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PrintWorks — Music Old and New

Friday, July 29, 2022

PrintWorks: Making Music is an interactive art and music event, combining an installation, printmaking workshop, and live musical performance by The Halfmoon. The musical program features chunky, letterpress-printed scores from 17th century Venice, and uniquely-engraved French and English works, crafted with beautiful, suave sculpted lines or up-front dynamism. The music in the program echoes structural or aesthetic, stylistic characteristics from the historic letterpress and engraving printing processes used in their creation.

PrintWorks also includes a new electroacoustic piece by up-and-coming composer Audrey Wu, co-commissioned by The Halfmoon and Boston’s Society for Historically Informed Performance (SoHIP) for their 2021 virtual concert series. Wu’s receive | repeat | restore | redeem, melds sounds of period instruments with a fixed media track featuring an historically-appropriate common press and engraving press in action, and explores the process of communication — what both printing presses and music are all about!

Works by Buonamente, Gabrieli, Marini, Marais, Matteis, and Wu.

PrintWorks Inspiration

Monday, July 25, 2022

One tool that a musician can use to craft a dynamic, insightful performance, is an awareness of the world that produced the music they are now sharing. In “historically-informed performance”, we may play on original or reproductions of period instruments, or perform with stylistic conventions that have long-since fallen out of fashion. We can better understand and interpret old music today by being familiar with the everyday technologies and creative processes used when a piece of music was first created.

One of my favorite parts of “doing” historically-informed performance is studying, learning from and playing off of old scores. Early printed scores can be confusing, beautiful, fascinating and enlightening —  there is so much information that can be read between the lines of a chunky musical staff. At some point I became curious about what the [tangible, sheet] music sounded like as it was being created, with the printing technology of its own time and place.

This curiosity developed into the PrintWorks project!