Altramar

Altramar Medieval Music Ensemble was co-founded in 1991 by Angela Mariani, Jann Cosart, David Stattelman, Chris Smith, and Allison Zelles. Altramar has recorded seven CDs for the Dorian label and toured in North America and abroad, including early music festivals and series with international audiences such as Boston, Regensberg, and Utrecht. In 2009, Altramar was invited to record several pieces for the Norton Anthology of Music, the most widely-used music history anthology and textbook in the English language. Every one of Altramar’s recording projects involved months of specialized research into the medieval musician’s processes and practices; historical instruments; the poetics and historical languages of the texts; the deciphering of the early notation in which these musics were recorded; and the inventive and improvisatory processes necessary to create a fully-realized performance from this relatively non-prescriptive medieval notation. The repertoire of the recordings included music of the Italian medieval laude spirituali (Nova Stella and Saint Francis and the Minstrels of God); Christian, Jewish, and Muslim music of the Iberian peninsula (Iberian Garden I and II); and Celtic chant, song, and epic from early insular and continental sources (Crossroads of the Celts, Celtic Wanderers, and From Galway to Galicia).