Early Music Organizations, Performers, and Composers

The Amherst Early Music Festival is a two-week workshop offering the largest program of classes for early music enthusiasts, from amateur to professional, in the US. It is currently held at Connecticut College, New London CT, in July of each year. There are also winter, spring and fall weekend workshops at different sites.

This is great resource for everything related to the viol!

The Society for Historically Informed Performance grew out of the local early music community’s desire for more performance opportunities, as interest in early music grew during the 80s. It currently offers a series of summer concerts, each repeated three times at different venues.

This calendar lists early music and dance events throughout New England including concerts, workshops, and lectures.

Through its programs (concerts during the year and its biennial week-long festival) the Boston Early Music Festival has earned its place as North America’s premier presenting organization for music of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods and has secured Boston’s reputation as “America’s early music capital”

CSEM, with its decades of superb concerts, has long nurtured the public interest that has led to the current flowering of music from the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods. It offers each season a series of concerts, each repeated at five different sites.

‘Arcadia Viols,’ a consort of viols, has been associated with Arcadia Players of Western Massachusetts since its founding in 2009. The ensemble has performed around New England, mostly in private venues;

Olav Chris Henriksen and Carol Lewis perform a variety of music for plucked and bowed instruments, from the earliest manuscripts and publications until our own time.

Named after the supporters of King Charles I of England, The Cavalier Consort has been playing 17th-century English music in greater Boston since 2013. They specialize in broken consort repertoire featuring combinations of viols and baroque violins among with harpsichord and theorbo, and they’ll even sing you a ballad or two. The Cavaliers share a love of bizarre and wonderful music by composers such as William Lawes, John Jenkins, Christopher Simpson, and Matthew Locke.

Viol consort with lute. Associated with Duo Maresienne.

Since 1995 Ensemble Soleil has given concerts and presented multi-media theatrical events in the United States and Europe.

Long & Away is a professional consort of viols that was founded in Boston in 2005.

Seven Times Salt is a Boston-based early music ensemble specializing in repertoire of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Jay's compositions have been played across the U.S., Canada, Japan, Europe, and South America, among them works commissioned by Les Voix Humaines (Montréal); Elliot Z. Levine, baritone of Western Wind Vocal Ensemble (New York); Yukime Kambe Consort (Japan); Bass Instinct Sextet (Vienna). Publishers: Westwood Music, PRB Productions, Brichtmark Music.

Will Ayton has been composing music for a variety of instrumental and vocal combinations for over 40 years.

Fantasias with a late-Renaissance feel - for viol consort.