Cappella Pratensis - The Feast of the Swan: A Renaissance brotherhood at table (2024)

The fourth volume of the unanimously acclaimed series of Den Bosch Choirbook, performed by Cappella Pratensis.
This disc reproduces the music plausibly sung and played by the members of the Confraternity of Our Illustrious Lady in 's-Hertogenbosch on the occasion of the Feast of the Swan, normally taking place around the new year. For the first time in this series Cappella Pratensis is accompanied by the instruments of the well-known Renaissance music specialists of the Sollazzo Ensemble.

The album presents the kind of music that might have been heard at the Feast of the Swan, an annual banquet held by the Confraternity of Our Illustrious Lady in 's-Hertogenbosch, sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century. The combination of "sacred" and "secular" pieces might come as a surprise. However, the border between what we in the twenty-first century might imagine as two different musical realms was actually quite porous in the sixteenth.

One of the Confraternity's regular banquets, held each year on the first Monday after Holy Innocents' Day (28 December), was the Feast of the Swan. The Swan was the Confraternity's heraldic beast, a symbol of grace and purity, attributes of the Blessed Virgin. In the medieval imagination, the swan had musical associations. The anonymous bestiary Physiologus states that the Latin name for the swan (cygnus) comes from the verb "to sing" (canere), because it produces such a beautiful song from its long and flexible neck. It was thus fitting that the Feast of the Swan should include a rich musical component. Some of the singers also played instruments at the banquets.