Brattleboro Camerata: The Unknown Master – Music of Adrian Willaert

The Brattleboro Camerata presents “The Unknown Master: Music of Adrian Willaert” Sunday, April 13. The 4 p.m. concert spotlights the works of Willaert, one of the central figures in 16th-century music.

According to Camerata music director Jonathan Harvey, “He was the most powerful and influential musician in Venice, and his students included the biggest names of the next generation of Italian composers. The continuing reputation of centuries-old music is always dependent on a combination of financial and class circumstances, aesthetic qualities, later trends and fads, and pure chance – unfortunately, Willaert was just unlucky, and his music largely disappeared by the end of the 16th century.

“In this concert, we get to unearth his work, and you can hear for yourself, centuries later, why he was considered a master in his own time.”

Harvey has studied Willaert’s work, “and the idea that broadly captures Willaert’s effect for me is that his music is both profoundly beautiful as an aesthetic sound experience, and also intellectually rich, brimming with ornately and often abstractly arranged patterns that carry a variety of hidden meanings. These musical games and puzzles that he loved so much usually cannot be perceived by a listening audience – they were private joys for him, and his students and patrons if he chose to tell them.”