At Home in Sweden combines music, dance, historical performance practices, and folk sensibilities to bring the contents of five little-known 17th-century Swedish manuscripts with lyra viol notation to life for the public. In a world without recording technology, if you wanted to hear music, someone had to play it. If you had the financial means to own a bound book of music, you could revisit your favorite songs again and again. The five Swedish lyra viol manuscripts we explore in At Home in Sweden are like someone in 2025’s favorite playlist, and in this program, we imagine family and friends gathered in a 17th-century Swedish living room to enjoy this music.
Most of the pieces in these manuscripts have been adapted to suit the home environment. The addition of dance and the nyckelharpa to our ensemble helps us demonstrate this historical practice for our audiences, painting a broad picture of the histories of the pieces on our program both within and beyond the pages of these five manuscripts.
We may never know as much about the histories of domestic-sphere music-making as we do about music at courts, churches, and theaters, but investigating and celebrating little-known sources like these manuscripts helps us to understand better the varied cultural and social contexts of historical music-making by a wide range of individuals. Through performance, we can help a broad public understand this history and connect to it on a personal level.
Recording Samples
Courant/Ifrån den dag jag Elisandra, Pierre Dubut, Tablatur No. 3
John Come Kiss me Now and Improvisation, traditional English tune, Finspång 9096.3
Sarraband, Daniel Holzt, Wenster G.28
More Information
Program Notes
Past Performances
2024
Lyracle’s Boston area concert series, Quincy & Somerville, MA
Performers
Julia Bengtsson, baroque dance
Lindsey Clark, nyckelharpa
Ashley Mulcahy, mezzo
James Perretta, viol
