Brumel:
Sicut lilium inter spinas

Clemens:
Ave Maria

Compere:
Le grant désir d’aymer m’y tient

Appenzeller:
Missa Benedicti (Ick had een boelken uutvercoren)

Susato:
Myns liefkens bruyn ooghen

Vinders:
Missa Myns liefkens bruyn ooghen Sanctus

Pipelare:
Een vroulic wesen

Anonymous:
Ick had een boelken uutvercoren (Oeverloos)
Bonus track - Ick had een boelken uutvercoren (Oeverloos)

The present program 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.