The University of Calgary Collegium Musicum is dedicated to exploring music from the baroque period and earlier.  Our goal is to bring music from the past into the present with interpretations that are focused on the text and how the composers of various periods  were inspired to set those words to music.  Our concerts with the ProArts@Noon Concert Series at the Cathedral Church of the Redeemer allow the students to experience this music in a perfect acoustic for so much of this repertoire!  Our concert will include music of the renaissance and French baroque.   Included on the program is the Kyrie of a mass by Ockeghem which is based on the popular secular song of the renaissance, L’homme armé.  Along with several other pieces by Josquin des Pres, you will get to hear his beautiful lament on the death of Ockeghem, Nymphes des bois.  

We have several selections by the prolific composer of French baroque sacred music, Marc-Antoine Charpentier.  These include music for voices in many combinations (two, three and four-part) and a motet sung by women in unison where one can imagine nun’s or members of a girls school singing devotionally.

Accompanying Musicum Collegium will be special guest organist Neil Cockburn. Neil Cockburn is Head of Organ Studies at Mount Royal University Conservatory and Director of the Conservatory’s Purcell Ensemble. He won First Prize at the 1996 Dublin International Organ Competition, and has received numerous other prestigious awards. He received his musical education at Oxford University (BA Music), the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, UK (MusM, Organ Performance), the Conservatoire Nationale de Région Rueil-Malmaison, France (Premier prix de perfectionnement), and the University of Calgary (PhD, Musicology).