After several years in Boston, a historical music performance ensemble is making a new home in the Pioneer Valley.
Lyracle, which specializes in music for a solo viol and solo voice, creates and performs shows that explore the ways in which music has impacted everyday lives and communities throughout history. Its co-artistic directors, viol player and cellist James Perretta and mezzo-soprano vocalist Ashley Mulcahy, are also husband and wife.
The move came because Perretta recently started a new full-time role as a lecturer of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Like many musicians, Perretta works outside of his performing career, and he “strikes a really nice balance between the two,” Mulcahy said.
Even outside of Perretta’s new role, the duo are delighted to make the Valley their new musical home, Mulcahy said.
“Neither of us are from Massachusetts, but when he got the job, we spent some time in the Pioneer Valley, and we’re really excited to be part of a place that has such a vibrant arts and culture scene,” she said.
This isn’t their first time playing in the area — they performed a show about Colonial American music at Historic Deerfield in September — but it was Historic Deerfield, not Lyracle, who presented it. More recently, though, the group held their first self-presented show in the Valley, “Escape to the Stage,” at First Churches of Northampton last Friday, Nov. 14, featuring two local performers, actress Julie Nelson and guitarist/lutist Nathaniel Cox.
The show told the story of Ann Ford (later known as Ann Thicknesse), an 18th-century British socialite whose father wanted her to marry a much older man. Ford used her talents as a singer, viol player and composer as a way to escape the potential marriage, hence the name of the show. In 1760 and 1761, she used money borrowed from friends to rent out concert venues to play shows that funded her independence.
Perretta and Mulcahy founded Lyracle in 2018 because they wanted to create opportunities to play together. Perretta was a cellist before he became a viol player, but as he grew his viol skills, the two discovered a “forgotten history,” as Mulcahy called it, of music composed by a solo vocalist and a solo violist, which they explored in their first public program.
“We realized, if we keep this focus, only looking at music that was actually composed and written down specifically for one voice and one viol, we will have a very narrow slice of 17th-century English music, and we wanted to get a bigger picture,” she said.
“Instead of asking ourselves, ‘Who composed for voice and viol, we started asking the question: ‘Who throughout history made music with our instruments? And/or was even involved in the music-making process?’” she continued. “Suddenly, you go from just people who composed or whose compositions were written down and survived, to people who performed, people who wrote poetry that was set to music, people who sold instruments, people who were amateurs and made music just for fun, and suddenly you get this much wider, much more diverse group of historical individuals that can become the focus of your concerts.”
Since then, Mulcahy said, “Escape to the Stage” has become their “North Star,” and the paradigm within which all of their concert programs fit.
“We all learn history in school, and we mostly learn about it through reading — sometimes through reading very dry textbooks,” Mulcahy said. “But I think, at its best, history really has the ability to spark the imagination and allow us to imagine what a lived experience was like for other humans, and, in that, find the through lines that make us human and have made us human for however many centuries.”
Besides “Escape to the Stage,” Lyracle’s other programs also spotlight stories in music history that are lesser-known to Americans. “Musicians of the Tenshō Embassy” spotlights four noble-born Japanese teenagers who traveled across Italy and Iberia in the 1580s to serve as ambassadors of three Christian Japanese feudal lords; “At Home in Sweden” showcases the ways that the music of 17th-century Swedish nobility made its way to Swedish households; and “Exodus and Evolution” traces a Tudor-era Jewish musical family’s migration from Iberia to Italy to England.
Lyracle’s next program in Northampton is slated for Saturday, April 18, also at First Churches. That show, “The Family Band,” will imagine the story of Duchess Elisabeth Sophie of Mecklenburg, Duke August the Younger of Braunschweig, and their children, based on a painting by Albert Freyse showing the family playing viols together, as “a wholesome musical afternoon of 17th-century family fun,” according to the event description.
Until then, Mulcahy and Perretta will take tget settled in their new home.
“We’re really excited to establish some sort of connection to a new community of people interested in music and history,” Mulcahy said, “and to just see how it all goes.”
For more information about Lyracle, visit lyraclemusic.com.
