'Tune thy Musicke to thy Hart' with Jonathon Adams and the Oak and Holly Quartet

Event Description

Music has a powerful natural capacity to affect human beings in immediate and profound ways–to move us to tears of grief or smiles of joy. Since the Ancients, the affective powers of song have preoccupied thinkers; Plato, for example, wrote that "rhythm and harmony permeate the inner part of the soul more than anything else, affecting it most strongly." Even today, some of the most cutting-edge neuroscience is devoted to uncovering the internal rhythms of our brains and of our bodies, and to explaining how external music can resonate with those internal rhythms. But for Reformation Christians, the question of how music and poetry might affect the soul of an auditor held unique currency; the fracturing of the Roman Church in the sixteenth century left Protestants and Catholics alike in fierce competition to win the hearts and minds of parishioners, and music, it was believed by many, could do just that. Music, it was said, had the capacity to enter an auditor through their ears and penetrate their heart, potentially operating as a means of grace. In this intimate concert of seventeenth-century songs for the heart, audiences will be invited to open their own hearts to the sounds of grief and joy that express our common human experiences. The concert will feature internationally renowned baritone Jonathon Adams and will include well-loved classics such as Henry Purcell's setting of George Herbert's lyric, "With Sick and Famished Eyes" alongside newly-discovered and rarely-heard gems from the archives by John Jenkins and Henry Lawes. Come, and let us pluck on your heart strings, while we endeavour to tune our own through song.