![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/rochesterbeacon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Magdalena-with-PR-logo-UPDATE.jpg?resize=771%2C514&ssl=1\"){kind=logo}
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
The past needs a future, and the world of early music is no exception. The music is hundreds of years old, but requires contemporary performers to make it fresh for contemporary audiences.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to help replace the current generation of early musicians,\u201d says Deborah Fox, artistic director of Pegasus Early Music.<\/p>\n
She saw many talented younger musicians who needed opportunities to grow in this specialized art. The result was Pegasus Rising, created in 2014. This program provides mentoring and performance opportunities, and professional fees to rising musicians.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn many cases, it\u2019s their first professional fee,\u201d says Fox.<\/p>\n
The 2026 Pegasus Rising series begins May 8, with a performance at ARTISANworks by the Maryland-based ensemble Magdalena.<\/p>\n
Magdalena\u2019s concert programs range widely, and its \u201cWomen of Magdala\u201d is based on an imaginative idea: depicting the lives of three 16th<\/sup>-century women named Magdalena: Magdalene Winslow, a little-documented English countrywoman; the French princess Madeleine de Valois, who married James V and ruled Scotland for a summer before she died at age 16; and a fictional character named Madal\u00e9in Ni Ceailaigh, an aristocrat who was part of a wave of Irish immigration to Scotland in the 1500s.<\/p>\n The music includes English country dances, French chansons, and traditional Irish and Scottish songs. The composers\u2019 names\u2014John Playford, Jacques Arcadelt, Josquin des Prez\u2014and some of the tunes will be familiar to early music fans; their context is new.<\/p>\n Magdalena musician Mira Fu-En Huang, describing \u201cThe Women of Magdala\u201d as \u201ca grab-bag program, but it does have a narrative throughline.\u201d That is provided by Huang herself, who has written fictional accounts of the lives of all three women (she made up the character of Madal\u00e9in Ni Ceailaigh).<\/p>\n Huang is a vocalist and percussionist with Magdalena; her instruments include the riq, an Egyptian tambourine, and the tar, a Persian drum. Her colleagues include\u00a0Cole Manel\u00a0on plectrum instruments (played with a pick),\u00a0Cameron Welke\u00a0on plucked strings, and\u00a0Niccolo Seligmann\u00a0on bowed strings.<\/p>\n The ensemble\u2019s members all graduated from Baltimore\u2019s Peabody Conservatory, though not at the same time; they didn\u2019t play together until 2023. By that time, each member was an experienced performer and had, as Huang puts it, \u201ca unique skill set. As a result, we haven\u2019t been afraid to use musical styles from all over the place.\u201d<\/p>\n The second Pegasus Rising concert will take place on June 8 with Pedro Sperb, a Brazilian-born guitarist and lutenist, who is a doctoral student at Eastman. His recital will feature music from very early in his instruments\u2019 histories: a recently discovered German collection of lute music printed between 1450 and 1500; the first guitar music ever published, in \u201cTres Libros de M\u00fasica en Cifras para Vihuela\u201d (1546) by Alonso Mudarra; and a French anthology of music for the Renaissance guitar from the 1550s. \u00a0<\/p>\n The music was transcribed for lute and guitar from organ pieces, vocal works, and popular songs and dances.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cThese are arguably the first sources for both of these instruments,\u201d Sperb says. \u201cThey give a clear picture of music in the 50 years prior to the Renaissance.\u201d<\/p>\n This German collection survived only in bits and pieces, and in Sperb\u2019s words, \u201cmusicians and scholars had to be Sherlock Holmes,\u201d finding clues in historical writings, drawings and paintings of musicians about how to play it. In 2015, it was finally published.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very typical of late medieval music,\u201d he says, \u201cbut there are also many singular melodic and harmonic gestures that look ahead. In one piece, a section sounds to me almost like Beethoven\u2014 but only for a fraction of a second.\u201d<\/p>\n Sperb plays a five-course (or five-string) lute in medieval style and tuning, and an early guitar that has only four strings. It is based on a Spanish model, the vihuela, and Sperb says it most resembles the modern ukulele (which was provided to Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders by colonizing Europeans).<\/p>\n Since 2015, Pegasus Rising has presented 20 concerts (two of them online during the pandemic) and a couple of dozen young musicians from all over the country. Most have been presented in downtown churches, but Pegasus Rising musicians have also performed lute recitals in coffee shops, \u201cBach, Beethoven, and Beer\u201d at a downtown bar, and a harpsichord trio at Bernunzio Uptown Music on East Avenue. And happily for curious audience members, admission is free. (They will repeat their Rochester programs in Ithaca and Syracuse.)<\/p>\n \u201cYounger musicians are experimental and open-minded, and it\u2019s nice to mix it up, to perform in different venues,\u201d Fox says. \u201cThey\u2019re showing that there are lots of approaches to early music.\u201d<\/p>\n Pegasus Early Music\u2019s \u201cPegasus Rising\u201d presents Magdalena in \u201cWomen of Magdala\u201d on Friday, May 8, at 7:30 p.m. at ARTISANWorks, 565 Blossom Road Suite L; and Pedro Sperb, lute and Renaissance guitar, Friday, June 12 at 7:30 p.m. at the Perkins Mansion, 494 East Avenue.<\/p>\n Admission to both concerts is free; more information is availa<\/span>ble\u00a0here.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n David Raymond is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer.<\/em><\/p>\n The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our\u00a0<\/em>comment policy<\/em><\/a>\u00a0including use of their full, real name<\/em>.\u00a0See \u201cLeave a Reply\u201d below to discuss on this post. Comments of a general nature may be submitted to the Letters page by emailing\u00a0\u00a0[email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source rochesterbeacon.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Maryland-based ensemble Magdalena The past needs a future, and the world of early music is no exception. The music is hundreds of years old, but requires contemporary performers to make it fresh for contemporary audiences. \u201cWe need to help replace the current generation of early musicians,\u201d says Deborah Fox, artistic director of Pegasus Early Music. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2397816,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2397815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Pegasus-Rising-the-latest-in-early-music-scaled.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2397815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2397817,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2397815\/revisions\/2397817"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2397816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2397815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2397815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2397815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rochesterbeacon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Pedro-Sperb.jpg?resize=771%2C514&ssl=1\")
\n
\n
Related<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n