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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.
“We need to help replace the current generation of early musicians,” says Deborah Fox, artistic director of Pegasus Early Music.
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.
“In many cases, it’s their first professional fee,” says Fox.
The 2026 Pegasus Rising series begins May 8, with a performance at ARTISANworks by the Maryland-based ensemble Magdalena.
Magdalena’s concert programs range widely, and its “Women of Magdala” is based on an imaginative idea: depicting the lives of three 16th-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 Madaléin Ni Ceailaigh, an aristocrat who was part of a wave of Irish immigration to Scotland in the 1500s.
The music includes English country dances, French chansons, and traditional Irish and Scottish songs. The composers’ names—John Playford, Jacques Arcadelt, Josquin des Prez—and some of the tunes will be familiar to early music fans; their context is new.
Magdalena musician Mira Fu-En Huang, describing “The Women of Magdala” as “a grab-bag program, but it does have a narrative throughline.” That is provided by Huang herself, who has written fictional accounts of the lives of all three women (she made up the character of Madaléin Ni Ceailaigh).
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 Cole Manel on plectrum instruments (played with a pick), Cameron Welke on plucked strings, and Niccolo Seligmann on bowed strings.
The ensemble’s members all graduated from Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory, though not at the same time; they didn’t play together until 2023. By that time, each member was an experienced performer and had, as Huang puts it, “a unique skill set. As a result, we haven’t been afraid to use musical styles from all over the place.”
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’ histories: a recently discovered German collection of lute music printed between 1450 and 1500; the first guitar music ever published, in “Tres Libros de Música en Cifras para Vihuela” (1546) by Alonso Mudarra; and a French anthology of music for the Renaissance guitar from the 1550s.
The music was transcribed for lute and guitar from organ pieces, vocal works, and popular songs and dances.
“These are arguably the first sources for both of these instruments,” Sperb says. “They give a clear picture of music in the 50 years prior to the Renaissance.”
This German collection survived only in bits and pieces, and in Sperb’s words, “musicians and scholars had to be Sherlock Holmes,” finding clues in historical writings, drawings and paintings of musicians about how to play it. In 2015, it was finally published.
“It’s very typical of late medieval music,” he says, “but there are also many singular melodic and harmonic gestures that look ahead. In one piece, a section sounds to me almost like Beethoven— but only for a fraction of a second.”
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).
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, “Bach, Beethoven, and Beer” 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.)
“Younger musicians are experimental and open-minded, and it’s nice to mix it up, to perform in different venues,” Fox says. “They’re showing that there are lots of approaches to early music.”
Pegasus Early Music’s “Pegasus Rising” presents Magdalena in “Women of Magdala” 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.
Admission to both concerts is free; more information is available here.
David Raymond is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer.
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