CONTACT: PETER ALEXANDER
100 Old Public Library
Iowa City IA 52242
(319) 384-0072; fax (319) 384-0024
e-mail: peter-alexander@uiowa.edu

Release: Nov. 22, 2000

Art Museum Performance Features Collegium Musicum Instruments

IOWA CITY, Iowa -- Early Music 2000, the instrumental division of the University of Iowa Collegium Musicum, will perform a concert of Renaissance and Baroque Chamber Music at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 8 in the sculpture court of the University of Iowa Museum of Art .

The concert by Early Music 2000 (EM2000), which is part of a series of public events being held at the museum on Friday evenings through the fall semester, will be free and open to the public.

The UI Collegium Musicum is an ensemble devoted to the study and performance of music from the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque. The members of the group are music students and faculty of the UI and members of the local community. The group usually includes both singers and instrumental performers. For the current semester, the instrumental group EM2000 is under the direction of UI graduate student Kyle D. Gassiott.

Consorts, or instrumental groups, of recorders and violas da gamba, will play a series of dances by Renaissance composers, including the descriptive "Pavane de la Guerre" and "Galliard de la Guerre" (Pavane and Galliard of war) by Claude Gervaise and the Dance Suite for two recorders, op. 17 no. 2, by Joseph Bodin de Boismortier. Soprano Lyndsay Gross will sing two songs by English Baroque composer Henry Purcell.

In celebration of the newly formed UI Division of Performing Arts, the performance will include reconstructions of Renaissance dances created by choreographer Rachelle Tsachor, assisted by Mark McCusker, a graduate student in intermedia in the UI School of Art and Art History who will also perform as one of the dancers.

Gassiott is a master's student in musicology at the UI School of Music, where he has been assistant director of the Collegium Musicum for the past four years. Last fall Gassiott received a master’s degree in double bass performance. He has played with the William Casey Baroque Ensemble at Baylor University, where he earned the Bachelor of Music in 1996, and he has participated in various early music workshops. In addition to his teaching responsibilities at the UI Gassiott currently teaches music appreciation at Kirkwood Community College.

Tsachor teaches movement for actors in the UI theater department and works in dance notation and reconstruction. She has performed professionally with Ballet Arkansas, the Juilliard Dance Ensemble, the Lincoln Center touring program and Beth Corning and Dancers. Dover Books published her "Labanotation Manual of Dance Step Types selected from Fabritio Caroso's ‘Nobilta di Dame’ (1600) " in a new edition of Julia Sutton’s "Courtly Dance of the Renaissance." She has taught at the City College of New York, Grinnell College, Tunghai University in Taiwan and in Israel as a guest teacher at Tel-Hai.

M.C. Ginsberg Objects of Art, Inc. of Iowa City is the corporate sponsor for events at the UI Museum of Art during the 2000-2001 season, through the University of Iowa Foundation.

The UI Museum of Art is located on North Riverside Drive in Iowa City. Admission is free. Public metered parking is available in UI parking lots on Riverside Drive.

For information on the UI Museum of Art, visit http://www.uiowa.edu/uima on the World Wide Web. Information is available on other UI arts events at http://www.uiowa.edu/artsiowa. To receive UI arts news by e-mail, contact <deborah-thumma@uiowa.edu>.