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Julia Cavallaro’s Inspired Take on Early Music

The graduate student in music composition brings nuanced interpretations to works from centuries past

A professional mezzo-soprano, Julia Soojin Cavallaro, AG26, has a gift for singing early music, which spans the medieval through Baroque periods. She has performed with the world-renowned Handel and Haydn Society as well as smaller, innovative choirs such as Skylark Ensemble and Ensemble Altera.

While maintaining a busy performance schedule, she is also a master’s candidate in music composition at Tufts. She collaborates with her mentor, composer and professor John McDonald, on commissions inspired by early music; this past spring that work included reimagining a 12th-century chant as a piece for two violins.

For Cavallaro, early music, whether in how it is performed or how it is adapted for new works, can and should be made vital and fresh for contemporary audiences.

“I approach early music as music that isn’t ancient, distant, or removed,” she says. “I want to treat it as music that still feels relevant, that can teach us something about our modern lives and that connects us to people in the past.”

When did you first become interested in early music? 

I first joined choir in high school, and we performed the Magnificat secundi toni by Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria. It was unlike anything I had ever heard before. Each voice part moves independently and is equally important, so it was different from the way that a lot of later choral music sounds. But I liked the layered interplay of voices: I had the feeling that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Our choral director, David Hodgkins at the Commonwealth School in Boston, then encouraged me to seriously pursue voice training, and I went to Harvard, where my choir directors, professors, and fellow students were also interested in early music. I learned a great deal about Renaissance and Baroque music there and went on to pursue a master’s in voice performance at Boston University.

For a piece you wrote this past winter at Tufts, you repurposed a medieval chant. Can you talk more about that idea and process?

Yes, that was the first time I had done something like that! I was inspired by a piece by 12th-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen. I quoted the first phrase of her chant “Karitas habundat” in my violin duet for Hsin-Lin Tsai and Miguel Pérez-Espejo Cárdenas, who perform as L’Étoile Duo. In the duet, the two violins echo each other, passing the chant melody back and forth. A colleague and friend of mine sang the original at my wedding, and for this occasion, where I wanted to convey the idea of a romantic partnership of equals, I thought it worked well for two string players who are a husband-and-wife duo.

Can you expand on your approach to singing early music? 

I want the listener to understand the love and passion that we have for it. You might think, “What does music from the past have to do with us now?” But part of the excitement of doing music that’s this old is that we can experiment with it. Here is something that has stood the test of time, and we can do a fresh take on it.

It could seem on the outside to be stuffy, that there are a lot of rules, that it’s only for certain people. But I would want people to know that everyone is welcome and that we are not trying to uphold certain ways of thinking or being or playing. We’re trying to innovate and do something new and exciting that’s accessible for everyone.

For those who are new to early music, is there a piece you would recommend?

It’s hard to recommend just one piece, because medieval chant is so different from Renaissance polyphony which is yet again different from Baroque oratorio or opera. But regardless, I would definitely recommend that people listen to Victoria’s Requiem, which I sang this summer with Skylark Ensemble at the Hispanic Society of America. It’s a masterpiece of Renaissance polyphony. One voice part will carry the melody at first, and then it will switch to another voice part, as each voice takes a turn coming out of the texture. It has a monumental quality.

The important thing is just to listen. Appreciating this music is like experiencing a Gothic cathedral. It’s fine to just let it wash over you, to be immersed in it. That’s definitely what it feels like when I’m singing.