Capella Itineris

Switzerland's Capella Itineris, meaning Itinerant Ensemble, takes its Latin name seriously: the members travel on foot to concerts whenever possible. The group specializes in music of the 16th and 17th centuries. Capella Itineris was formed in 2016 by Josquin Piguet and Marc Pauchard, graduates of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis who had studied flutes and cornetts for five years and conceived the idea of making a two-week backpacking tour of Switzerland, from Basel to Lausanne via Gruyère, performing concerts as they went. The ensemble grew, but it retained, for ecological reasons, the practice of traveling on foot where feasible; the members comment that "[t]he crises that our societies are going through are pushing us to rethink in depth the ways of offering and consuming music." The group has seven instrumentalists: three sackbut players (one playing the bass sackbut), recorder and cornett players (with several members playing multiple instruments), an organist, and two vocalists. There are also "invited musicians," guest players, who, as of 2023, included two lutenists, a recorder player, and a harpist. Specialties of the group's playing are the art of diminution -- the predecessor of the variation form, in which the player applies rapid ornamentation to a melody -- historical instrumentation, and a virtuoso that stretches the limits of the instruments. With these strengths in mind, Capella Itineris in 2020 devised a new program called Stadtpfeifer (or "City Piper"), exploring the repertory of the municipal wind players active in Switzerland and Germany during the early and middle Baroque eras. In addition to purely functional music, these musicians accompanied sacred music in Reformed church music in Switzerland and played independent instrumental compositions. Part of the program was Daniel Speer, an intriguing figure of the German Baroque, a Stadtpfeifer himself but also a composer, music theorist, controversial political commentator, educator, and writer on other subjects whose works, some of them Turkish-influenced, were published in the 1680s and 1690s but have been little recorded. The Stadtpfeifer program formed the basis for the group's debut album, which the group issued in 2022; the album Daniel Speer followed on the Aparte label in 2023.
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