A Tempesta di Mare In Focus project
A Fuller Story is Tempesta’s ongoing exploration of diversity and inclusion in baroque music. Baroque music is literally all around us. However, neither the performers active in our niche field nor the composers whose music we play mirror the current racial or societal makeup of our community.
For instance, only a handful of Black early music instrumentalists perform in the US today, and not a single Black composer is known to have been active in the baroque period.
By deliberately including the stories of historically underrepresented people, their significant contributions to baroque music and the music’s subsequent performance and survival, we can better understand how this music shapes the understanding of our shared culture, humanity, and history today.
Learn more about recent and ongoing projects:
“Ugly” Virtuosas
Discovering music by and for the female musicians, some of whom were also people of color, who resided in the institutions that formed Venice’s social safety net during the 18th century, the Ospedali Grandi. The women-singers and instrumentalists performed behind screens for crowds of enchanted travelers, who were horrified to find out that their adored subjects were mature women, often scarred by illness. Learn more.
FraternitÉ
Exploring connections of the music and musicians from colonial St. Dominigue who made their way to Philadelphia, plus the remarkable story of how a baroque song written from the point of view of an enslaved man traveled to the US and France. Learn more.
The Itzig Sisters
Sara Itzig Levy and her sisters Bella and Fanny were Jewish salonnières, whose love of the music of the Bach family led to the 19th-century Bach Revival conventionally attributed solely to their great-nephew Felix Mendelssohn. Find out more.