Baroque Music Montana presents this annual period practice workshop for modern and baroque players who are interested in being inspired and challenged for three days of intense music-making, learning, and social exchange.
Participants have the chance to explore original sources (manuscript scores and first edition, iconography, writing) and their clues for today’s performers, varied articulation, rhetorical, communicative sound, ornamentation and improvisation, an open, centered, relaxed physical approach to their instruments, and larger cultural context of music. Large and small ensembles, lectures, private lessons, and some events just for good musical fun for a variety of levels.
The workshop is held every August at the First Presbyterian Church in downtown Bozeman, Montana, and is taught by renown baroque specialists. Meal-time lectures, a faculty concert, and a concert by all at the workshop’s conclusion are open to the public.
Past themes have been the Language of Improvisation (2024), British Isles & Folk Baroque (2023), Paris in the Age of the Enlightenment (2022), J.S. Bach & Baroque Dance (2021), and Rome: Music in the Cardinal Courts (2020).
Open to students, amateur, and professional players of violin, viola, cello, wind instruments, keyboard instruments, and guitar or lute with at least four years playing experience and adequate reading skills. Ages 14 and older. Limit 50 participants. Viols, singers, and other instruments admitted by request. Professional players have a separate class, contingent upon registration.
This workshop was started in 2015, with a grant from The Juilliard School’s Alan D. Marks Center for Career Services and Entrepreneurship.
Faculty and participants of the 2024 Period Performance Workshop after their concert
Cellist Phoebe Carrai, from Julliard, teaching at the 2024 workshop