Seven Times Salt is approaching our 20th anniversary, and to celebrate, we have a very special Shakespearean double feature planned. As you may know, our name is taken from a scene in Hamlet when Laertes finds that his sister Ophelia has gone mad. Despite such tragic sounding origins, we in fact “delight in masques and revels sometimes altogether” and have a great deal of music in store for you, from the melancholy to the rollicking and everything in between. It seems fitting that we honor the Bard with TWO musical endeavors in the coming year:

Our ensemble, known as an English consort, was very popular during Shakespeare’s active period and the Globe’s heyday. “Easy as Lying” features flute, violin, bass viol, lute, cittern, and bandora along with singing and spoken excerpts from the plays in Original Pronunciation. Our conspirators include soprano Barbara Allen Hill, tenor Michael Barrett, and STS founding members Dan Meyers on winds, Matthew Wright on lute, Karen Burciaga on violin, and Josh Schreiber on viola da gamba. Frances Fitch, a longtime friend and mentor, will serve as our producer for the recording, bringing her vast knowledge of the repertoire and limitless good humor to the project. The album will feature choice scenes from several different plays intermingled with our signature blend of instrumental works, broadside ballads and English dance tunes, each fitted carefully with the scene in question.

     Unlike some recordings of “Shakespeare’s Music,” this album won’t be a compendium of known music he mentions in his writing, but rather the other way around–we’ve selected plays and then fit relevant period music from England and Italy to the scenes. On the album you’ll hear works by Ferrabosco, Azzaiolo, Dowland, Morley, Holborne, Playford, and others. The album title is also from Hamlet, when the Prince of Denmark beseeches a friend to try playing his pipe: “'Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music.” 

In 1663 the actor and impresario William Davenant, presiding over Lincoln’s Inn Fields (which, like all English theaters, had been closed for 18 years during Cromwell’s reign), mounted an ambitious revival of Shakespeare’s Macbeth–complete with several scenes cut or re-written in order to please the tastes of Restoration audiences! One of Davenant’s Macbeth productions featured music by John Eccles, some of which has survived–particularly the delightful songs written for the Witches, who became the theatrical center of Davenant’s showpiece. 
   Inspired by the work of musicologists Amanda Eubanks Winkler and Richard Schoch and their Performing Restoration Shakespeare project, Seven Times Salt will collaborate with the Henry Purcell Society of Boston to bring a very musical version of Davenant’s “Scottish Play” to 21st-century Boston, with an abridged script adapted by notable theater and opera scholar Laurence Senelick, and plenty of music by Eccles, Purcell, and some 17th-century Scottish lutenists. The production features an all-star cast of Boston musicians and actors and will be staged in Boston and at the Connecticut Early Music Festival.   

Looking ahead to our 20th anniversary season (2022-23) we hope to film an accompanying video to share with schools, libraries, historical societies, and audiences around the world. While modern stagings of Shakespeare set in exotic places and scored with contemporary music abound, we feel that the particular mix of spoken word in Original Pronunciation (16th-century dialect) and historically-informed period music is a type of show that most audiences, particularly American audiences, don’t get to experience very often. After nearly two decades of making music together, we now return to the theatrical source of our name and record one of our all-time favorite concert programs. Please join us on our next adventure! 

Here's how your contributions will help:

If we fall short of our goal, we will still record, but we’ll postpone CD production. If we surpass it, we'll already be on our way to filming and sharing the video with online audiences far and wide.

We have some amazing rewards in store for you, including our new CD, wine tastings, handcrafted beer, soap, and decorative items, house concerts, gourmet picnic baskets, and tickets to upcoming performances.

We invite you to help us continue our contributions to early music and historical research. Every single gift helps, no matter what the amount. Please share this with your friends and anyone else with an interest in historical performance, the theater, Shakespeare, or good old fashioned music. Thank you!

--Karen, Dan, Matt, Josh, Bobbie, and Michael