January 9, 2021, 1:30 PT

Rachelle Romero

sponsored by OCRS on Zoom

OCRS will be sponsoring Rachelle Romero for the joint OCRS/SCRS Zoom session on Saturday, January 9th at 1:30 pm PST. The music files and Zoom invitation will be sent to all members of both organizations a week before. This event is included in your membership.

Rachelle is a newcomer to our meetings here in Southern California, although she presented a wonderful Zoom session recently for the SFEMS on-line workshop series. She comes highly recommended by both Rotem and Adam Gilbert, and will be presenting a program different from any we have had this season. I know that you are going to enjoy her style, enthusiasm, and presentation.

“Kiss Me Sweet”: Consort Songs of John Dowland,
Led by Rachelle Romero
Rachelle will lead us in playing and singing the consort songs of John Dowland. We will play/sing four songs from John Dowland’s First Booke of Songs and Ayres (1597), exploring their performance possibilities and discussing a few performance practice issues surrounding this repertory along the way. All instruments and voice parts are welcome, as there is an appropriate range for everyone in this beautiful consort music. In our efforts to explore the various performance possibilities of these pieces, we will be performing with digital recordings, as well as lute accompaniment graciously provided by lutenist/scholar extraordinaire, Jason Yoshida.

Rachelle Romero is a DMA candidate in Early Music Performance at the USC Thornton School of Music, where she studies with Jennifer Ellis Kampani, Rotem Gilbert, and director Adam Knight Gilbert, and serves as Teaching Assistant for the Early Music Program. She also enjoys her work as Higher Education Coordinator with Early Music America, where she serves a growing group of Early Music educators in Higher Education across North America. A native Californian, Rachelle holds a MA in Early Music from the University of Southern California and a BM in Vocal Performance from Azusa Pacific University. She performs regularly as a vocalist with the Thornton Baroque Sinfonia and USC Collegium Workshop Ensemble, the early music ensemble L.A. Camerata, and the Los Angeles-based Sterling Ensemble chamber choir. Other notable performances include concerts with KUSC’s LACMA Sundays Live series, the Boston Camerata, and the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra. Rachelle’s research interests include women’s studies in early modern sacred music, early modern Rhetoric, seventeenth century English repertory, and vocal improvisation. In 2019, she presented her paper on “Seventeenth-Century Women’s Solo Motets as Sacred Oration” at the Twenty-Second Biennial Conference International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR), and she teaches workshops with the San Francisco Early Music Society (SFEMS).

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