MADS Presents: Hymns to the Unsacred

The SU Madrigal Society is delighted to present: Hymns to the Unsacred, an a cappella contemplation.

🗓 Date: June 1, 2025 (Sunday)
⏰ Time: 3:00 pm–4:30 pm
📍 Location: Redfern Town Hall

Profanity. Asymmetry. Asynchrony. Join us for a concert filled with earthly longings, profane pleasures, parody masses, and confusions between sacred and secular. 

We begin in the Renaissance with songs of ardent longing and earthly worship, with songs from John Dowland and Claudin de Sermisy. We move to a Kyrie and Agnus Dei by Pedro Bermúdez and Josquin des Prez respectively, revelling in the complex polyphony. We move to the turn into Baroque with Salamone Rossi’s virtuosic psalms, visit the 20th century with C. H. H. Parry’s four part songs, and finally arrive at the contemporary work of Vienna Teng. Teng’s Hymn of Acxiom is an exaltation to being accepted unconditionally, being whole-heartedly embraced and brought into the fold—not by a god, but by a database who tirelessly, zealously, gloriously, collects our information and preferences.

In this provocative programme, we entangle with longing, understanding, and many kinds of divine. Come and hear it at 3pm on Sunday 1st of June, 2025.

Join us at the pub afterwards to eat, drink, and make merry!

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The Sydney University Madrigal Society (MADS) began in 1999 as four students singing madrigals around a piano. We have since evolved into an eclectic chamber choir, performing Renaissance madrigals, chansons, villancico, lute songs, and everything else that strikes our fancy. We have brought our light-hearted, spirited energy to Medieval Faires big and small. Following our past concerts Dreams of Galileo, The Forest at the End of the World, and The Odyssey—we now bring you Hymns to the Unsacred.

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For the safety of our choir, audience, and community at large, we have an expectation that everybody is as vaccinated as they are able to be. We ask that you refrain from attending if you have any COVID symptoms. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation in enabling safer choir events.

This event will take place on Gadigal land. Australia was founded on the genocide and dispossession of First Nations people. This land was violently stolen, and sovereignty has never been ceded. It always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.