Sacred Love in Earthly Songs

Originally from the US and then Canada, Catherine has been a versatile musician and composer since her teenage years, performing and recording across various countries and genres. While adept at a multitude of instruments, including keyboard and strings, her voice has always been the heart of her creativity. Based in Singapore for the last decade, she continues to shuttle back and forth between Asia and Montreal for projects, oftentimes with her family. Catherine began her career as a singer-songwriter and specialist in traditional music. She holds a BA in Literature and a degree in Early Music Performance from Montreal’s McGill University, specialising in medieval music. Despite the distance, she remains an active founding member of Montreal’s Ensemble Scholastica, contributing her own compositions to their explorations of early polyphony, as well as playing the medieval organetto and singing. Among her numerous projects, she has released an album and collaborated with Canada’s La Nef on their double-CD Perceval project.

Over the years, she has worked on various solo and group projects with her local group La Voix Medieval, and has appeared on the Esplanade stage. This programme features her first collaboration with Edward Yong.

Musical director of Singapore’s longest-running early music singing group, Cappella Martialis, Edward began singing in various groups during his late childhood and started playing the lute at the age of 17—when more sensible people take up the guitar. Over the following decades in London and Singapore, he continued singing with different groups, including the choirs of the Russian and Greek Orthodox cathedrals, while adding renaissance and baroque guitars to the list of instruments he dabbles in. His most recent acquisitions have been a medieval citole and a renaissance viola da mano. Edward is a trained Byzantine chanter, and his musical research interests include Italian lute music of the early 16th century, intabulations of polyphonic Renaissance sacred music, and Byzance après Byzance interactions. He is also a writer and editor, as well as a Greek and Latin teacher. Like his dog, he is very much motivated by food.