The current Music Divine perhaps could be called Music Divine II, since it is the 2024 rebirth of the original Music Divine, which was active from 2005 through 2011.
During that first run, we presented concerts in churches on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Lower East Side, and Greenwich Village, as well as inside some of the most resonant tunnel underpasses in Central Park. We brought some of those programs to churches in Teaneck, NJ, and Boston. In addition, several members of the group demonstrated Renaissance choral music for a Columbia University Humanities class; accompanied a Shakespeare lecture at the New York Public Library; and, as part of a New York chapter meeting of the American Musicological Society, made a surprise performance of Parisian Renaissance chansons for Dr. Isabelle Cazeaux in honor of her 85th birthday.
In 2007 we took part in the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) and the New York Early Music Celebration (NYEMC). In Boston we presented our "War and Peace" program, which we will be offering again this winter back home in "the city." Robert Aubry Davis broadcast much of our NYEMC performance of Josquin and Isaac on his nationwide Sirius XM radio program "Millennium of Music."
For our return to the 2009 BEMF, Music Divine presented a fringe concert of Jacob Obrecht's Missa Salve diva parens, a monumental, late-15th-century mass that transcended the recently established "classical" norms of polyphonic composition. For the 2011 BEMF, Music Divine presented "Renaissance: Christmas in June" — the Noël part of our "Not Only Noël" concert from the previous December.
Music Divine participated in the annual Make Music New York festival every June 21, starting in 2008, when we presented a sneak preview of our "War & Peace" concert inside a resonant Central Park underpass near the zoo. In 2009 we found an even better underpass and performed all of the music of our two previous concerts. Half of the group returned there for MMNY 2010, to perform Josquin's Missa de Beata Virgine and a few pieces from our "Stile Moderno" concert; and for MMNY 2011, to repeat most of our Renaissance "Pastoral" concert.