Kickstarter

Less than a week to go...THANK YOU, kind supporters! We have met our minimum, so we will just about meet our production costs. We've just added a new incentive for the person whose donation puts us over $3,500, which would cover our Kickstarter and Amazon fees, pay for the postage to mail your CDs, and still leave a full $3,000 for production costs.

The project

We are Mignarda, a professional duo specializing in music for voice and lute from the 16th century. We are embarking on a project to record a personal selection of the music for voice & lute by John Dowland, one of the most important and innovative composers of the Elizabethan age. After 7 award-winning self-produced CDs and 50,000 miles of travel, sharing this music through concerts and lecture/recitals to a diverse audience – and with absolutely no artist representation – we're ready to record our interpretations for posterity.

The music of Dowland is a standard measure by which performers specializing in the very small niche of lute songs are judged. While there are many recordings of his music available, we have spent a great deal of time with Dowland's deeper, more mature music and we tend to feature some of his lesser-known works.

Our motivation for pursuing this project is twofold: 1) We wish to have a recorded example of our interpretation of this great music, and 2) We strongly feel that our interpretations are unique, sensitive, and very moving to the listener.

To reinforce this last point, while we are committed to historically accurate interpretations of Dowland's music, we are also committed to performing it in a more direct, accessible way. To put it plainly, we don't treat the music like a museum display. On our most recent tour with this music, our performance of one of Dowland's more effective songs received standing ovations, and a comment from a musicologist that she thought she had just heard the perfect interpretation of the song. We're ready to record and share this music with the rest of the world.

The details

We will create a high-resolution recording working with a Grammy Award winning engineer, with whom we have already recorded our last two CDs. This means we have many of the time-consuming setup details worked out and we can spend our time capturing the nuances of the music. While we work very efficiently, the project dollar amount we are proposing will barely cover the costs of recording, mixing, mastering and a short manufacturing run of CDs. We respect your generosity and intend to give the best possible value for your contribution.

We urge all potential contributors to visit our website to peruse examples of our music, and reviews of our previous releases. Or Google the name "Mignarda" or even the term "lute song" for examples of our work ethic. Or just contact us with questions.