Raising Voices. Sharing Music.
Maddalena's Descant is a Vancouver treble choir where talented amateur and professional singers develop their musicianship and perform a distinctive repertoire spanning centuries, cultures and languages.
Our Mission
Our goal is raising voices:
For choir members: training, coaching, and opportunities to take risks and experiment (composing, arranging, solo performance, choreography)
For the community: gifting music to youth; elders; urban-dwellers.
In repertoire: featuring and celebrating women composers, arrangers and composers of colour, Indigenous musicians, and local artists.
In collaborations: with instrumentalists, community orchestras and ensembles, other choral groups, in festivals and charitable galas.
Meet the Choir
Soprano 1’s
Soprano 2’s
Alto 1’s
Alto 2’s
Who Was Maddalena?
Maddalena Casulana was the first woman in Western music to self-publish a complete book of her own compositions, essentially the first recognized female composer.
She lived from 1544-1590, during the late Renaissance, a time when women were rarely recognized as intellectuals or artists. She used her music to challenge that belief.
She dedicated some of her music to Isabella de’ Medici and boldly declared in the dedication of her first book of madrigals, “[I] want to show the world, as much as I can in this profession of music, the vain error of men that they alone possess the gifts of intellect and artistry, and that such gifts are never given to women”.
Maddalena is a meaningful namesake for our choir.
Compiled from publicly available information.