Interesting Videos about Renaissance Sacred Music

Here’s an interesting thing I stumbled across via a friend’s Facebook page: an English vocal ensemble called The Marian Consort has recently posted some videos on their YouTube channel under the rubric (so to speak) “Inside the music”, in which the founding director, Rory McCleery, gives historical and musical details about specific composers and pieces of their repertoire. Here is his take on William Byrd’s Mass for Three Voices:

another about a particularly beautiful motet by the Netherlandish composer Jacob Clemens, which also explains a bit about the odd nickname by which he is usually known, “Clemens non Papa”:

and this one about a composer I had never heard of before, a nun from the Italian city of Ferrara named Rafaella Aleotti, who lived from 1575 to 1640.