Guest with Alychymy Viols for a new program, Songbook from Across the Sea: The Sounds of French Louisiana, at the Bloomington Early Music' Festival’s 2026 season. Cantatas by Clerambault, Campra, Couperin, Lully, Desmarets, and de Bousset.

Indiana’s own Alchymy Viols offers music from the Ursuline Manuscript, a spiritual songbook gifted from France in 1736 to a convent in New Orleans in the heart of French Louisiana—territory that would later join the United States. Sung in devotion by the Ursuline sisters, its music is by the most reputed French composers of the era—Lully, Campra, Lambert, Marchand, Clérembault—adapted with religious lyrics. In transcriptions by Alchymy artistic director Phil Spray, this concert is a stunning showcase of feminine expression and colonial life in the Louisiana territory.