Performing Matteo Ricci: The map and the music

¡Sacabuche!, an early European music ensemble at Indiana University, under the direction of Linda Pearse, together with Huang Ruo, Ann Waltner, and Qin Fang, designed a multi-media program focusing on the sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci, taking as the focal point Ricci’s 1602 map, which we call “Matteo Ricci: His Map and Music.” We used music, images, and text to create a layered performance, which we premiered in Beijing in December of 2010. This article describes the program and the logic behind some of the artistic decisions we made.