Baroque specialist Lucas Harris will be performing at the Pacific Baroque Festival (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nHarris points out that for about 800 years, Spain was under Muslim rule, and that this influence comes across in the art and the music.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you go into a Spanish cathedral, you see these certain kind of geometric patterns in the artwork and so forth that make you think of Arabic or Islamic art,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I think you find that in the music too. There\u2019s a certain kind of seriousness to it, a certain kind of symmetry or balance to it. It just kind of seems to have a flavour of its own. It comes out in small details.\u201d<\/p>\n
While classical music isn\u2019t as popular now as it was a few centuries ago, Harris believes that there\u2019s still a dedicated following that continues to live on and find new members.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at it from the point of view of society as a whole, certainly there are lots of people who don\u2019t necessarily have playlists of baroque or renaissance or medieval music,\u201d he says. \u201cBut there is a core of people who have been exposed to it in the right way, who fall in love with it\u2014and once you\u2019ve fallen in love with it, people keep coming back to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The difference between music from the classical era and modern music is that modern music tends to be about specific recorded performances from individual artists, whereas in the classical era, recording technology didn\u2019t exist, so the music had to be written in a way that was timeless and could be performed by anyone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a little bit more emphasis on the composer\u2014the way the music comes to us, it\u2019s always the composer\u2019s name comes first rather than the performer,\u201d Harris says. \u201cI kind of doubt that in 400 years people are going to be listening to our music. It\u2019s, a lot of it, about the [artist\u2019s] personality, and do you think certain Prince songs\u2014how would they really be the same if it weren\u2019t Prince singing them?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nHarris thinks that the festival is worth attending because of the richness of the music on offer, and that while this style of music is a little bit different than a lot of well-known classical, it has a distinct beauty.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cYou\u2019re going to hear an incredibly diverse collection of music that spans the gamut from gentle and ethereal and floating to rhythmically driven and injected with dance-music energy,\u201d says Harris. \u201cYou\u2019re going to end up being educated too about a whole area of baroque music that\u2019s not as well known as your Vivaldi and Bach and Handel. And the music is really of good quality and deserves to be heard. Anybody that knows the festival is going to trust that they\u2019re going to hear something that\u2019s really worth coming to.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Pacific Baroque Festival
\nWednesday, February 25 to Sunday, March 1
\nVarious times, venues, and prices
\npacbaroque.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back for its 22nd season, the Pacific Baroque Festival focuses this time around on Spanish influences. This collaboration between The Victoria Conservatory of Music and Christ Church Cathedral invites audiences to explore the rich and diverse sound world of baroque Spain, where the popular influences of Italian and French musical culture blend with Iberian traditions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27874,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,348],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-february-18-2026"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27873"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27875,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27873\/revisions\/27875"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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