What we do

Wondrous Machine takes its name from the bass air in Purcell's Hail! Bright Cecilia but as a metaphor for the process of music making.

It was established to promote Early Music performances, particularly vocal works, and encourage wider awareness.

Past performances include excerpts from John Dowland's First and Second Bookes of Songs and Aires, showcasing the evolution from traditional madrigals to more complex and original pieces grounded in melancholy, as well as songs from Purcell and Danyel.

Venues such as the House of Annetta, a partially restored Huguenot house in Spitalfields, and Wilton's Music Hall, provide an intimate and evocative hosting of sparse and beautiful songs from the seventeeth century.

Next up

Danse Macabre - the 1600s and Chaos
Wednesday, 4th June 2025 - the Old Operating Theatre in Southwark

Following last year’s concerts at the House of Annetta we are planning a brand new performance in the atmospheric Old Operating Theatre in Southwark.

The Danse Macabre was part of a wider constellation of allegories that acknowledged the darkness of a life that ended in death within the joy of music. Dancing manias that ended in broken bones and death; reminders that under all the pomp and richly-clothed power lurked the bare bones of skeletons. As the 1600s slipped into chaos and war, this foreshadowing became ever more acute and entwined with the strangeness and dissonance of the early English Baroque.

Our programme will focus on the seventeenth century including pieces by John Danyel and Henry Purcell as well as less well-known works by William Webb, John Banister, John Blow and an astonishingly beautiful vocal work by Henry Lawes’ brother William Lawes who, though assigned away from the front-line to keep him from danger, was “casually shot” by a Parliamentarian at Rowton Heath, near Chester, in 1645. This work appears in his brother’s autograph manuscript in the British Library detailing 324 songs few of which are either known or performed now.

Tickets now available from eventbrite

'Strikingly intimate... well-judged story-telling entwined with the haunting, sparse beauty of Purcell and Dowland'

'Like nothing I've been to before - playful, serious, beautiful, chilling, provocative in just the right way!'