This website was started to call the world's attention away from the exclusive focus on Schubert's and Gounod's Ave Maria and lead into the subtlety of Ave Maria poetry, its music behind, and its origin. This repertoire of four-hundred music pieces was indeed a nice motivation to form our ensemble to turn scholarship into practice as it should always be so.

     The king of all the Ave Maria repertoire is Antoine Brumel's four part motet, which carries the full text and melody of the Sequence Ave Maria in each voices gracefully embellished. This sequence served in the early Renaissance as the ideal sample of music and text for composers to build their compositions on, until the Council banned it from use, and today's text became the mandatory standard.

     Ave Maria motets often turn into litany, or are virtual dialogues of the angel and Mary, or are creative unique poems, or especially in the Middle Ages are often acrostic, which means that each line or strophe start with the appropriate phrase, others are made for children's schooling, who, through one song not only learn singing in polyphony, but also telling each biblical event of Mary's life, while learning rhythm, and dancing, and even the alphabet.

     Welcome to the world of the origin of the theme of Annunciation in the history of music - one specialty of the wide interests of our Ensemble "Imperatrix"!