It’s not necessarily what you think of when you contemplate early music, but there’s something to it: part of what is so attractive about today’s approach to the music of the distant past is that it’s played by a lively cast of iconoclasts and eccentrics.

At least that’s what Suzie LeBlanc suggests on the line from Vancouver Island, where she’s getting ready to perform with countertenor Daniel Taylor and the Victoria Symphony. “I think that what attracted me to early music was the fact that so much of it isn’t written down,” the New Brunswick–born soprano reveals. “What you have is a blueprint of what it might have sounded like, and I always thought that was so liberating. Contrary to romantic music, it’s never written ‘piano crescendo here’; really, that’s all up to you.

“It’s also got very, very few tempo markings,” she continues. “But what we do have are these treatises on how to get from G to A and how to get from G to B and how to get from G to C, in all the ways that sound elegant. They thought that just playing two notes one after the other, as they were printed in the music, was not always desirable.…So you had pages and pages of basically written-out improv that you could practise—improvisation, but within a system that got standardized more and more as the years went on.”

Fastforward 300 years, and that’s essentially the history of jazz, this writer points out.

“Exactly,” LeBlanc replies, laughing.

The ensemble that LeBlanc will perform with this weekend is, arguably, jazzier than most. Ensemble Constantinople’s array of violin, viola da gamba, theorbo, percussion, and setar (an Iranian cousin of the guitar) isn’t something you’d hear on Saturday night at the Blue Note nightclub, but the group’s instrumental verve and sense of collective interplay will sound familiar to jazz aficionados. In part, that’s because much early music is, like some jazz, built around a repeating bass line. But it’s also because the group’s leader and setar virtuoso, Kiya Tabassian, eschews the formality of the written score.

“He just learns all the pieces and basically then he’s improvising, because there’s never a score in front of him,” LeBlanc notes. “And Patrick Graham, who’s playing percussion, well, there’s never a percussion part, so he really has to make it up.”

The soprano concedes that she does have to follow a preordained melodic line, but says that, when it comes to the mostly Venetian music that will be featured in this week’s Metamorfosi program, she’ll still have lots of room for melodic ornamentation and rhythmic play.

“I can’t say we ever perform a piece the same way,” LeBlanc says, “although there are certainly some things that start to find a form.”

Early Music Vancouver presents Ensemble Constantinople with Suzie LeBlanc at Christ Church Cathedral on Friday (February 23).