Isabelle Douailly-Backman

Isabelle Douailly-Backman (she/they) is a Montreal-based historical string player specializing in medieval and early string performance. Originally from Chicago, she moved to Montreal to study viola at McGill University, where discovering early music completely changed the direction of her musical life. She went on to complete a B.Mus in Baroque Viola and an M.Mus in Baroque Violin at McGill under Hélène Plouffe and Olivier Brault, before turning increasingly toward the music and performance practices of the Middle Ages.

Isabelle performs on medieval vielle, baroque violin, and viola with ensembles and festivals across Canada, including Ensemble Caprice, Arion Baroque Orchestra, TENET Vocal Artists, L’Harmonie des Saisons, Musique Royale, and the Montreal Baroque Festival. She currently studies medieval vielle at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel with Baptiste Romain. In 2023, she received Early Music America’s Barbara Thornton Memorial Scholarship, awarded in collaboration with members of Sequentia to an outstanding young performer of medieval music.

She is the founder and artistic director of COMTESSA, a Montreal-based ensemble devoted to music of the 11th through 15th centuries. Since taking its current form in 2025, COMTESSA has quickly emerged as a leading new voice in medieval performance in Canada. The ensemble was selected for Early Music America’s 2025 Emerging Artists Showcase and as Early Music Vancouver’s 2026 Next Generation Artist under the mentorship of Benjamin Bagby, and has appeared at Early Music Vancouver, Festival Montréal Baroque, and BIGLAKE Festival. COMTESSA is rapidly developing into one of Canada’s distinctive small early-music ensembles, bringing rarely heard repertoire to major stages while building new performers and audiences for medieval music.

This work reflects a broader belief at the centre of Isabelle’s practice: that medieval music is both an inheritance of the past and a living artistic practice. Through COMTESSA and her own performance, she is helping build a stronger culture for medieval music in Montreal and across Canada, bringing deep historical research into conversation with experimentation, collaboration, and contemporary identity. Rather than treating the repertoire as something fixed to be preserved, her work seeks to reclaim it as something we can inhabit, question, and transform. In doing so, she connects us to the people and ideas of the past while creating new possibilities for what medieval performance can be today.