July 2011 standing at the crossroads

The Eton Choirbook – standing at the crossroads of the Renaissance (NAXOS 8.572840)
TONUS PEREGRINUS will be spending part of July in St Alban the Martyr, Holborn (http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/447/holborne01vl7.jpg) recording astonishing music from the Eton Choirbook, including Hugh Kellyk's very very little-known setting of the Magnificat - which I finished editing yesterday. This recording completes our series of milestones of early Western music for Naxos – early organum and the first music in four parts, the first ‘opera’, the first complete mass setting, the first polyphonic passion setting, the first harmonies of the Renaissance, the first English hymnbook, etc.

Eton College was founded in the early 1440s by Henry VI; under the rule of Henry VII, who claimed the monarchy for the Tudors in 1485, the music of what we call the Eton Choirbook was collected and copied into one giant manuscript which, unlike so many others, has survived the ravages of history (or at least, 126 of the original 224 leaves have). By the time Eton was founded English music was already well-known for its originality and exuberance – one Continental poet described its influence on Dufay and his contemporaries:
"For they have a new method
Of making fresh harmony
In music both high and low
In artifice and interruption and nuance
And have adopted the English
Habit and followed Dunstable
Because of which wonderful delight
Makes their song joyful and remarkable."

The composer of the six-part setting of 'Stabat mater dolorosa' which we'll be singing, John Browne, was almost certainly a boy at Eton in the late 1460s and then seems to have gone on to New College, Oxford; while Richard Davy, the composer of the St Matthew Passion (the first Passion setting not written by Anonymous) was Master of the Choristers at Magdalen College, Oxford in the 1490s; Robert Wylkynson was Master of the Choristers at Eton itself and wrote a fabulous 13-part canon on the final page of the Eton Choirbook. We can imagine them and their fellow-singers grouped around the huge choirbook on a lectern – seven or so men, and in front, ten boys who with eyesight still undimmed could read from the top of the very large pages. The size of the pages meant they had to be parchment and, in order to be legible in the uncertain candlelight, the music was solidly inscribed on staves 2cm high. It’s the notation of the Eton Choirbook which is the key to understanding the style: how it was composed and how it was performed. Each voice-part is written out by itself (without barlines) on one part of the open double-page spread: unlike a modern score there is no vertical alignment between the parts and there is little to show the existence of the tactus – or beat – apart from the groupings of the noteheads. Red ink, too, provided a way of conveying further instructions to the performer: red text is used in sections for reduced numbers of voices, while red noteheads convey the notion of binary ‘imperfection’ in a mensural world built on the solidly Trinitarian foundation of the mediaeval theorists.

Road to Jericho – stage one complete
The last few weeks saw the climax of the first part of the moving and extraordinary journey which is the Road to Jericho project, involving the combined forces of Fifth Quadrant and Dal'Ouna: a week working with the gifted composers and performers on an Aldeburgh Young Musicians course, followed by a residency at Aldeburgh during which we spent four days rehearsing and recording my new piece Who is my neighbour? in The Kiln – a beautifully converted studio at Snape. We then gave the public premiere to open the Spitalfields Music summer festival, and followed that with an educational visit to the Al Kamandjati music centre in Ramallah where the piece was first developed in workshops last December. The next stage of the journey is a planned Middle East tour in November and the release of the studio (and maybe the live) recordings of Who is my neighbour? Photos of the journey so far - Jerusalem, Ramallah, Fitzrovia, Aldeburgh, Snape, Leiston Abbey, Spitalfields – are here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.184241871597012.43468.100000336016625&l=2bf6f52961
More info at: http://www.roadtojericho.com/new-antony-pitts---who-is-my-neighbour.html

Thank you for listening!
Antony Pitts

July 2011: standing at the crossroads...