Our hero, Peirol d’Auvergne, inhabits a theatre of the imagination somewhere between the epic and the everyday, the real and the supernatural. It was during the summer of 2007, on the roads of Xinjiang and more especially in Kashgar, that we gave free rein to our own imaginations and finally decided to share the inner life of this troubadour over the next few months.

Prior to Guillaume de Machaut's Notre Dame Mass, a complete polyphonic setting of the Mass Ordinary in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, inaugurating a tradition that has come down to the present time, various anonymous composers made experimental steps in that direction, creating several related mass movements. This disc by the innovative French group Ensemble Organum is essentially a recording of one of those fragments, the so-called Mass of Toulouse. In order to create a complete "Missa Gotica" (Goths, by the way, may enjoy the booklet's brief exegesis on why the music of the Middle Ages was later termed Gothic), director Marcel Pérès joins the Toulouse fragments to another early mass pair, the Gloria and Credo known together as the Mass of Barcelona.

“When I wanted to exist, I couldn’t”. Mystical inscriptions on ancient Bosnian tombstones inspired this programme.

In the margin of official religious institutions, Catholic confraternities and Muslim orders offered a mystical experience. Music played an important role in their rituals, as a way of access to God. Simple, repetitive, haunting, this music sung in groups during processions or devotional meetings was intended to place the assembly in a state of ecstatic trance.

The Baltimore Consort used to do programs similar to this one, but The Harp Consort takes the production values and vocal artistry to an even higher level. From the opening, a highly rhythmic, sensuously melodic traditional Breton number, you're drawn into a world of earthy, folk-based music that's filled out with the colors of period instruments and brought to life by the expressive voices of singers who allow the flow and pulse of the language to shape phrases and create natural accents and inflection. The result is affecting, engrossing performances that convey what we can only surmise is a reasonably accurate realization of these ancient and justifiably enduring tunes.

Love variations: The variant, and its corollary the variation, inseparable from the Middle Ages, have established themselves, particularly since Eloge de la variante (In praise of the variant) by Bernard Cerquiglini and the term of “mouvance” (mobility) inaugurated by Paul Zumthor, as genuine writing processes. Extending them to the musical field sounds quite obvious, and allows us furthermore to apprehend the modes of transmission and circulation of the medieval melodic repertoires.

The works of the 15th-century composer Guillaume Dufay are often considered to be where medieval music ends and Renaissance music begins. Yet Dufay sounds quite different from later, better-known Renaissance composers such as Palestrina, Victoria, and Josquin: Dufay's music is less densely scored, with more stratified voice ranges, very complex rhythms, and a somewhat neutral emotional affect. Pomerium, a New York-based choir with extensive experience in Dufay, presents here one of the composer's largest works: a setting of both the ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, etc.) and the propers (texts specific to the occasion) of the Mass for the feast of St. Anthony of Padua. Pomerium's polished performance makes this a fine addition to the Dufay discography.

During the years 1431-1449 a Church Council was held in Basel. This was one of the most important international events in the city’s history. Basel’s cultural and musical life must have benefited from ceremonies and entertainment that took place in a public and private context during this coming-together of Europe’s sacred and secular powers.

This is one of the most beautiful early music discs in the catalog–equally attributable to the music and to the perfectly tuned and blended voices, whose timbres couldn't be more appealing to the ear or more appropriate to the style of the repertoire. The very first track–a charming, gentle, hopeful little piece by Dufay, "Bon jour, bon mois, bon an"–leads us easily into the heart and spirit of this well-conceived program, which seeks to duplicate in music the expressive power and visual beauty of the richly illustrated Books of Hours–lovingly created volumes that were a cherished fixture of religious devotional practice in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Among the composers represented are Dufay, Desprez, Busnoys, Dunstaple, and Ockeghem. Put this at the top of your list.

25 years on from the release of Officium, the groundbreaking alliance of Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, comes Remember me, my dear, recorded during the final tour the group made in October 2014.
Named for the Scottish ballad which concludes it, the programme is emblematic of the range of repertoire the Norwegian saxophonist and British vocal quartet explored together from Pérotin, Hildegard von Bingen, Guillaume le Rouge, Antoine Brumel to Komitas, Arvo Pärt and more.

Grace Davidson presents her third release with Signum Classics, an intimate recording of Sacred Chants by Hildegard von Bingen, translations by Jeremy Summerly.

This double album accompanies the eponymous book by Anthony M. Cummings, Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250-1750 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London 2023). They are designed to enable readers and listeners to enter the sound world of late-medieval and early-modern Florence.Despite the enviable place Florence occupies in the historical imagination, its music-historical importance is not as well-understood as it should be. Yet if Florence was the city of Dante Alighieri, Niccolo Machiavelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Galileo Galilei, it was also the birthplace of the Renaissance madrigal, opera, and the piano. Our goal in assembling this set of recordings, which survey the principal surviving genres of music in Florence in the half-millennium between c. 1250 and c. 1750, was to provide a "virtual" evocation of the extraordinary musical culture of golden-age Florence, one of unsurpassed importance. Through the integration of the contents of the book and the CDs, and leveraging text, image, musical notation, and sound, we offer our listeners the possibility of a fascinating metaphoric time travel.