Presentations
Plainchant
The monophonic sung prayer of the Latin Church — the modes, the neume, and the birth of notation from which all Western music grows. With synthesised chant, drone and organum.
LaunchHildegard von Bingen
Abbess, visionary and one of the first named composers — ecstatic, soaring chant of enormous range, and the sung morality play Ordo Virtutum.
LaunchThe Notre-Dame School
The birth of measured polyphony in Paris — organum over sustained tenors, the four-voice grandeur of Pérotin, and the first notation of rhythm.
LaunchTroubadours & Trouvères
The first great flowering of named secular song — courtly love in Occitan and French, from Bernart de Ventadorn to Adam de la Halle, and the dancing estampie.
LaunchGuillaume de Machaut
The towering figure of the Ars Nova — the first complete polyphonic Mass by one composer, dazzling isorhythmic motets, and the perfected formes fixes.
LaunchFrancesco Landini
The blind organist who crowned the Italian Trecento — graceful ballate, the Squarcialupi Codex, and the sweet under-third "Landini cadence".
LaunchJohn Dunstaple
The English master whose sweet, full triadic harmony — the contenance angloise — gave the Continent its new sound of thirds and sixths.
LaunchGuillaume Du Fay
The Burgundian sun of the early Renaissance — the motet for Florence's dome, the cyclic cantus-firmus Mass, fauxbourdon and radiant chansons.
LaunchGilles Binchois
The supreme miniaturist of the Burgundian court — tender, perfectly shaped chansons and rondeaux for the age of courtly love.
LaunchJohannes Ockeghem
The master of seamless, flowing polyphony and canonic mystery — the Missa prolationum, the earliest polyphonic Requiem, and canons of astonishing ingenuity.
LaunchJosquin des Prez
The Michelangelo of music — pervasive imitation, expressive word-painting, and a mastery so complete that Luther called him "master of the notes".
LaunchThomas Tallis
The English composer who survived four monarchs and the Reformation — from the 40-voice Spem in alium to the plain beauty of the English anthem.
LaunchPalestrina
The serene voice of the Counter-Reformation — flawless, balanced counterpoint whose controlled dissonance became the very textbook of the art.
LaunchOrlando di Lasso
The cosmopolitan genius of the late Renaissance — over two thousand works in every language and genre, vivid, pictorial and daringly chromatic.
LaunchTomás Luis de Victoria
The Spanish mystic — sacred music only, burning with the ardour of the age of St Teresa: the great Requiem, O magnum mysterium, the Tenebrae Responsories.
LaunchWilliam Byrd
Master of two worlds — glorious Latin Masses for the secret Catholic rite and English anthems for the Chapel Royal, and a founder of the keyboard virginalist school.
LaunchCarlo Gesualdo
The prince who murdered and then poured his anguish into music of chromaticism so extreme it would not be heard again for three hundred years.
LaunchJohn Dowland
The melancholy lutenist — Flow, my tears, the falling "tear" motif, and the English ayre. "Semper Dowland, semper dolens." With a guide to lute tablature.
LaunchClaudio Monteverdi
The doorway to the Baroque — the seconda pratica, the last great madrigals, the first great opera (L'Orfeo), and the birth of the basso continuo.
LaunchByzantine Chant
The sung theology of the Christian East — voice alone over the ison drone, the eight echoi, the microtonal genera, St Romanos and St Kassia, and a notation of gesture and interval. With microtonal synthesis you can hear.
LaunchSlavonic & Russian Orthodox Chant
From austere Znamenny chant and its hook-notation to the bells of the zvon, the deep oktavist basses, and Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil — with the wider Orthodox world, including Georgian polyphony.
LaunchReading Early Music Notation
The full guide to how Western notation was invented and how to read every stage of it — neumes, the Guidonian staff, square notation, mensural notation, and tablature — with playable examples.
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