‘Aural Histories’ Showcase: Coventry in the later Middle Ages

This concert is a showcase of the AHRC-funded ‘Aural Histories: Coventry 1451-1642’ research project, exploring the experience of music in late-medieval and early-modern Coventry. We have recorded this music so that it can be processed and heard within digital reconstructions of Coventry’s historic buildings as they might have appeared at various stages in the past. The music in our concert this lunchtime focuses, in evocative sound and vision, on two chronological ‘slices’ at the early end of our period: 1451 and 1528.

Hard though it may be to imagine today, in the late Middle Ages Coventry awas almost the de facto capital of England. 1451 saw one of its cultural high-watermarks, when Henry VI visited the City and heard Mass in St Michael’s Church (the former Coventry Cathedral). The first part of our programme celebrates this event through a succession of piece for voices and winds that may have been used on that occasion to celebrate the presence of the King, including a movement of the famous English Caput Mass that still today survives in a unique fragment in Coventry itself.

For part 2 we switch to 1528, and celebrate the arrival in Holy Trinity Church of a new organ, whose sounds we dress up with fabulous music for winds and voices, including Hugh Aston’s sensational motet ‘Gaude virgo mater Christi’.

1451
Fanfare (after Dufay, Gloria ad modum tubae)
Te Deum (anon.)
Anon., Missa Caput – Kyrie & Agnus Dei
Leonel Power (d.1445), Ave regina caelorum

1528
Anon., The Base of Spayne
Hugh Aston (c.1485-1558), Maske
Robert Fayrfax (1464-1521), O lux beata trinitas
Hugh Aston, Gaude virgo mater Christi
Laudate pueri (anon.)

The Binchois Consort
Amy Haworth – soprano
Katie Trethewey – soprano
David Allsopp – alto
Tom Lilburn – alto
Dominic Bland – tenor
Nick Madden – tenor
George Pooley – tenor
Matthew Vine – tenor
Jimmy Holliday – bass
Sam Mitchell – bass
Andrew Kirkman – conductor

Members of His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts
Helen Roberts – cornett
William Lyons – shawm
Jamie Savan – slide trumpet
Stephanie Dyer – trumpet and sackbut