What we do have, though, is the famous Carver Choirbook, from which all the polyphonic works on this CD, with one exception, are taken. This is one of only two large-scale collections of music to survive from pre-reformation Scotland, the long-term work of its principal scribe, the Augustinian Canon Robert Carver (also known as Robert Arnot), whose name appears in a number of entries in the source. Whether the collection itself had a role to play at Linlithgow is unknown; clearly, however, it was compiled for a sophisticated chapel, almost certainly a royal one. Eight of its 27 works were written by Carver himself in the first half of the 16th century, but we have not chosen any of them for this CD. Our reconstruction of the palace focuses instead on a slightly earlier period, before the building of an organ within the chapel and the consequent changes to its internal layout. The centrepiece of our recording is a magnificent Mass cycle, found within a layer of the choirbook containing, alongside Du Fay’s Missa L’homme armé, works both anonymous and from the mid-to-late fifteenth century. This, along with a companion cycle, has previously been described as either continental or English, but we now believe the pair to be the oldest surviving Mass cycles of Scottish origin.

The present cycle, given the known proclivities of Linlithgow’s overlord, King James IV, may well have found a place in King’s devotions. Saint Katherine seems to have held a special place in his observances, as we will see below. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that the famous tale of James being warned of his impending death at Flodden by a spectre takes place in the St Katherine aisle of Linlithgow Parish Church. That the warning came from the Saint is rendered the more likely given her particular reputation as an intercessor. This derives from her imploration to Christ at the moment of her own death (in the words of The Golden Legend): ‘I beg of you that anyone…who invokes me at the moment of death or in any need, may receive the benefit of your kindness.‘ We know that James celebrated Masses for St Katherine in the chapel at Linlithgow Palace, having given significant funds for the celebration of her feast there in both 1490 and 1497.

We know also from surviving records that James more generally had ‘chapele geir’ and ‘organis’ in the royal chapel at Linlithgow – originally transporting these as necessary from the other Royal Chapels in Stirling and Edinburgh, but eventually having them permanently installed. Indeed, Linlithgow – as the King’s great pleasure palace between the standing Chapel Royal and capital city of Edinburgh – frequently paid host to the King and musicians from his Chapel. He spent many important occasions there, and was present particularly often for Easter, spending paschaltide there as a sixteen-year-old in 1489, and again hearing Easter Mass in the 1490s, most probably for the first official use of the new chapel; his last Eastertide visit occurred in 1512, the year prior to his death on the battlefield at Flodden, and perhaps the occasion for his putative spectral warning. The treasurer’s accounts show that he often spent yuletide in Linlithgow too, seemingly being present in the Palace frequently during the most important occasions in the Christian calendar.

The Music:

The music recorded here is dedicated to the veneration of Christianity’s two foremost female intercessors. First of these is clearly the Virgin Mary – more on this below – but the second, St Katherine, is a virgin martyr who yields in weight of medieval veneration only to Christ’s mother. The King’s particular veneration of Katherine centred on a healing well in the village of Liberton, just outside Edinburgh, which between 1502 and 1512 he visited no fewer than fifteen times. The legendary origins of the well were traced to James’s ancestor Queen Margaret, consort to King Malcolm. The story goes that the queen had been presented, by a pilgrim returning from the Holy Land, with a vial of healing oil from St Katherine’s shrine at Sinai. On accidentally dropping the vial, the queen was amazed to see the emergence of a spring of black, oily substance. The viscous substance came to be seen to have healing powers, capable of curing rashes and scabies.

The Missa Horrendo subdenda machinamoto – the ‘Catherine Wheel Mass’, as we have taken to calling it – has only recently had its structural chant identified as belonging to a responsory for St Katherine of Alexandria. The work is both strange and beautiful; its underlying structure mirrors that of contemporary Mass cycles from south of the border, but its surface details, like those of its companion Mass, are quite unlike anything else of the period. It frequently makes use of the octave-leap cadence which would seem to be a rather antiquated feature for a Mass of c.1460, and a particular kind of floridity that seems on the one hand redolent of the slightly later Eton repertory and on the other quite distinctive. Its opening movement is missing two folios, robbing us of half of the voices of its opening movement, which we have refashioned in a reconstruction for this recording.

We place the Mass here in the context of a series of snapshots, as it were, from a succession of putative St Katherine’s day devotions at Linlithgow. Our proceedings begin with the extraordinary Matins responsory itself – its bewildering musical machinations vividly recalling those of the famous wheel on which the saint was tortured – on which the Mass is based. The Sarum introit for St Katherine, Dilexi justiciam, serves to usher in the glorious polyphonic Mass cycle itself, its movements heard without interruption. Following this, we fast-forward to Vespers, with one of the Carver Choirbook’s elaborate and brilliant settings of the Magnificat, alternating its polyphonic verses with chant set in a four-voice formulaic succession of intervals following the ‘fourth kind of faburdoun’ discussed in the mid-sixteenth-century treatise on the ‘Art of Music’ known as the Scottish Anonymous. We end the proceedings, as every liturgical day would have done, with a Marian antiphon following compline, calling in this instance on the famous Ave Maria mater Dei by William Cornysh from the Eton Choirbook. In doing this we invite comparison with music from that great collection with which our Carver selections stand in oblique comparison. At the same time, moreover, we invoke the English repertory whose representatives also found their way into the Carver book, the expression, perhaps, of Anglophile influx brought with Margaret Tudor, elder daughter of Henry VII of England and wife of James IV from 1503 until his untimely demise a decade later.

The Project:

This CD is one of several products of two AHRC-funded projects – ‘Space, Place, Sound and Memory: Immersive Experiences of the Past’ and ‘Hearing Historic Scotland’ – which sought to bring the lost performance space of Linlithgow chapel back to life. The project sought to reconstruct architecture, interior decoration, and acoustics in immersive Virtual Reality. All of the music you will hear is situated within this reconstructed acoustic. This acoustic is quite unlike that usually used for a recording of this type, or indeed for concert performance; it presents a far more intimate and exposed rendering of the music than we might usually expect. We find this a particularly compelling presentation for this repertoire since it allows the listener to hear the finer details of the counterpoint and especially the decorative filigree of the upper voices. Importantly, we see this acoustic as approaching that in which much of this repertoire must have originally have been heard. Music designed for private chapels would, of course, have often been performed in smaller spaces, decorated with tapestries, drapes, and soft furnishings – an acoustic environment which is quite distinct from that experienced in the bare stone of modern Cathedrals and Churches.

You can enjoy the full Virtual Reality experience on site at Linlithgow Palace, Linlithgow, and St Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh. This CD itself offers an experience quite unlike any other: the chance to enjoy a number of works in as accurate a reconstruction as we were able to achieve of a space in which we believe they may have once been heard. If you want to investigate the difference that changing acoustics can make on performance, please explore the downloadable app. This allows you to compare the music as it would sound performed in the reconstruction versus its sound in the chapel as it stands today, with its missing ceiling and windows, as well as viewing our physical reconstruction of the chapel.

For a sneak-peak at the project, take a look at our making-of documentary.