Music for contemplation and/or devotion

The Lost Music of Canterbury: Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks

It's great to see this 5-CD compilation of the complete music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, recorded by Scott Metcalfe's amazing Boston-based choir Blue Heron between 2010 and 2017. I cottoned on to this music with the 4th disc in the series in 2015, and that recording of music by previously unheard composers Robert Jones, Nicholas Ludford and Robert Hunt was a Top 10 disc for me that year. The final disc, from 2017, was just as great, and also made the cut for my Top 10. I've been listening carefully to the first three discs to see what I had missed, and I once again loved what I was hearing: near perfection in singing, and an absolute miracle of musicology, since we were so terribly close to missing out on this music altogether. So much credit goes to Nick Sandon, who interpolated the missing tenor part; that shows what a near thing this was! Metcalfe and Blue Heron erase the centuries between the 15th and 16th and the 21st, in highly atmospheric recordings made at the Gothic-style Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill MA. This is music for contemplation and/or devotion; whatever your spiritual leanings, it will surely lift your spirits!

This album will be released on October 5, 2018.

Life-affirming Music

From October 3, 2015:

This is the fourth and penultimate disc in Scott Metcalfe’s critically acclaimed series Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, with his Boston-based choir Blue Heron. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross has called their singing ‘precise and fluid, immaculate and alive.’ Those qualities are enhanced by the space in which this splendid music was recorded, the Gothic-style Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill MA, and the excellent sound production and engineering that’s a key quality of this series. There’s no fall-off in musical quality as the series nears its end. Robert Jones’ Missa Spes rostra is a major work from a composer who very existence is known to us only through the Peterhouse Partbooks. Jones’ Magnificat was one of the highlights of the first disc in this series, and this Mass shares its profundity and its beauty. The music of Nicholas Ludford is so appealing; Metcalfe, in his fine liner notes, calls it ‘genial and ebullient.’ Ludford’s Ave jujus conceptio is a joyful celebration of the life and Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The movements that make up this hour’s worth of music are ardent or contemplative, but always life affirming.

Here is the Credo from "Missa Spes nostra" by Robert Jones (fl. c. 1520-35):