Abstract
Eton College has produced twenty British prime ministers but only one Choirbook: the giant manuscript of the Eton Choirbook is one of the greatest surviving glories of pre-Reformation England, consisting of sacred music for many voices, originally sung as part of the daily liturgy. However, reading its intricate and colourful musical notation is an all-but-lost art today. After exploring its notation over the last 25 years in workshops and performances in Europe and Australia with Cappella Pratensis, TONUS PEREGRINUS, The Song Company, and now TONUS AUSTRALIS, it seems clear that when we perform music from a long time ago from the written instructions which the original musicians used, we get “closer to the music”, both closer to the way it sounded, and closer to the psycho-physical experience of the 15th- and 16th-century performers. Thus turning over the pages of a giant early 16th-century choirbook is the entry into another world, historically, musically, theologically, and physiologically. The outward and visible signs on the page – the musical notation in “black-full” mensural notation – convey to us the inward musical structure in a way which is lost in the bland score notation of modern editions, and possibly even aspects of the original performers’ belief systems. Comparing specific musical passages read directly from the Eton Choirbook by modern performers with the same passages sung earlier by the same singers from modern editions teaches us about those margins of difference – in terms of mental mapping, ensemble dynamic, melodic contours, creative freshness, and even spiritual grace. There is arguably a sacramental aspect to an artefact of such historical and artistic pricelessness when it becomes the mediating element in the transaction between a composer living half a millennium ago in a very different world and a a grouping of performers reading and singing aloud from the black and red dots on the page. Working both from the momentous DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music) facsimile with introductory text by Magnus Williamson and from new performing editions used for the TONUS PEREGRINUS recording on Naxos, and numerous workshops (from Tilburg in 1999 to Eton itself in 2023).