Abstract
A filmed scholarly introduction to the programme The Eton Choirbook: Crossroads of the Renaissance, narrated by Kathryn Knight, a long-standing member of TONUS PEREGRINUS, and built from the concert programme notes. It sets out the source, the method and what is at stake in the project: following the ensemble’s critically acclaimed recording of Music from the Eton Choirbook for Naxos, made from modern editions, TONUS PEREGRINUS returned to the source of the repertoire and re-learnt it from the original notation, working from a life-size facsimile. The film is the dissemination arm of that research: it explains to a general audience what the Choirbook is, why reading its notation had become a lost art, and what recovering it changes about how the music sounds, so that the performances are heard as the argument they are rather than simply as a concert.