Abstract
Filmed documentation of TONUS PEREGRINUS recovering the practice of singing directly from the Eton Choirbook (Eton College Library, MS 178), one of the greatest surviving sources of pre-Reformation English polyphony, compiled at the beginning of the sixteenth century and consisting mostly of fifteenth-century sacred music for many voices. Reading its intricate and colourful notation is an all-but-lost art. In 2023 the ensemble, led by its Founder-Director, set out to rediscover how to sing from it, making their first attempts from the manuscript itself in Eton College Library and from the DIAMM facsimile, and continuing over the following three years to complete performances from a life-size facsimile at New College, Oxford, and St Martin-in-the-Fields, London. The research question is what changes when singers read from the notation its first performers used rather than from a modern score: how the parts are learnt, how the ensemble listens to itself, and how the melodic lines take shape without a conductor’s score to reconcile them. The films record the method and its results, including the initial performance of Browne.