ABOUT the ensemble
Fount & Origin is a Oxford-based early music vocal ensemble specialising in late-medieval and early-renaissance music. We are committed to performing lesser-known works from this period and exploring the rich cultural and liturgical history that accompanies the music. We hope that our work will inspire further performance and interest in this neglected repertory.
Formed in Autumn 2018 by our director, James Tomlinson, the ensemble of a dozen students and young professionals delight in reviving forgotten and underperformed early music to the highest standards of choral performance, combining clarity of tone with an expressive wit, and demonstrating “impressive control over challenging idioms” (Edward Higginbottom, 2019).
Fount & Origin has been awarded the Stile Antico Ensemble Development Bursary 2019-2021, for which the members of Fount & Origin will be working closely with those of Stile Antico to embark on exciting projects and performances in the near future.
Our next event
Wed 27th Nov, St. Mary Magdalen's Church, Oxford
A New Star Shall Arise
Music for Christmas in Medieval England
This programme will transport you back to the wintry cathedrals and now-ruined abbeys of medieval England for an evening of musical splendour from the Middle Ages. We will perform rare and often surprising musical treasures written for the Christmas season between the 13th and 15th centuries, including the anonymous Missa Veterem Hominem of the mid-15th century, which luckily survives in a manuscript copied not in England, but on the continent. Indeed, the surviving sources of polyphony in England from the late-Middle Ages are far rarer than those on the continent. This is in part due to the fact that, for many centuries, notated polyphony was cultivated and copied mostly within the great English monastic communities, whose libraries were largely destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries from 1536.
The soaring melodies of Sarum plainchant, the energetic drama of 13th- and 14th-century motets and conductus, and the great beauty of 15th-century carols and other settings will all be brought back to life in this very special Christmas programme.
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