Our Passion

Fount & Origin is a new 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 Name

The name ‘Fount and Origin’ comes from the writings of the fifteenth-century composer and theorist, Johannes Tinctoris (c.1435-1511). In his Proportionale Musices (1472-3) he comments on the ‘new [musical] art’, and credits the early fifteenth-century English school of polyphony, and John Dunstaple in particular (d. 1453), as its ‘fons et origo’, or ‘fount and origin’. We chose this name to engage with a hugely important turning point in musical practice throughout Western Europe more broadly.

This period in music history is characterised by an increasing awareness of rich sonorities, thematic cohesion, and the rise of humanism in philosophical thought. These factors are but a few of those which birthed the early musical renaissance. It also reminds us that there is so much music and history yet to be discovered and recreated, and that a scholarly approach can be the starting point, or the fons et origo, of a new musical experience in the twenty-first century.