The Sweetest Songs: Music from the Baldwin Partbooks III

Featuring

Nick Ashby
Owen Rees
Alice Hulett
Ruth Provost
David Gould
Contrapunctus

Robert White
William Byrd
John Mundy
Anonymous
Robert Parsons
William Mundy
John Sheppard
William Daman

Did you know?

1/7

Recording & Production

This recording was made possible through funding by the John Fell Oxford University Press (OUP) Research Fund and was recorded in the Church of St Michael and All Angels, Oxford.

Composition History

This album is the third and final installment in a series of recordings by Contrapunctus exploring the Baldwin Partbooks, a significant collection of Tudor polyphony.

Compositional Technique

Because the Tenor partbook is missing from the Baldwin Partbooks, some works on this album required reconstruction of the missing Tenor part by Owen Rees or Jason Smart.

Composition History

More than half of the works on this album, including motets by White, William Mundy, and Sheppard, appear to be world premiere recordings.

Performer Biography

Contrapunctus, the vocal consort on this recording, is the Vocal Consort in Residence at the University of Oxford and collaborates on the Tudor Partbooks Project.

Historical Context

The Baldwin Partbooks, a set of manuscript partbooks copied by John Baldwin, a lay clerk at St George's Chapel, Windsor, is the richest single source of Tudor polyphony, preserving almost 170 works.

Historical Context

The 'psalm motet' was a distinctively English phenomenon in the mid-16th century, as psalm texts were acceptable to both Catholics and evangelical reformers during periods of religious upheaval.