During MANU SCRIPTUM music from the period 1050-1550 will resound: five centuries of music from all corners of Western Europe, sung and played in medieval living rooms, at bustling market places, at opulent renaissance courts or in impressive gothic cathedrals. The splendid manuscripts – prominent witnesses of early West European music history – are even today samples of unsurpassed craftsmanship: now by their colourful illuminations, then again by their volume and rich contents. Musicologist Sofie Taes (AMUZ, Alamire Foundation, Leuven University) got steeped in the sources and will reveal for you their rich past, their special history, their idiosyncrasies and secrets, generously using musical and visual aids. You will also get the inside scoop why exactly AMUZ decided to choose these sources, thus inviting you to cast an artistic glance behind the wings of Laus Polyphoniae!

i.c.w. Alamire Foundation

Performers
Sofie Taes, speaker

Composer-organist Conrad Paumann (‘il cieco miraculoso – the miraculous blind man’) will always be connected to the origin of the voluminous Buxheimer Orgelbuch, and also to the composers who were active at the Bavarian court in Munich. Even so, the complete substance and the true story of this source can only be grasped when our horizon is widened beyond the brilliance of these famous composers. Tasto Solo has set itself this task and engages on a quest for the shadows of the (anonymous) composers who belonged to this most remarkable keyboard school of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. A few names have survived the ravages of time, such as Adam Ileborgh and Wolfgang de Nova Domo, or Johannes Götz and Antonius Baumgartner. A rediscovery in depth and a fresh interpretation are in order!

Performers
David Catalunya, clavisimbalum & organ | Andrés Alberto Gómez, organ | Reinhild Waldek, gothic harp | Guillermo Pérez, organetto & artistic direction

Programme
Werk van Gilles Binchois, Conrad Paumann e.a.

Artists in residence during Laus Polyphoniae 2010 are the musicians of the Huelgas Ensemble.Conducted by Paul Van Nevel they tackle three multifarious concert programmes,leading the listener to Tudor England, the Italy of the quattrocento and Spain around 1300. The music manuscripts on which these programmes are based – the Eton Choir Book, Bologna Q15 and the Codex Las Huelgas respectively – are old friends for the accomplished researcher Van Nevel. Radio producer Chantal Pattyn engages in a dialogue with the archive buff about his unrelenting passion for research in the records, his interdisciplinary approach, his artistic skill and his fascinating investigations of the sound of the past. Everything you learn here comes from a good source!

Interviewer
Chantal Pattyn

It would be hard to find a second work as complex as the almost mythical Chantilly Codex, the manuscript preserved in the same library that holds its equally famous visual contemporary, Les très riches heures du duc de Berry. The fascination of graindelavoix with this manuscript with its new music notation and endlessly subtle opportunities to quantify sonorous qualities, is considerable. The ensemble discovers in the ars subtilior music a hidden tradition that takes its cure from the mathematical ideas of the 14th-century polymath Nicole Oresme. Voice, dehumanized and instrumentalized, as source of pure sonorities and melodic sine curves. Björn Schmelzer can only endorse what the French art historian Henri Focillon said about late 14th-century art: ‘fashion and art transmogrify man into beast’. Yet another challenge for graindelavoix to combine the artificial and the natural, tradition and avant-garde!

Performers
Olalla Alemàn, Eurudike De Beul, Marius Peterson, Yves Van Handenhove, Lieven Gouwy, Thomas Vanlede, Tomàs Maxé & Antoni Fajardo, voice | Björn Schmelzer, voice & artistic direction

The ladies of Psallentes have already enchanted the AMUZ audience several times. As recently as last season with a performance of songs from the office of Mary in the papel chapel. However, it all began for the group with the ethereal songs of Hildegard von Bingen, preserved in the Dendermonde manuscript. The ensemble used this for its acclaimed debut at the Day of Early Music in Alden Biesen in 2007. Within the context of MANU SCRIPTUM Psallentes offers a rerun of this feat, this time with an expanded strength of 11 voices. In comparison with the performance of Ensemble Organum on Sunday August 22 it is mainly the higher voice compass that will be prominent here. Thus Laus Polyphoniae offers a rich choice of vantage points and interpretations. Up to you to take your pick and enjoy!

Performers
Sarah Abrams, Soetkin Baptist, Katelijne Boon, Helen Cassano, Lieselot De Wilde, Marina Smolders, Barbara Somers, Veerle Van Roosbroeck, Rein Van Bree, Kerlijne Van Nevel & An Van Laethem, voice | Hendrik Vanden Abeele, artistic direction

The Orlando Consort was founded in 1988 by the British Early Music Centre and rapidly graduated to the status of eminent chamber music ensemble. Their recent projects with contemporary music and jazz were widely acclaimed, but today these talented singers return to an old passion: the mysterious and fascinating music repertoire of the Middle Ages! The Orlando Consort even takes up the challenge to deal with the oldest manuscript from the festival MANU SCRIPTUM: the Winchester Troparium. For a long time the music notated in the Winchester Troparium was regarded as impossible to decipher because the neumes notation only suggests rudimentary indications of pitch and tone duration. However, musicological studies in the 1960s and 1990s enabled musicians to perform this earliest polyphonous repertoire of Europe. Or how a sharp view of a distant past can widen our musical horizon today.

Performers
Matthew Venner, countertenor | Mark Dobell, tenor | Angus Smith, tenor | Donald Greig, baritone