Music for the King of Scots: Inside the Pleasure Palace of James IV

Liner notes: https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA68333
Full album (Spotify):
https://open.spotify.com/album/3IedVKQEAqJTCkCEm60Tbz?si=gGzsDZa4Q5md7JvjSfGG0g

This CD and its production build on my research experience over some 30 years of putting stylistic knowledge of Renaissance polyphony into practice. Most significant has been my work (including twelve prior recordings for Hyperion Records) with my ensemble The Binchois Consort (BC), partners on the current project. Performative research is essentially collaborative: the sense of what is plausible or even possible relies on realisation in practice and the (vocal/instrumental) mechanics of its production; these then feed back into the fund of interpretative knowledge. Hence the input of singers, themselves highly experienced practitioners, is integral to this work.

This recording stands as a monument to a particular space, place and time: the Chapel Royal of Linlithgow Palace, as it once stood, at the turn of the sixteenth century. Now a ruined shell, the building once resounded to music sung by the skilled musicians of the itinerant chapel royal, surrounded by magnificent decorations and sculptures. Almost none of this—the music or the building, save its walls—survives. Hence the larger project involved putative VR reconstruction of the building as it appeared 500 years ago. The sounding project, to which I and the BC were integral, involved VR reconstruction of the chapel’s acoustic, and the recording of repertory which may plausibly have been sung there. We began by recording in an anechoic chamber—an acoustically ‘dead’ space—and subsequently superimposed the new acoustic on it. This was a considerable musical challenge since it relied on my performing experience to be able to elicit performances from the singers in a sounding environment fundamentally different from that following electronic processing, but moulding the performances—in terms of attack, approach to vowels and consonants, and so on— with that eventual sound in mind.