One of musicology’s most exciting achievements in recent years is the transcription of the earliest polyphony. The oldest manuscripts were in fact destroyed during the Second World War and survive only in photographs; and what they contain are the merest scratches in tiny writing to indicate the pitches – certainly not the stave-notation of later years, and not even heightened neumes. To interpret them involves the minutest examination of the available sources taken along with the theoretical statements and a careful application of musical common sense. Now at last we begin to have plausible reconstructions of this music, near the very roots of the polyphonic tradition that essentially separates western music from that of the rest of the world. In this search Wulf Arlt has been a leader; and it is his transcriptions that are used on this recording.
The results are wonderful: Dominique Vellard and Emmanuel Bonnardot have been performing some of the earliest polyphony for many years now; together with Gerd Turk, they sing it as though they had known it all their lives. It is not easy: much of the music is in parallel fourths, a very hard interval to sing accurately, particularly when the lines must resolve on a unison. And it may be that the rich acoustic of the Abbey at Murbach helps them cover up some of the difficulties; but the sound is glorious, a powerful witness to the vitality of this first polyphonic music.
Alongside this, the women of the Gilles Binchois Ensemble sing a fine selection of early troped Mass music to show the ‘other’ new music of the time. Again, this is beautifully done; the contrast between the men and the women matches the contrast between these two kinds of music. Listen to it if you can: the disc deserves to become a classic.'