Canterbury Pilgrims
The delicious and memorable opening lines of The Canterbury Tales seem from our historical standpoint to be the springtime of English poetry. They combine the vitality of the early European renaissance with the vigour of the new English vernacular. Chaucer (c1340-1400) was brought up as a boy at court and as a young man saw military service in France. He was a diplomat both in Italy and France and later a type of senior civil servant. He read widely in European literature, and his most popular work, The Canterbury Tales, displays his experience and learning. It comprises a number of stories told to pass the time during a pilgrimage on horseback from London to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The Prologue to the Tales describes the thirty pilgrims. William Blake claimed that it depicted universal human character; indeed it is both a living portrait of late 14th century England, yet also a colourful, ageless, and concise catalogue of human types delineated with a rich vein of bubbling humour.

Opus Anglicanum’s sequence interweaves the Prologue with music contemporary with Chaucer. Music plays a background part in Chaucer’s works. We hear of popular songs, singing, the social playing of various instruments, and of the sort of church music that a layman might know. No contemporary music survives for any text by Chaucer; nor any great body of courtly or secular English music . For fourteenth-century lyrics in contemporary settings we have to turn to the continent, notably the work of the poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-1377). Chaucer learned from Machaut’s work and from his experiments with verse-form; four of Machaut’s pieces are sung in this programme in which we use music to set the scene, to complement and illustrate the various characters.

PROGRAMME
1 Sumer is icumen in English 14thc.
2 Reading: The Prologue, first part
3 In Rama sonat gemitus Anon. 12thc.
4 Solemne canticum Sequence for St Thomas
5 Thomas gemma Cantuariensis/ Thomas caesus English 14thc.
6 Reading: The Prologue, second part
7 L’homme arme French 14thc.
8 Reading: The Knight, the Squire
9 Amor mi fa cantar Italian 14thc.
10 Dame, de qui toute Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377)
11 Alma redemptoris mater Hermannus Contractus (1013-54)
12 Reading: The Prioress
13 Ave regina caelorum Lionel Power (c1370-1445)
14 Reading: The Monk
15 Tosto che l’alba Ghirardello da Fierenze (fl .1375)
16 Douce dame jolie Guillaume de Machaut
17 Reading: The Merchant
18 Tant doucement Guillaume de Machaut
19 Reading: The Clerk, the Franklin
20 Vos qui admirimini Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361)
21 Reading: The Sailor, the Wife of Bath
22 Io son un pellegrin Giovanni da Florentia (fl.1350)
23 Comment qu’a moy Guillaume de Machaut
24 Reading: The Priest, the Ploughman
25 Beata progenies Lionel Power
26 Angelus ad virginem English 14th c.
27 Reading: The Miller
28 Questa fanciull’ amor Francesco Landini (1325-1397)
29 Reading: The Pardoner
30 Sub Arturo plebs J. Alanus (English c1370)
31 Reading: The Host
32 Sanctus and Benedictus English c1375
33 Reading: The Journey begins
34 Sumer is icumen in English 14th c.

programme devised and produced by John Rowlands-Pritchard

Recorded in Dorchester Abbey, Oxon. 18th - 20th November 1994
Producer: David Goode
Recording engineer, digital editing & mastering: David Wright