Music & Poetry in Saint Gall : Vellard / Ensemble Gilles Binchois

MUSIC AND POETRY IN SAINT GALL - Sequences and tropes (9th century)
Works by the monks Notker, Ratpert, Tuotilo, Gallus, Nativitas, Johannes Evangelista, Innocentes, Epiphania, Versus ad processionem diebus dominicis, Pascha, Dominica IV, post octavam pascham, Ascensio, Pentecostes

Ensemble Gilles Binchois with Wulf Arlt
Raphael Boulay (tenor)
Gerd Turk (tenor)
Dominique Vellard (tenor)
Emmanuel Bonnardot (baritone)
Jacques Bona (bass)
Stephen Grant (bass)
Dominique Vellard (direction)

Recorded Eglise de Romainmotier, Vaud, Switzerland April 1996
Originally issued on HMC905239 (HMF)

The Benedictine monastery of Saint Gall (Sankt Gallen), situated near Lake Constance, acted in the early medieval period as a creative centre for the development of music and poetry concerned with the liturgy. To be found there were the oldest named composer-poets from the West, especially monks such as Ratpert (d. 890), Notker (d. 912) and Tuotilo (d. 913). They enlarged and broadened out the scope of existing liturgical chants with additions whose melodic and poetic inventiveness still provoke admiration today. Such tropes and sequences were brought together in the 10th century in Sankt Gallen’s codices 484 and 381, with a precise notation in numes which is unique to the Abbey.