Conductus III

Professor Mark Everist has been leading the ‘Cantum pulcriorem invenire’ (CPI) project at the University of Southampton since 2010; it has brought to life the repertory of twelfth- and thirteenth-century poetry and music – known as the conductus – through research, performance and recording. In addition to Everist’s monograph for Cambridge University Press entitled Discovering Song: Thirteenth-Century Latin Poetry and Music, and an open-access online database of the entire repertory, members of the project team have been performing and recording the repertory in the UK and Europe.

In addition to performing the repertory of the conductus, the CPI artists, John Potter, Rogers Covey-Crump and Christopher O’Gorman, under the direction of Mark Everist, have recorded three CDs for Hyperion Records. The third and final recording – Conductus III – has just been released. Like the previous two recordings, it contains a range of conducti for one, two and three voices, for the most part not performed for around 750 years. The project has created a total of 45 recordings of the conductus.

Hyperion have preleased a rather nice mash-up of the CD on YouTube. It’s at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rhn4SjPHmc.

John Potter has already written a blog about the new CD, the process of recording and the music we perform:

http://www.john-potter.co.uk/blog/2016/01/29/conductus-3-released/.

Mark Everist