Fount & Origin is an early music ensemble, specialising in the vocal music of the Late Middle Ages. The ensemble was founded in Oxford by James Tomlinson, the choir’s director, in 2018. It began life as a student group – an opportunity for like-minded musicians to explore unknown and neglected works from the period, but, thanks to its steady successes, it now operates as a professional ensemble.

The group has a large and diverse repertory; it has explored the compositions of Dufay, Machaut, Ockeghem and Dunstaple, performed music from the Eton Choirbook, the Chantilly Codex, and the Trent Codices, and offered programmes ranging from medieval déplorations to monastic Christmas music.

Not long after its inception, Fount & Origin was honoured to be awarded the 2019–22 Stile Antico Ensemble Development Bursary. Over that time, Fount & Origin worked closely with the members of Stile Antico to develop exciting projects and performances, beginning with a multi-day observance of the Benedictine Divine Office and a reconstruction of a Sarum Mass in Norwich Cathedral (2019), and ending with the present disc.

The inspiration for the name, Fount & Origin, came initially from the writings of composer and theorist Johannes Tinctoris (c.1435 1511). Tinctoris marvelled at the musical developments that had taken place in France since the 1430s and identifies as their ‘fount and origin’ (fons et origo) the early fifteenth-century English school of polyphony, citing John Dunstaple in particular. It is a name that neatly evokes the ensemble’s chosen period, but also reminds us that the cultural wellspring of the late Middle Ages has provided a vast yet largely unperformed repertory of music, and that listening to traces of our shared history can today bring us together in often-unexpected ways.