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PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Our project title is ‘Echoes of Medieval Coventry’, inspired by a research project undertaken by members of His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (RBC), exploring the role of the waits in Coventry as a typical English provincial city from the mid-15th to the mid-17th Centuries. This research has shown that instrumentalists collaborated with vocalists in sacred music on regular ceremonial occasions much earlier and more frequently than has been recognised by musicologists until now.

As a result, we have developed a new concert programme in collaboration with the Binchois Consort (10 voices, 5 winds), recreating in the first half music for the royal entry of King Henry VI into Coventry in 1451, including fanfares, a processional Te Deum with shawms and trumpet, and the anonymous English Missa Caput, a fragment of which survives in a Coventry source. The second half of our programme looks forward by some seventy years, to the high point of Tudor polyphony prior to the Reformation, and includes at its centre a little-known motet of exceptional quality: Gaude Virgo, by Hugh Aston who was active in Coventry in the 1520s. The vocal music is framed by a choice selection of Henrician instrumental music for cornett, shawms and sackbut.

This central showcase concert will be held at the Elgar Concert Hall (capacity 420) in Birmingham, 28 Nov 2025, part of the Barber Concert Series (a well-established series of free concerts), and will be filmed by University technical staff at no cost, enabling us to create a series of edited highlights to promote the concert programme further afield (aiming for, e.g., Utrecht and Regensburg Early Music Festivals in 2027).

In addition, we propose two further events which aim to connect the community in Coventry with their rich musical heritage (and help build our future audience base). These will comprise a day of schools workshops (aiming for 2 primary and 2 secondary schools, reaching approx. 500 children) to be organised via Coventry Music Service in collaboration with RBC’s Learning and Participation (outreach) department; and a family concert featuring 5 wind players entitled ‘Meet Coventry’s Waits’ at St Mary’s Guildhall, one of England’s best preserved medieval halls (complete with minstrels’ gallery), to be promoted in collaboration with the hall’s dedicated education team. The hall capacity is c.100 and the concert (1 hour) can be repeated, allowing us to reach a total audience of c.200. All events will be free of charge to be as inclusive as possible.

The main concert will be part-funded by the Barber Trust to a maximum of £4000; the research project at RBC (funded by the AHRC), has contributed £3200 to rehearsal costs. This leaves a shortfall of £5250, which is our request to the Continuo Foundation. This will enable us to bring this unique repertoire to a combined audience of over 1000 people across the 3 events, and to generate invaluable AV documentation for future promotion.