The Hilliard Ensemble - Perotin

The Hilliard Ensemble is a British male vocal quartet devoted to the authentic performance of early music. Founded in 1973/74, the group is named after the Elizabethan miniaturist painter Nicholas Hilliard.

Although most of its work focuses on music of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, the Hilliard Ensemble also performs contemporary music, working frequently with the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and including in its concerts works by John Cage, Gavin Bryars, Giya Kancheli, and Heinz Holliger.

The group was originally founded by Paul Hillier, Paul Elliott, and David James, although the membership was flexible until Hillier left in the late 1980s. Since 1990 the core members have been David James, Rogers Covey-Crump, John Potter, and Gordon Jones.

The Hilliard Ensemble has recorded extensively for the ECM label. In 1993, when popular interest in Gregorian chant was at its height, the ensemble released the CD Officium, an unprecedented collaboration with the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek. The disc became one of ECM's biggest-selling releases of all time, reaching the pop charts in several European countries. (Officium's sequel, the 2-CD set Mnemosyne, followed in 1999.)

PEROTIN
Pérotin (fl. c. 1200) was a European composer, believed to be French, who lived around the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century. He was the most famous member of the Notre Dame school of polyphony. He was one of very few composers of his day whose name has been preserved, and can be reliably attached to individual compositions; this is due to the testimony of an anonymous English student at Notre Dame known as Anonymous IV, who wrote about him. Anonymous IV called him "Pérotin Magister", which means Pérotin the master or expert. The name Pérotin is itself derived from "Perotinus," the Latin diminutive of Petrus, the Latin version of the French name Pierre (just as Léonin comes from "Leoninus," the Latin diminutive of Léo).

Works attributed to Pérotin include the four-voice Viderunt omnes and Sederunt principes; the three-voice Alleluia, Posui adiutorium, Alleluia, Nativitas, and nine others attributed to him by contemporary scholars on stylistic grounds, all in the organum style; the two-voice Dum sigillum summi Patris, and the monophonic Beata viscera in the conductus style. (The conductus sets a rhymed Latin poem called a sequence to a repeated melody, much like a contemporary hymn.) Pérotin's works are preserved in the Magnus Liber, the "Great Book" of early polyphonic church music, which was in the collection of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. The Magnus Liber also contains the works of his slightly earlier contemporary Léonin.





PEROTIN - TRACKLIST:
01. Viderunt Omnes
02. Veni Creator Spiritus
03. Alleluia Posui Adiutorium
04. O Maria Virginei
05. Dum Sigillum
06. Isaias Cecinit
07. Alleluia Nativitas
08. Beata Viscera
09. Sederunt Principes



Other Works by the Hilliard Ensemble:
The Hilliard Ensemble - Sacred & Secular Music
The Hilliard Ensemble - Leonel Power: Masses And Motets