Idrîsî: Trinity and Quadrivium

St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh - 13/10/26

Idrîsî Ensemble

The historic stone vaulting of St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh provided an imposing acoustic landscape for the Idrîsî Ensemble, who are pioneering a fresh, engaging approach to medieval historical performance and endangered traditions. Their exquisite tour programme, 'Trinity and Quadrivium', offered a passionate yet precise emotional, intellectual and musical journey through medieval cosmology and belief in a contemporary setting.

Using Hildegard of Bingen’s ‘three wings’ – sky, earth and spirit – the evening traced the movement between the ancient trivium (the linguistic arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium, where number manifests itself in overlapping ways as arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

Attentive to Boethius’s landmark treatise De institutione musica, the performance simultaneously navigated the three interlocking spheres of medieval sound theory: musica mundana (the silent, numerical harmony of the cosmos),musica humana the internal coherence of human body and soul), and musica instrumentalis (the physical, sounding craft of human voices and instruments). It also acknowledged the musical bridge between past and present experiences of colonialism.

If that sounds formal and didactic, the actual performance and presentation was warm and lively, with each piece being introduced by a different member of the ensemble. Bathed by the spotlight in a darkened cathedral, the six members of the Idrîsî performed in different configurations, with and without the grounding of a single vielle – a wooden instrument with a deeper, longer body than a modern violin or viola.

Still the only UK ensemble specialising in the performance practice of Old Roman chant, Idrîsî works with musical and liturgical traditions spanning late antiquity and the Middle Ages from across Europe. The concert’s architecture therefore initiated a dialogue between oral vernacular polyphony and the rigorous notation of the late Middle Ages.

A traditional Corsican Kyrie Eleison set a grounded, microtonal foundation before the ensemble transitioned into Baude Cordier’s late fourteenth-century ars subtilior canon Tout par compas. Cordier’s piece, famously written in a circular stave, treats the score as both geometric object and musical performance. The singers delivered its intricate, staggered canons with a cool, mathematical clarity – but also deep feeling.

The Kyrie was set alongside another traditional Corsican work, Paghiella Orezzinca, and Guillaume Du Fay’s celebrated 1436 motet Nuper rosarum flores. Du Fay’s work, famously structured around the proportional ratios of Florence Cathedral, filled the nave with stark, vaulted harmonies that made the physical geometry of sound immediately present.

As the 90 minute concert progressed, the ensemble moved further into repertoire that tested the boundaries of vocal tuning and rhythm, throwing in two bridging pieces not in the programme. One was a polyphony and call-and-response in the Greek style. The middle section of the recital foregrounded the subtle secular stylings of the late fourteenth century, including Jacob de Senleches’s La harpe de mélodie, where the human voice imitates the plucked articulation and elaborate syncopations of stringed instruments.

This was paired with the anonymous 13th-century motet S'on me regarde from the Montpellier Codex and Borlet’s Hè, tres douls roussignol, where birdsong motifs were absorbed into refined courtly music. The ensemble’s approach to these notoriously complex scores was harmonically delicious. But rather than smoothing over rhythmic friction, they allowed the cross-rhythms and off-beat accents to breath themselves across the space.

Finally, under the thematic heading Ala Undique Volans (“The Wing that Moves Everywhere”, a reference to the Holy Spirit), the ensemble explored the edges of fourteenth-century chromatic experimentation. The 12th-century two-part organum Congaudeant Catholici from the Codex Calixtinus provided a sturdy, rhythmic anchor before Johannes Ciconia’s Le ray au soleyl and Solage’s enigmatic Fumeux fume par fumée pushed the harmonic palette into dense, disorienting territory.

Solage’s work, written for a circle of eccentric Parisian intellectuals who seem to have indulged in both literature and smoking, uses low vocal registers and radical chromatic shifts to simulate the visual and poetic indulgence of… well, smoke! The singers navigated descending, unexpected intervals with control, creating an appropriately dark, suspended atmosphere within the cathedral. Here is the surprising meeting point between Early music and a contemporary classical or vernacular palette.

All in all, the Idrîsî Ensemble’s first appearance in Scotland – with Edinburgh being followed by Glasgow as part of an eight-date UK tour– proved a memorable occasion, rounded off with Guillaume de Machaut’s Ite, missa est, which announces the end of the Mass. Superb performance standards, excellent sound reinforcement (certainly at the front), vivid historical context, a glowing atmosphere, and a sizeable, diverse attendance showed how music that is both ancient and adventurous, curious and familiar, can thrive and find new audiences.

More about the Idrîsî Ensemble, whose new CD is due next year, here: https://www.idrisiensemble.com/

More about presenters Through the Noise (“live, global, classical music”): https://www.throughthenoise.co.uk