Jubilus – Early Voices
Jubilus is a new creative project led by David Allinson.
Employing professional singers and embracing a collaborative spirit, Jubilus will shed new light on music of the past.
Watch this space!
The choir’s name is chosen for its connotations of rejoicing, vocality and Catholic heritage.
As the great musicologist Richard Taruskin put it:
Melismatic singing was held by Christian mystics to be the highest form of religious utterance: “It is a certain sound of joy without words,” St. Augustine wrote of melismatic chanting in the fourth century, “the expression of a mind poured forth in joy.”It came to be called jubilated singing, after jubilus, Latin for a “call” upon God (as in Charlemagne’s Admonitio, quoted earlier; compare the root ju-, pronounced “yoo,” as in “yoo-hoo!”).This musical jubilation, in fact, was the means through which the Latin word took on its secondary (in English borrowings, primary) association with joy.