Voices from before the metronome
Exsultemus is a small early-music ensemble — and a journal alongside it — devoted to Renaissance and early Baroque choral music, sung the way its composers might have recognised.
Music written before the metronome moves differently. It breathes with the words rather than counting against a fixed pulse, and it was made for rooms with stone walls and no amplification. Singing it as though it were nineteenth-century choral music flattens almost everything that makes it worth hearing.
Repertoire
Motets, madrigals and the music of the long sixteenth century.
Performances
Small rooms, natural acoustics, no amplification.
Voices
Singers on blend, tuning and breathing as one.
History
Where this music came from, and what it meant.