October: We have just announced the three early summer courses in 2026 and hope you will be tempted to join us. The first two are our annual pilgrimage to that idyllic former monastery on the Adriatic, Monteconero. One title encapsulates both repertoires: ‘After Josquin . . . before Monteverdi’. We begin with a week for invited singers (the 31^st of May to the 6^th of June) led by Rory Wainwright Johnston, which will include the Gombert Mass Quam pulchra es, settings of Inviolata by Willaert and Certon (clear tributes to Josquin, who wrote a setting that became widely famed) and Phinot’s 8-part Lamentations. This will be followed by a week (the 7^th to the 13^th of June) led by Eamonn Dougan with repertoire from the generation of Venetian composers before Monteverdi: Claudio Merulo, Andrea Gabrieli, Cipriano de Rore and Giaches de Wert.

After that we return to England for another visit (the 5^th to the 10^th of July) to one of its most attractive small towns, Ludlow on the Welsh borders. Bill Carslake will delve into the seemingly inexhaustible store of first-rate music from Spain’s siglo de oro. There will be a healthy dose of Victoria – the Missa Gaudeamus, Lamentations and a setting of the hymn Ave maris stella – and music by Morales, Esquivel, Lobo and Esquivel.

The courses already announced are on the whole full, with just a few lower voices place still available in Patrick Craig’s week in Swanage in April and in The Music of Florence with Rory Wainwright Johnston, which starts in a couple of weeks.

It’s pleasing to be able to report a run of very satisfying summer courses, fully subscribed in all voices. We were rather worried that the new management at Monteconero would make sweeping changes and destroy the family atmosphere that the Melappionis had created over the generations. Quite unnecessarily – the small innovations were for the better, but we missed Sabrina, who had welcomed us and shown us to our rooms (and, we suspect, kept the whole show on the road) for the twenty years since we started going there. In Skipton we had a rich diet of Tudor polyphony, benefitting from the taste and fancy of John Baldwin, who had preselected the pieces for his late 16^th century partbooks.

Woodbridge, where we were for Eamonn Dougan’s course at the beginning of September, proved an excellent venue and one to which we will certainly return. For me it was a chance to return to some of the places of my Suffolk childhood: my home village of Easton, our nearest seaside place, Aldeburgh, and Snape. The maltings have now become a destination in themselves; in addition to the concert hall there are shops, cafés, craft workshops and the like. I remember being shown round by the head maltster when I was about twelve. I can still see the vast trays of germinating barley and feel the heat and humidity.

Most recently, with snatches of Spem in alium still ringing in our ears [and happily recorded on video], we have been in Gourdon and celebrating Lacock’s first forty years with Patrick Craig. We decided not to pair it with one of the many fine pieces for the same combination of forty voices which have appeared for fathomable reasons in the last few decades: they invariably make heavy demands on rehearsal time. Instead we chose a few ten-part double choir pieces including a Magnificat by Lassus. As an insurance policy we had a supernumerary Lacock scholar in each voice. The first one was called into action on day one when a bass with severe back pain was unable to travel. In the middle of the week another bass had to pull out with a bad throat infection and we thought we would go down in the no doubt crowded annals of 39-part Spem performances. We then remembered that Simon Carrington, founder director of the Kings Singers and more recently professor of choral conducting at Yale had a house not so far away. I can’t say that I knew him well, but our paths had crossed a few times and after a little ferreting around we discovered that he was indeed in France and managed to contact him. Alas, he had visitors arriving on the evening of the concert, but I could tell he was sorely tempted and it didn’t take much arm-twisting to get him to say yes. He duly turned up at the final rehearsal, appearing to the rest of the group as a deus ex machina.

It reminded me of the time I had been invited to play the orchestral serpent part in Mendelssohn’s Paulus in Kassel in Germany. It was just the city’s choral society (a rather good one, it has to be said), so when I arrived for the Generalprobe I was astonished to discover that the bass soloist was none other than Olav Bär, then at the height of his fame. He happened to have been at the Hochschule für Musik in Dresden with the conductor. The tenor soloist had been taken ill that morning, so in the afternoon rehearsal, while the organisers scurried around to find a replacement, Olav Bär sang all the tenor solos as well as his own, despite the heavy sing in the concert that evening.

Finally, The Lacock Scholars have a largely Palestrina concert coming up in St Mark’s church, Regents Park on Friday the 17^th of October. It would be good to see you there if you are in striking distance. All the details, and those of further appearances in Westminster Abbey and Kenardington in Kent are on their web site lacockscholars.org.

May: Three new courses: the first is a return to Cádiz, that vibrant port at Europe’s extremity, which like all those Andalusian cities, has managed to keep its own stamp and individuality. The dates are the 8^th to the 13^th of March, so its famed mild winter climate is another attraction. The repertoire will be suitably penitential Lenten fare: Alonso Lobo’s six part Lamentations, curiously never before done on a Lacock course, and Duarte Lobo’s Requiem for eight voices. The director will be the brilliant young musician (himself a countertenor) Bruno Campelo Muñíz, a true gadetano, or son of Cádiz.

Then from the 13^th to the 18^th of April we return to Swanage, which turned out to be an excellent spring venue, with dramatic coastal scenery, a welcoming town (complete with steam railway) with some nice places to eat and very hospitable people running the church. Patrick Craig will direct a programme of music by Josquin’s slightly younger contemporaries – Févin, Mouton, L’héritier, Richafort – with the central work Pierre de La Rue’s Missa Ave Sanctissima Maria, apparently the first written for six voices. It is really exciting to explore this seminal school, long fêted by scholars but only recently accessible to singers through readily available performing editions.

Inspired by the many good Scots singers now turning up on courses, we return to Scotland from the 3^rd to the 8^th of May, to an fine new venue, The Church of the Holy Rude on the crag next to Stirling Castle, a beautiful building on the scale of a small cathedral, favoured by monarchs and hallowed by coronations. Rory McCleery will direct a programme of music by a brilliant recent rediscovery, the Portuguese composer Vincente Lusitano, for whom we can make the reasonable claim to be the first published composer of African descent. Rory has been in the forefront of the restoration of Lusitano, highly regarded in his day, with his Marian Consort CD dedicated to his work. We sang his setting of Intemerata Dei Mater (Josquin’s had inspired many others) in Lyme Regis last year and were astonished at the effectiveness of his music.

Both these last two courses are what we have come to call ‘Music Parties’; that is, for invited participants. But you can always let us know if you would be interested in a place via the form on the web site. In fact now that most Lacock courses are oversubscribed there is not a great difference between open and invited weeks. Our aim is always to convene a matched group of singers with a good balance of voices, an interesting mixture of nationalities and ages, and newcomers and regulars. It’s therefore not a question of first-come-first-served: we wait for a few weeks after the announcement of new courses through this newsletter and the web site before offering places. Most of this year’s courses are now fully subscribed but it’s always worth asking – there are inevitably drop-outs for one reason or another. If you’re an outstanding baritone we may have a place in the one-to-a-part Spem in alium week in September and there are still some lower-voice places on the course in Florence in October. You may like to know that next year’s Monteconero dates will be the 7^th to the 13^th of June and the 14^th to the 20^th of June.

We have had a most successful start to this year, helped by sunny weather at all three venues so far. Our Granada week with Gabriel Días was a Moralesfest and confirmed his claim to be Spain’s first truly great composer. In Swanage we were back in the world of Josquin des Prez and were reminded of what a wealth of repertoire there remains to be explored. Then at the beginning of this month we were in Tenby, burying Philip II with Lobo and Cardoso. On all three courses we had some excellent new singers, and as we don’t openly advertise, thank you to all those who have been quietly putting the word around.

The programme we have just sung in Tenby, the Cardoso Requiem interspersed with Portuguese funerary motets, was a variation of a concert I first promoted when working with the great pioneer of renaissance polyphony Bruno Turner. It set me thinking what a great debt we all owe to Bruno, who did so much to restore composers like Lobo, Guerrero, Vivanco and all the Portuguese to our sound world. By sheer dogged persistence he managed to wheedle the music of so many long-forgotten composers out of the grasp of the unforthcoming Iberian ecclesiastical authorities and publish and record them. Luckily he was a successful businessman and was able to channel the necessary financial resources into the project. He was also fortunate in his timing, starting out in the mid-70s around the time of Franco’s death, when the Spanish church began to realise that its power was on the wane. I was lucky enough to work with his publishing house Mapa Mundi in the early 80s. Daily conversations about renaissance polyphony – in effect a private tutorial – were the best ‘early music conversion course’ imaginable. I recently came across an excellent reflexion on his life, which I have just put on our web site (https://www.lacock.org/people/bruno-turner). It is full of interesting and eccentric characters, like Thurston Dart, whose correspondence was written in black and red ink in alternate paragraphs, the ‘bogus monk’ Dom Anselm Hughes, a brief conversation with Stravinsky, and the BBC producer only too happy to take Bruno’s detailed planning and present it as his own. Bruno, happily still with us in is nineties, is looking more and more like his cousin William [Turner] Walton these days, though I was shocked to discover that his interviewer Ivan Moody, my successor at Mapa Mundi, perished last year at the age of 59.

It is sad to report the death last week of Roger Gibson, a Lacock bass of very long standing. He was the spit and image of the cartoonist’s John Bull; only the low top hat and Union Jack waistcoat were missing. He did indeed have the Bullish pastime of fattening beef cattle on his land in Cheshire. In the early days at La Maison Verte he played an important role in setting my younger son Bertie off on his entrepreneurial path. Bertie, then aged about eleven, had noticed that the only place to get a drink was a bar some way off in the town. He blagged a fridge from goodness knows where and set up a bar serving wine from the local monastery. Roger suggested that gin and tonics would go well but Bertie thought that a whole bottle of gin was too heavy and risky an investment. They went into partnership – Roger bought the first bottle of gin in exchange for free drinks thereafter. The G&Ts sold like hot cakes and opened Bertie’s eyes to the folly of ignoring new opportunities. Roger also passed on to me the useful tip that if the moon looks like a D – decrescendo – it is waning; like a C – crescendo – it is waxing. However that was in his South African childhood, so in the northern hemisphere the reverse is the case. We will miss his genial presence.

January: We have just announced three new courses in September and October. The first, from the 31^st of August to the 5^th of September will be in the small town of Woodbridge in Suffolk. The director will be Eamonn Dougan and the early Tudor repertoire will include a piece that came to obsess him when he was a choral scholar at Oxford, Parsons’s O bone Jesu. There will be contributions from other composers born in the opening years of the 16^th century, including Tye, Sheppard and Clemens. It will be one of our increasing number of invited courses. They give us greater scope to convene a group of matched voices, which makes for a more satisfactory experience for everyone. There is certainly no notion of stealth or exclusion and anyone can apply to be considered. They are popular, though, and we cannot always fit in all who want to come.

Then comes our Spem in alium week with Patrick Craig in Gourdon in SW France, from the 21^st to the 26^th of September. This will be one voice to a part and also by invitation. This ambitious project will be a celebration of our fortieth year of courses. Most parts have already been allocated, with just a couple of unfilled seats in the bass section. What a distant world 1986 now seems, before laptops, mobile phones and even, I was going to say, fax machines. Our large and capable fact-checking department, however, tells me that the fax machine, improbable as it sounds, was invented by the Scotsman Alexander Bain in 1843.

In October (the 19^th to the 24^th) we will return to Florence for the first time since 2008. Rory Wainwright Johnson will direct a programme of sacred music by composers associated with the city, prominent among whom are Verdelot and Corteccia. It will include Du Fay’s complex motet Nuper rosarum flores, written for the consecration of Brunelleschi’s dome for Florence Cathedral. The work has come to be treated as an icon in the history of Western music.

Of the courses previously announced, Granada, Swanage and JanJoost van Elburg’s week at Monteconero are full. There are just the odd tenor place going in Tenby (Patrick Craig, the 27^th of April to the 2^nd of May) and Music at Monteconero (Rory McCleery, the 8^th to the 14^th of June) and we could find room for one more in each voice in Skipton (Bill Carslake, the 6^th to the 11^th of July). We are very cheered that many people are now asking to be on our mailing list and that the courses generally fill very quickly.

Many will be sad to hear that Jill Mitchell died on the 30^th of December. She loved our courses and tried to pack as many in as she could. We loved her for her erudition: elucidation – and sometimes correction – of Latin texts, her witty end-of-course verses satirising our inadequacies as singers and the director’s quirks and mannerisms, and of course for the large theatrical character that she was. She was a great hit with anglophiles who saw her as the archetype of the dauntless Englishwoman. These included our Flemish conductor Erik Van Nevel and Emanuele Canevaro Duke of Zoagli, whose castle in its fairytale setting on the cliffs of Liguria looking over to Portofino regularly hosted courses some years back. Her indomitable spirit stayed with her to the end.

We already have a list of repertoire we would like to include in next year’s programme. It includes Vincente Lusitano, a Portuguese and probably half-African composer of some wonderful and innovative music, more William Mundy, writing from the 1550s on, but an enthusiast for and master of the pre-Reformation ecstatic style of the Eton Choirbook, and more of the still little-known composers such as Vaet and Utendahl, grouped around Philippe de Monte at the Imperial Habsburg court in Vienna, whose merit was shown up at our course in Dartmouth last autumn. Lucy has just returned from a visit to the fine city of Stirling on the River Forth, which we hope to add as a venue in July. We are hoping for a return to the excellent city of Cádiz in March.

I’ve just had an email from the Inland Revenue, reminding me to pay my dues before the end of January. It began ‘Dear customer’: clearly wrong – I am not buying anything from them; ‘Dear fellow citizen’ would have been nearer the mark. It reminded me of a late night discussion – after wine had been taken – about the practicalities of reintroducing the death penalty. Recruitment of a hangman (hangperson?) would be easy – advertise in the Daily Telegraph – but what would be a PC term for the condemned? ‘Client’ didn’t seem quite right; ‘hangee’ too American. Someone versed in the brave new vocabulary of authority settled it with ‘service user’.