The rediscovery and digitisation of the Brno polyphonic manuscripts BAM 1 and BAM 2 has opened a new chapter in the study and performance of Renaissance music. At the crossroads of historical research, modern technology, and artistic interpretation stands Past Forward, a cross-border project connecting institutions from the Netherlands, Belgium and the Czech Republic. At its artistic core are two musicians whose approaches complement each other: Tim Braithwaite, artistic director of Cappella Pratensis, and Kateřina Maňáková, lutenist, teacher of early plucked instruments at Janáček Academy of Performing Arts and guarantor of the entire initiative. In this conversation, they discuss working with previously overlooked sources, the challenges of historically informed performance, the promises of international collaboration, and their vision for the future of early-music interpretation.
Working with Manuscripts and Artistic Vision
Q: Kateřina, how did you first encounter the BAM 1 and BAM 2 manuscripts? Were you the one who discovered it?
Kateřina: Not at all. These manuscripts were discovered some time ago by Vladimír Maňas, an outstanding Brno musicologist and also a dear friend of mine. Martin Horyna also worked on them for a time. I came to them more or less by coincidence during my year-long research stay at the Alamire Foundation, where I was studying intabulations of this repertoire for the vihuela de mano and looking for connections with Central Europe. When I stumbled across them and realised what an extraordinary repertoire they contain - what a crucial source it is, not only for Moravia but also for the wider Franco-Flemish sphere - I simply couldn’t believe how little was known about them. And that’s how it all began. Not only this project, but also—at least for me—the start of a truly essential collaboration with Vladimír, which I hope will lead to many more wonderful things. I sincerely hope he will one day receive the recognition he deserves for this, not only from me!
Q: Both of you work directly with historical sources. What does it mean to handle manuscripts that remained unnoticed performers for so long? What is the procedure?Tim: It’s always a privilege to work directly with original sources, and one which we’re fortunate enough to do quite often. The practicalities of handling historical manuscripts revolve primarily around the care required to work with such delicate artifacts, but also a degree of sensitivity and consideration for the archives and researchers who often have a greater sense of ownership of these sources than we.
Kateřina: I see great added value in being able to work with the manuscripts directly. They breathe history - and knowledge. I feel an enormous sense of respect and humility toward these books. I’m genuinely grateful that, thanks to my studies, and thanks to the many people who brought me to this point, I can contribute my small part and help bring these manuscripts to life again. As for the process of gaining access to materials like these, it varies greatly. Some institutions are incredibly accommodating; with others, the process is long and administratively complicated. In any case, I can safely say that once we do gain access, we always handle them with the utmost care - literally with kid gloves. (laughs)
Q: Does the “local origin” of the music influence your interpretation somehow?
Tim: Yes, in fact, we often work with local traditions of music-making when embarking upon such a project, either engaging with local liturgies and rituals or simply by structuring our programmes in a way that reflects the complex identities of the sources themselves. From a performance-practice perspective, dealing with any source raises questions about several basic issues, ranging from issues of pronunciation to even ornamentation.
Kateřina: That’s right, although this mass and the manuscript itself are local, Jean Mouton is not a local composer. This just shows the popularity of this repertoire. Of course, the idea that we are presenting in Brno something that was loved here centuries ago makes the music even more engaging. From the point of view of the intabulation technique I use for this repertoire, however, it doesn’t change anything in practical terms.
Digitisation and Research
Q: What significance does the digitisation of the Brno manuscripts hold for performers and the wider musicological community? And what is the actual process?
Tim: These manuscripts have been digitised as part of the Alamire Foundation’s ongoing project attempting to bring greater publicity to the huge richness of Central European sources for Franco-Flemish polyphony, a treasure-trove which has remained comparatively under-explored since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Through the act of digitisation, these sources have been rendered intimately accessible to performers and researchers alike, enriching both our understanding of Czech and Franco-Flemish traditions of music-making. The process itself is quite involved, involving essentially the capturing of extremely high-resolution images of each page of the manuscripts. Considering the skill required in handling these delicate objects and the requirements of such a process itself, such a task is a highly specialised job.
Kateřina: I believe that the extraordinary quality of the digitisation will enable a great deal of further research, while also protecting the manuscripts, which are not in ideal condition and could be seriously damaged by continued physical handling. Perhaps it will even attract future students and enthusiasts who might be inspired to work directly from the original source. And now that the manuscript is being presented to a wider audience thanks to Barbara Maria Willi Presents… and to the masterclasses held at the Music Faculty of JAMU, anyone can view it online through the Integrated Database for Early Music (IDEM) - even if only for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of it rather than for musicological study. (laughs)
Q: Has digital technology ever directly changed your interpretative view of a particular piece?
Tim: In this digital age, I think that the vast majority of my interactions with historical music is actually through the digital medium, with access to both historical theoretical treatises and collections of music being often only the click of a button away! For an ensemble like Cappella Pratensis, who sings exclusively from reproductions of historical sources, the role of digitisation is now absolutely essential.
Kateřina: That’s a very interesting question. I think digital technology has allowed me to actually become a true lutenist and leave the classical-guitar world for good. I have gained access to digitised lute manuscripts and prints, enabling me to play directly from them rather than from modern editions, which fundamentally changed my thinking. A useful parallel would be the difference between playing early music from a modern transcription on a classical guitar and then taking up a lute with original tablature. It may be technically and interpretatively perfect on the guitar, but still not “the real thing”.
Q: How can digital tools help bring early music closer to students – and possibly listeners? – who are just starting with it?
Tim: The obvious answer is that it makes the world of early music smaller – allowing my students in Amsterdam, for example, to sing (almost) directly from these remarkable manuscripts without needed to travel to Brno for the privilege.
Kateřina: For people unfamiliar with early notation, it can certainly be difficult to orient themselves at first. But everyone has to start somewhere, and I think having direct access to digitised sources allows beginners to skip the stage of relying solely on modern notation. With a little effort, they can begin to read the originals. Many students don’t even realise that this possibility exists. And when teaching, being able to show a manuscript in detail - especially the beautifully illuminated ones - helps enormously. It took a while before musicians regularly played Baroque music from original prints; I think the Renaissance is next in line. For me as a teacher, having access to original materials is incredibly liberating.
Q: If you could design an ideal digital tool for working with polyphony, what should it be able to do?
Tim: I think this depends very much on your goals. For Cappella Pratensis, the ability to download and create high-quality facsimiles for performance is essential, as is the need to be able to find multiple sources of individual pieces quickly.
Kateřina: I believe we are already on a very good path. We have the technology to produce extremely detailed image digitisation—from watermarks to the imprint of a pressed fly. We have superb sound recording. We can even simulate the acoustics of vanished spaces using historical architectural plans. Now, in my opinion, it is time to return to the human element and see how, as performers and musicologists, we can work with all this.
Working with Ensembles
Q: How would you describe the artistic identity of both Cappella Pratensis and Ramillete de Tonos to someone who has never heard of the ensembles?
Tim: Cappella Pratensis is a Gramophone-Award-winning ensemble that has been specialising in the performance of Renaissance and Medieval music for the past forty years. The most noticeable part of our practice is that we are one of the few ensembles in the world to perform exclusively from historical notation, but in reality, this is just scratching the surface of the aims and ideals of the group. My own personal goals for the ensemble are to create a culture of music-making in which the musicians are immersed in the musical culture surrounding this music – a sort of historical ethnomusicology if you will. This involves asking difficult but fundamental questions about how we how we learn and read music, how we make music, and how we perceive music. The result is a performance practice that is embodied in the lived experiences of the musicians, and yet inspired by our interactions with the musical past.
Kateřina: Ramillete de Tonos focuses on repertoire similar to that of Cappella Pratensis - primarily Renaissance sacred polyphony - but from the perspective of intabulation. The ensemble began while I was still in The Hague and for a long time served as the “testing ground” for everything I researched. Our approach follows the Spanish tradition, where text often remains in the intabulation and the transcription is almost literal, preserving the devotional intention of the repertoire. Although we know that in this form the pieces were not part of liturgy, we explore and experiment with the role instruments played in vocal polyphony, not only in 16th-century Spain but more broadly.
Q: How does the collaboration between the two ensembles work, and how do you complement each other? Have you every performer together before?
Kateřina: This is our first collaboration between the two ensembles. So far, it has consisted mostly of exchanging an unbelievable number of emails, messages and phone calls. But we have known each other for many years. I met Tim Braithwaite during my studies at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague - first as a fellow student in Joachim Held’s lute class. We would play and sing intabulations in the corridor, including Tallis. Later he became a substitute teacher for Practica Polyphonia, and I have to say I owe him a great deal for where I am now. When he asked if I wanted to join the polyphony group he led, neither of us had any idea where it would lead or what it would set in motion. I was completely amazed at his ability to inspire students to love polyphony, and I hope I manage the same one day! (laughs)
Tim: Kateřina and I have known each other for many years, indeed I was her thesis supervisor during her master’s studies at the conservatoire in the Hague! While we haven’t yet worked together on a professional level, I’m very much looking forward to the experience.
Q: How do you shape the music when performing from facsimiles? Is it different?
Kateřina: For me, the difference is fundamental, though I’m not sure I can fully describe it. The original contains many essential visual clues, and simply seeing a facsimile in front of you gives you something I would never achieve by playing from a modern edition.
Tim: Performing, but perhaps more importantly – rehearsing, directly from historical notation is the most immediately noticeable part of our practice, and it shapes even our most basic interactions with the repertoire. While our interaction with each source is different, several basic elements come to mind: The evidence suggests that historical singers very rarely added annotations to their scores in the way that is fundamental to modern professional music-making. This demands a totally different approach to learning music, which relies far more heavily on memorisation. The music from this period typically appears without barlines, and without being organised into score format. This means that every part is essentially presented with their own, visually undivided melody. Aside from the cognitive effects of such an experience, this makes the act of rehearsing very different, with basic issues such as where to start and stop demanding different skills. Aside from this, much of the music appears in choirbook format, in which the singers read huddled around a single large book. This creates a totally different physical experience of the performance, in which the singers are often even physically grasping each other while singing. In this notation, certain accidentals are not explicitly notated in the score, but are implied in the melodic, contrapuntal, or harmonic context. While some of these are obvious, many of these chromatic inflections are left up to the individual singer to decide, while in a modern score these decisions are usually made by an editor. Since we don’t write in our scores, we tend to use a variety of different hand-signs and gestures to indicate our intentions, which can be different from one performance to another. Equally, many decisions about text placement are also left to the performers, resulting in similar issues. And much much more!!
Q: Do you change your performing methods depending on the repertoire, or do you follow more of a unified philosophy?
Kateřina: Our approach really does differ depending on the instrument for which the repertoire is intabulated. In the “Spanish” model, the intabulation is not meant primarily as a virtuosic lute solo full of diminutions and ornaments. This allows me to focus much more on the polyphony and the vocal quality of each line. That said, I think the overall philosophy is the same: we should be able to sing on the instrument.
Tim: My aim is to create a performance practice which is rooted and grounded in the lived experiences of the performers, so rather than attempting to put on different identities for different repertoires, I/we have chosen to specialise, as much as possible, in a relatively small body of repertoire. While we attempt to approach each programme on its own terms, the basis of what we are doing is rooted in our own musical microcosm.
Q: And what musical compositions can concert-goers look forward to on December 4th?
Kateřina: I'd say every part of the programme is something to look forward to. The entire concert is framed by Jean Mouton's Mass Dictes moy toutez voz Pensées, or "Tell Me All Your Thoughts". This magnificent work is based on the beautiful chanson of the same name by Loyset Compère. As we follow both ways of performing this repertoire, vocal and with instruments, we have woven into the programme instrumental pieces by vihuela composers such as Miguel de Fuenllana and Enríquez de Valderrábano, which provide the right intabulation context.
Tim: Frankly, both the Mass which we’re singing and the secular song on which it’s based are stunning examples of this incredibly rich tradition of music-making.
Q: Kateřina, I know we sort of spoke about this topic before, but – what fascinates you most about intabulations and their relation to original vocal models?
Kateřina: Where to begin? (laughs) I’m fascinated by how universal the music of that period was. The fact that I can transform a vocal piece for a plucked instrument and interpret it myself is an enormous freedom. It lets me expand my repertoire almost endlessly. It also gives me insight into areas I would never otherwise reach as an instrumentalist in this repertoire. Intabulations are an excellent pedagogical tool for grasping polyphonic principles and Renaissance compositional techniques. I could talk about this for hours, but perhaps what satisfies me most is that, amid today’s chaos, I have a set of rules that, when followed, lead to something deeply rewarding. Intabulations are far better than anti-stress colouring books. I highly recommend them! (laughs)
Q: What is your preparation process when presenting music in a “dual” form – vocal and instrumental? Is it any different?
Tim: Sources from the time tend to tell us that the goal of most instruments is to imitate the human voice, and so, technical elements of the instruments themselves to one side, the processes are usually quite similar. That being said, issues of tuning and temperament in particular raise some interesting questions when working with instrumentalists.
Kateřina: I would add this: simply choosing repertoire that will function coherently in this dual format is a demanding task in itself. In this case, we went through the material of the mass and agreed on which sections would be intabulated - as, unfortunately, not everything is playable on the instrument. I then created those intabulations and had to decide which voice would be sung and which played. This usually involves a great deal of experimenting to see what will and will not work. But since my ensemble is in the Netherlands and work commitments didn’t allow me to travel there in the autumn, I had to find a “test subject” here so that I wouldn’t have to redo everything during the official rehearsals - so warm greetings and many thanks to Ondra Bouda! We will shape the complete programme together with Cappella Pratensis once we are in Brno.
Performance Practice and Interpretation
Q: What do each of you see as the greatest challenge when interpreting Franco-Flemish polyphony for today’s audiences?
Tim: The greatest challenge, in my opinion, is that this is generally not concert music, but music that was typically performed in a liturgical setting. That being said, there are descriptions of sacred polyphonic music being performed outside of the liturgy, ranging from after-dinner domestic music-making to large-scale public events. However, none of these resemble particularly the modern concert experience, in which the audience is required to sit and listen, and only listen, for an hour or more.
Kateřina: Perhaps the rather clumsy general stereotype that Renaissance music is boring, and Renaissance masses doubly so? So the greatest challenge, I think, is convincing the audience that this is absolutely not the case! But this perception is slowly changing. Renaissance music depends greatly on understanding the text. If I may speak for Brno, ensembles such as Ensemble Versus are doing a superb job of cultivating an audience for Renaissance polyphony.
Q: How has the approach to early polyphony changed compared to twenty or thirty years ago?
Kateřina: Tim will certainly answer this better - after all, he is a week older than I am and remembers more, and this has long been part of his research. But speaking as a lutenist: this repertoire would not have been played on the lute, and certainly not an entire mass.
Tim: I think it’s dangerous to talk of a singular approach to early polyphony, when there has always been a wide degree of variety in performance approaches. That being said, the dominance of the so-called “English” style remains a constant, and recordings of such groups from twenty or thirty years ago sound comparatively similar to groups of today.
Q: Tim, what do you consider the most important quality in a singer who wants to perform polyphony at the highest level?
Tim: I suppose that depends on who you think is performing polyphony “at the highest level.” Many top ensembles perform polyphony with extraordinary skill, drawing on freelancers and specialist ensemble-singers to create extremely high-quality performances. However, myself and many of the singers in Cappella Pratensis have consciously turned away from such an approach, attempting to find new ways to sing this repertoire. The ideal Cappella Pratensis singer can read the immensely complicated historical notation system fluently, can improvise and compose counterpoint well, is grounded in historical ways of reading and understanding this historical music such as historical solmisation, is familiar with the rituals and liturgies of the period, and comfortable with different styles of ornamentation current with this practice. All this while having a good control over their voice and experience working with others in an ensemble setting. If you find such a person then please give them my contact details immediately! (laugh)
Q: How do you address tuning and intonation when working within historically informed practice?
Tim: With great care and thoughtfulness, and rather more discussion than perhaps is found in other groups. Issues such as drifting in pitch are, as with any ensemble, reasonably common, and are often the result of drifting energy and concentration levels. This issue is, I think, best approached indirectly, through working on musical elements or simply taking a break. When it comes to the nuances of intonation itself, we tend not to think in a specific temperament unless working with instrumentalists. While the evidence for this is minimal from an historical perspective, there are certain hints in sources that suggest that singers were not bound to temperaments when singing unaccompanied. The question of what exactly that means for us in performance is one of constant debate within the ensemble, especially when navigating the period around 1500 when meantone temperaments are first described in theoretical sources.
Kateřina: For this particular project, this is something we will have to resolve during the rehearsals in Brno. In general, small instruments such as the vihuela de mano work well with temperaments close to equal temperament; and if using a historical temperament, the Pythagorean system proposed by Juan Bermudo in his 1555 Declaración de los instrumentos musicales is a good option. Mean-tone temperament works better on instruments with a larger mensur, such as the theorbo. We'll see.
Project Leadership and International Collaboration
Q: Kateřina, what was the initial impulse behind creating the Past Forward project, and how did its dramaturgical axis develop?
Kateřina: To be honest, like many wonderful things, it all began with a conversation with Stratton Bull over coffee and a biscuit after lunch at the House of Polyphony, where the Alamire Foundation is based. I told him about this Brno manuscript and the astonishing amount of Franco-Flemish polyphony it contains, and we were both immediately excited. The second impulse came over a Belgian beer together with one of the leading musicologists, David Burn, who is closely involved in research on the connections between Franco-Flemish music and Central Europe, and that is when everything began to unfold. We first arranged the digitisation, which meant involving Brno researchers such as Vladimír Maňas and Ondra Múčka, as well as the Brno City Archive. Then we said to ourselves that, since this music is so beautiful, we simply had to play it. At that time Stratton was still the artistic director of Cappella Pratensis, so a collaboration between the ensembles was the obvious next step. And because my stay at the Alamire Foundation came out of a post-graduate placement after my studies at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, we agreed with Teunis van der Zwart, head of the Early Music Department, that we absolutely had to share this with everyone - which led to the creation of the conference that will take place a week after the Brno premiere. Sometimes I wonder whether we should have kept our ambitions a little lower... (laughs)
Q: What is the biggest dramaturgical or organisational challenge within the project?
Kateřina: The sheer complexity of this enormous - and very logically interconnected - project. At one point I had to draw up a map of all the collaborations and send it around, because the plan was crystal clear in my head and I genuinely couldn’t understand that it might be confusing for someone else. My apologies to everyone involved! (laughs)
Q: Why did you decide to connect digitisation, concert performance, and an international conference into a single whole?
Kateřina: Because for me this is the ideal way of approaching historically informed practice, the way I work in my own professional life, and the approach I want to pass on: a close connection between theory and practice, and the creation of a network of specialists with whom I can not only consult, but whom I can also connect for further collaboration and for continuing this tradition in greater depth.
Q: How challenging is it to coordinate a project linking institutions from multiple countries and expert fields?
Kateřina: I won’t pretend there weren’t moments when I wondered what on earth I had gotten myself into. But overall, I don’t think it was such a problem, because I had enormous support from every institution I approached. I have my own personal philosophy, that when I organise a project, I reach out primarily to people with whom I know the collaboration will be pleasant not only professionally but also personally. I choose ensemble members the same way. The human dimension is incredibly important to me. And in this project I was unbelievably fortunate. Of course, with some organisations the process was more complicated because of their workload; sometimes it took ages to approve a single step on which twenty others depended. I am, unfortunately, an excessively organised person, but in this case that worked to our advantage. And it was also wonderful to have organisers like Eva Dittrichová on my side; without her kindness and support, it would have been far more difficult to bring this project to a close.
Q: Which moment in the preparation of Past Forward most strongly confirmed its deeper meaning for you?
Kateřina: I think there were two. The first was when I saw the digitised Brno manuscripts on IDEM. The second was when Stratton Bull, who has now handed the artistic leadership of Cappella Pratensis over to Tim, told me he would come to Brno to see us during the first phase of the project, because I simply cannot imagine doing this without him. That gave me closure not only on the professional but also on the personal level that Past Forward holds for me.
Q: What do both of you expect from the meeting of performers, scholars, and technical experts at the conference in The Hague?
Tim: You actually forgot one important group, which is the students! While I’m sure that the academic discussion will be immensely worthwhile, and hopefully the performance also revealing and enjoyable, my aim for the conference is to help inspire the next generation of professional musicians to embrace both this cutting-edge technology and this fascinating repertoire.
Kateřina: Personally, I would like this conference to show just how much work lies behind the moment when “some piece of music” appears online and becomes accessible to performers. I also want to open various questions surrounding digitisation, including ethical ones. I simply want musicians and students, not only of early music, to stop taking this luxury of one-click access for granted!
Q: How do the Brno manuscripts contribute to the European dialogue between Central and Western Europe?
Tim: In my opinion, sources such as these challenge any perceived notions of cultural hegemony during this period – being yet another tangible example of the way in which people moved throughout the world, bringing their art and their music with them.
Kateřina: They are certainly further proof of the importance of these Central European countries, both historically and in current research, something that was somewhat overshadowed by past political regimes. This repertoire travelled across the whole of Europe and reveals far more than just political connections. Another thing is that when people talk about the Czech lands, most still think of “Bohemia,” and “Moravia” tends to remain on the periphery, which, as a proud Moravian, I sometimes find hard to accept. I’m glad that with this project we can help draw attention to ourselves, to the Brno manuscripts, and to the decades of excellent work that local musicologists have invested in them.
Personal Reflections
Q: If you could tell today’s audience one thing about the beauty of early polyphony that often gets lost in casual listening, what would it be?
Tim: This is a question that is often asked, and one for which I think there is no easy answer. We could talk about theoretical elements, the way in which the song is parodied in the mass or suchlike, but these reduce the listening process of this rich and vibrant music to a series of micro-analyses. In my opinion, and I say this as a music-theorist myself, I don’t think that many people, especially non-musicians, really want to sit and attempt to analyse a piece of music for an hour. Personally, I rather like the idea of this music as being an overwhelming cascade of sound, somewhat comparable to stepping into the most richly decorated cathedral or palace, in which there is so much richness and opulence that you can barely take it in. Indeed, while accounts from musicians and theorists from the time do occasionally give us an impression of what professionals noticed of a piece, the vast majority of descriptions by lay-people simply comment on the “sweetness” of the sound. If Haydn or Mozart string quartets are like a well-mannered conversation, the simultaneous and intertwining melodies of Renaissance and Medieval polyphony are far more visceral. I suggest therefore that the casual audience try and engage instead with the music on a less academic and more instinctual basis.
Kateřina: Simply this: try to listen and read between the lines - you will discover something absolutely magical and breathtaking.
Q: If you could develop Past Forward into a new stage in the future, what would it look like?
Tim: It would be wonderful to develop this into a more regular partnership between these institutions.
Kateřina: I would probably elevate it to Past Forward for Everybody - by which I mean breaking down the imagined wall between pure performance practice and research. These areas are inextricably linked, and everyone should have access to whichever mixture of them they need. This project, and my entire professional life, is built on that philosophy. My not-so-modest dream is to integrate this philosophy into the study of early music in the Czech Republic as well. I believe student interest is strong, and perhaps Vláďa and I will succeed in conveying this to them in a way that truly feels meaningful and supportive.
Closing Remarks
As both artists make clear, the revival of early polyphony is no longer only a matter of historical reconstruction. It has become a collaborative dialogue—between performers and scholars, between analogue manuscripts and digital tools, and between cultural traditions across Europe.
Through Past Forward, Tim Braithwaite and Kateřina Maňáková demonstrate how historical practice can inspire new artistic thinking, and how rediscovered sources can reshape the musical narratives we take for granted. Their insights reveal a shared conviction: that the music of the past is most alive when it continues to evolve, provoke curiosity, and inspire imagination.
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