This programme has been conceived as an ode to the centre of political and social power and the undisputed European cultural capital throughout the Middle Ages. In its soundscape, France brings together one of the richest and most complex musical fabrics in the West, where genres and compositional schools of a very different nature developed, ranging from the archaic polyphonies of the School of St. Martial to the overwhelming sonorities of the School of Notre Dame, the evolution of the great forms of the motet and conductus, and all kinds of developments in monodic lyrical song, with a wide variety of themes (religious, secular, political, and amorous).

 

We will travel through the Gallic country from north to south through the network of repertoires that developed between the 9th and 14th centuries and which undoubtedly marked out the path that almost all Western music was to follow.