Music of court and street
Music of court and street
Photo: Anselm Reed
The Vervain Consort plays the music that crossed between the banqueting hall and the market square — four period instruments, four centuries of tunes, and a standing habit of commissioning new music for old machines.
Read the full biography“Four instruments that should not belong together, and four hundred years that vanish when they play: the Vervain Consort make the border between court and street sound like the invention it always was.”
— Broadside Quarterly, Margery Flint (on Court and Street at the Tallow Hall)
“The rare early-music record that treats its sources as living tunes rather than laboratory specimens.”
— The Early Music Ledger, Osric Vane (on Divisions on a Ground)
On record
Bellfounder Records, September 2025
Adjoa Mensah, viola da gamba
Kiran Iyer, theorbo
Bess Whitlock, hurdy-gurdy
Theo Bankole, sackbut
Grounds and their divisions, 1553–1685: Ortiz's recercadas beside the ballad sets that borrowed their basses, taped in one week in the Blackfriars undercroft with the room's echo left in.
Chamber Choice — The Early Music Ledger
Listen Buy the CD Radio Meridian broadcast — Divisions on a Ground (mp3)
Bellfounder Records, June 2026
Adjoa Mensah, viola da gamba
Kiran Iyer, theorbo
Bess Whitlock, hurdy-gurdy
Theo Bankole, sackbut
Five sets filmed and taped by candle-lantern in the Bristol undercroft — one camera, no retakes, the first recording of Mabel Torrance's Hedge Music among them.
Bellfounder Records, 2023
The West Country tour on record: wassails and carols taped in the churches the van could reach by dusk, one evening each.