About
Adjoa Mensah, Viola da gambaKiran Iyer, TheorboBess Whitlock, Hurdy-gurdyTheo Bankole, Sackbut
The Vervain Consort is a broken consort in the old sense: viola da gamba, theorbo, hurdy-gurdy and sackbut, four instruments that were never supposed to sit in one band and spent the seventeenth century doing exactly that. The repertoire is the music that moved between court and street — masque tunes that became ballads, ballads that became divisions, dances that nobody wrote down until a century after everyone knew them.
The four met in the historical performance rooms at the Blackfriars Early Music Programme, hired separately for a reconstruction of a civic procession and kept on together when the procession was rained off and the band played the whole programme under a market awning instead. That afternoon set the method: programmes built from period sources, played from their own editions, and tested on rooms that were never concert halls — chapels, undercrofts, a working tide mill.
The consort's editions are published as the Vervain Dance Book, a growing collection of the sets they play; the perusal copies on the catalogue page are free, on the theory that this music survived four hundred years by being passed around.
Broken Music
Since 2023 the consort has commissioned one new work a year for its old instruments — the Broken Music commissions, written by living composers for gamba, theorbo, wheel and slide. Three exist; the fourth is on the stands now.
Residencies
Blackfriars Early Music Programme
Coaching the programme's broken-consort class and giving the year's teaching repertoire its first outings in the Blackfriars undercroft.
The players
Adjoa MensahViola da gamba
Adjoa convened the consort and edits the Dance Book. Her seven-string bass viol, carved with a head nobody can identify, is the band's harmonic floor and its oldest member by three hundred years.
Kiran IyerTheorbo
Kiran came to the theorbo from classical guitar and now owns an instrument taller than his front door is wide. He realises the continuo lines and argues for slower sarabandes, usually successfully.
Bess WhitlockHurdy-gurdy
Bess is the street half of the consort's name: her wheel carries the drones and the dance tunes, and her field notebooks of surviving ballad variants are where half the programmes start.
Theo BankoleSackbut
Theo plays the sackbut as the singer it historically stood in for, and takes the top line whenever the tune needs carrying across a market square. He also keeps the tour van's inventory of candle lanterns.