Pomerium originated as a sub-group within the Columbia University Collegium Musicum in 1972. The Collegium, which had lain dormant at Columbia for several years when I entered as a graduate student in musicology in 1967-68, came to life again in a spectacular fashion a year later when Richard Taruskin, then a third-year student in the same graduate program, took over its reins. The Taruskin Collegium achieved more than local fame for its ambitious and lengthy concerts, sometimes lasting longer than a college football game. The repertoire focused on early music extending from Perotin to Palestrina, with a recurring emphasis on the works of Henricus Isaac, whose music Taruskin was contemplating as a possible subject of a Ph.D. dissertation. In the event, he elected to write about Russian opera, which required a year in Moscow for research. During his absence, he asked me to take over the Collegium, by that time a large group of sometimes ten or more instrumentalists and a chorus of nearly thirty. Though I maintained most of the Taruskin traditions during my year as director, I started two small ensembles within the larger group. One of these was devoted to singing Gregorian chant, the other to singing Renaissance polyphony. The chant group would later evolve into R. John Blackley’s Schola Antiqua of New York, while the polyphonic ensemble became Pomerium.

    Pomerium, consisting in the beginning of graduate students and community musicians, began reading through music as a separate ensemble in June of 1972. The fall of that year was devoted primarily to study and rehearsal of one large-scale work, Jacob Obrecht’s Missa Caput, based on the amazing 101-note melisma at the end of the Sarum chant antiphon Venit ad Petrum. My initial goal as director was simply to experiment with a cappella performance of the target repertoire: sacred polyphony of the fifteenth century. (I regarded Taruskin’s Collegium, in which I still sang—along with a large number of others who are now famous names in the field of early music, including Louise Basbas, Valerie Horst, Ben Peck, and Larry Rosenwald—as the appropriate vehicle for public performance.) But as my views on performance became clearer, and increasingly different from the approach adopted by the Collegium, which often had a virtual orchestra of instruments accompanying the chorus in sacred polyphony, I decided that an alternative approach to the performance of Renaissance polyphony deserved a public hearing. Many people today will be surprised to learn that in 1972 a cappella performance of the sacred polyphony of the Renaissance was a rarity. The professional ensembles specializing in such works at that time almost never performed or recorded them without some combination of viols, recorders, lutes, sackbuts, and organs playing colla parte.

    Pomerium gave its first concert in St. Paul’s Chapel on the Columbia University campus on January 14, 1973, just over half a year after its first meeting. The program was devoted to the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei of Obrecht’s Caput Mass, interspersed among motets by Josquin Desprez, two short liturgical works by Du Fay, and a Du Fay chanson performed by a variety of early instruments. Obrecht’s Mass was the only vocal piece that did not receive an entirely a cappella performance: its slow-moving cantus firmus, which occurs in different voices in the different movements, sounded forth variously on tenor sackbut, bass trombone, and treble shawm. But the sound of the unaccompanied voices on the other parts and in the other vocal pieces re-ignited my love of a cappella performance for works from the Golden Age of Polyphony.

    “Re-ignited,” for I had sung many works of English Renaissance polyphony in a cappella performance as a choirboy in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, beginning a dozen years earlier. At Haverford College, which I attended from 1962 to ’67, I collaborated with Stephen Bonime, who entered as a freshman my freshman year, to direct what we called the Haverford-Bryn Mawr Renaissance Choir, itself the outgrowth of a madrigal group we sang in as freshmen. The a cappella Renaissance Choir rehearsed at night a mile away from the Haverford campus in the Bryn Mawr College library, a wonderful neo-Gothic building in English perpendicular style with a huge reading room, the acoustics of which could rival those of a medieval cathedral. Though the library was locked after hours, there was a ground-level window in another part of the building which permitted us entry for our illicit Matins-like adventure of singing Josquin and Johannes Martini and Palestrina at midnight in a darkened room lit only by one or two green-shaded reading lamps.

    The Renaissance Choir and the early Pomerium were entirely amateur groups. Already in the fall of 1972, though, I had begun to dream of a time when Pomerium could be an ensemble of professional singers capable of a higher level of execution, perhaps eventually even rivaling the performance of a professional string quartet. Not that I wanted these Pomerium singers of the future to sing with a modern string player’s vibrato—quite the opposite. But I had in mind singers who could master a score without laboriously learning the notes in rehearsal. Singers whose musical skills allowed them to achieve easy ensemble and thus to perform with greater confidence and more refined phrasing. Singers with sweet, mellifluous voices. Singers, most of all, who could be relied on to sing in tune, the single greatest challenge of a cappella performance. Gradually, the personnel in Pomerium changed. Semi-professional singers joined the group, then singers who actually planned to make a living by singing but understood and embraced a style of production different from that required in an orchestra chorus or on the opera stage.

    It is no exaggeration to say that singers of the type who now make up Pomerium did not exist in the early ’70s. (Nor did the string players who would soon revolutionize the sound of Baroque music.) At that time, singers from the conservatory were trained to develop immensely powerful voices, which made almost all of them unacceptable for my newly-formed group. Singers with lighter voices who didn’t attend conservatory usually were deficient in musical skills. It was a slow climb to reach the first Pomerium ensemble with trained singers capable of recording formes fixes chansons by Ockeghem and Du Fay for a commercial label. For a few years, before their solo schedules made rehearsing together an impossibility, Pomerium had within its ranks some amazing pioneers of a new way of singing early music: Julianne Baird, Ann Monoyios, Johana Arnold, Drew Minter, Jeffrey Gall, Howard Crook, Kurt-Owen Richards, Peter Stewart, and Sanford Sylvan (still in high school when he first joined the group). Skilled gambists and vielle players, too, were suddenly on the scene, and two of these, Mary Springfels and Wendy Gillespie, became regulars in Pomerium programs, occasionally with a talented lutenist, as well, David Hart. Many of these pioneers participated in Pomerium’s two LPs for the Nonesuch label in music by Ockeghem and Du Fay, respectively, dating from 1976 and 1978.

    A six- and seven-person Pomerium of professonal soloists began to tour in 1979, its first concert outside New York being a program of music from the Old Hall Manuscript in Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, followed by performances at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Michigan State University in East Lansing, and Princeton University, though with ever-greater difficulty because of increasingly incompatible schedules. It was the very success of these singers’ solo careers that spelled the end of their participation in Pomerium. After a farewell concert featuring the first generation of Pomerium professionals in virtuoso music for the Ferrarese Concerto delle donne of the 1580s at Weill Recital Hall in 1986, I formed a new, larger ensemble the same year. This group could not at first boast singers of the caliber of the group’s previous personnel, but it too continued to improve in quality, with better singers joining its ranks on a regular basis. The new Pomerium recorded its first CD, called The Flemish Masters, for the small Classic Masters label in 1988. Soon thereafter we had Kurt-Owen Richards and Peter Stewart back in the group. Drew Minter, too, was able to join Pomerium periodically for the occasional tour and recording (Musica Vaticana, Carolus Maximus: Music in the Life of Charles V).

    1988 was the first year Pomerium traveled abroad. A 13-member ensemble from the new Pomerium sang at the Holland Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht that summer, presenting an all-Lassus program. (Members of the group at that time included Ruth Cunningham, Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer, and, soon, Johanna Rose, a quartet that the world would soon know as Anonymous 4.) Pomerium returned to Utrecht in 1989 for a program featuring composers of the late Renaissance (“Chromatic Music of the Renaissance”) and again in 1995 for a program featuring music by Guillaume Du Fay (“Missa Sancti Anthonii de Padua & Ceremonial Motets”), preceding the latter appearance with a concert in the Antwerp Festival of works printed by the sixteenth-century Antwerp printer Pierre Phalèse. In 1991 Pomerium sang at the Regensburg Tage Alter Musik, returning there in 1998. While in Regensburg in 1998, the group recorded its first CD for Glissando (Musica Vaticana) in a restored Benedictine chapel in the Regensburg suburb of Prüfening, continuing on after that to perform in the South Tyrol (Trent, Bolzano, and Brixen). That same year the group traveled to Japan in October, singing in Osaka, Nagoya, and Tokyo.

    Right in our home base in New York City, Pomerium has been fortunate to appear in many wonderful venues over the years, including the Morgan Library, the Frick Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, the WBAI Free Music Store, the Great Hall at The Cooper Union, and many churches. One venue stands out, however, for having presented Pomerium more often than any other, and in the process for having been the group’s most enduring supporter and life-blood: Music Before 1800, now in its 37th season. Today marks Pomerium’s 35th appearance for this most enduring and important institution; and for that signal honor, we wish to thank and acknowledge our respect for the director of the series, Louise Basbas.

    1991 was a watershed year for Pomerium, when, as a 13-singer group, it released its first CD for a nationally-acclaimed label. The program was devoted to madrigals and motets by Mannerist composers of the later sixteenth century (“The Mannerist Revolution”), a program recorded by Dorian in the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in Troy, NY. Two years later Dorian recorded Pomerium in Troy again for a second CD, this one devoted to the music of Antoine Busnoys (“Antoine Busnoys: In hydraulis & Other Works”). Then followed four CDs for Deutsche Grammophon/Archiv between 1996 and 1997: Du Fay’s Missa Sancti Antonii de Padua, The Virgin & the Temple (a program of chant and motets by Du Fay), A Musical Book of Hours, and Creator of the Stars: Christmas Music from Earlier Times (re-issued some years later as Old World Christmas). When the director of Archiv left to form the Glissando label in 1998, he commissioned Pomerium to record, at the rate of about one CD every 18 months, Musica Vaticana, Carolus Maximus: Music in the Life of Charles V, and Josquin Desprez: Missa Hercules dux Ferrarie, Motets & Chansons. In 2004 Pomerium recorded its first CD for its own new label, Old Hall Recordings, a CD that took several years to make its way through editing and production. In 2008 this recording was released as Orlande de Lassus: Motets & Magnificat. Last June, Pomerium recorded a program of Mannerist motets of the Renaissance that is scheduled for release later in 2012 as A Voice in the Wilderness.

    This is the modern Pomerium, an ensemble of 14 to 16 professional singers devoted to a style of performance that has fulfilled my dream of the early ’70s. One of these singers has sung with Pomerium for nearly three decades: Kurt-Owen Richards. Michael Steinberger passed the 20-year mark in 2009. Others are now approaching 20 years: Neil Farrell, Thom Baker, Jeffrey Johnson. Kristina Boerger passed the 10-year mark in 2011. Robert Isaacs has sung with Pomerium for eight years, Silvie Jensen for six, Melissa Fogarty and Dominique Surh for five, Elizabeth Baber, Michele Kennedy, and Thomas McCargar for three, Luthien Brackett for two.

    Many different singers, in addition to those already named, have sung with with Pomerium in the course of its decades-long evolution, but the sound of the ensemble and its approach have remained essentially the same. With only brief excursions into the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, the group has always specialized in vocal works from the Renaissance—broadly understood to include the occasional composer before Du Fay (Machaut, Ciconia, Baude Cordier) and the occasional composer after Palestrina (Gesualdo, Schütz). Today marks the kickoff event of our 40th-anniversary year, a year which will end with a performance of music for Mary Tudor at The Cloisters on April 21, 2013. That performance will celebrate not only a Pomerium anniversary but a Cloisters one as well: its 75th. And for that double anniversary Pomerium will reunite many of its former members to join current members in singing Thomas Tallis’s 40-voice motet Spem in alium.

    Today we present a selection of representative pieces from 40 seasons of Pomerium programs. The selection follows in chronological order the programs from which the pieces are drawn. Thus, we open with a movement from Obrecht’s Missa Caput, which Pomerium first began rehearsing in 1972 and first performed in January 1973; we proceed from there through the years, some programs featuring pieces for small ensemble, others large-scale motets and Masses for full chapel choir. From our program of Passion and Resurrection Motets of the Renaissance, which we have performed annually at The Cloisters for the past eight years, we take a piece introduced into the mix for the first time last month: Alfonso Ferrabosco’s six-voice setting of O vos omnes. Our program thereby includes music drawn from the entire span of Pomerium’s existence, 1972 to 2012.