The Project

Cover Story tracks connections between people, places, texts and music. It follows the spread of popular late medieval melodies across Europe, and evolve over many decades, as they are copied, rearranged and repurposed.

We are currently planning an album launch tour. If you’d like us to include your festival or concert series, please get in touch!

As usual we’re offering workshops alongside each concert, giving participants the chance to play music from our programme, or inspired by it.
We have taken Cover Story to the Harwich Festival, Wind Works Festival, Iceland, Maldon Festival, Otley Courthouse, St. Denys Church, York, and Colchester Early Music. We will be performing in Birmingham, (Selly Oak Methodist Church) on February 14th 2026, running a Cover Story workshop at St Andrew’s Church, Mark’s Tey on April 18th, Otley Courthouse on September 12th, Banbury Early Music Festival on September 26th, Salisbury Musick Early Music Festival on the 3rd of October, and in Mark’s Tey on the 4th of October.

Cover Story made us look at the music we play in a new light. What makes a song to leap across national boundaries and language barriers, slip from the secular to the ecclesiastic, and remain at the top of the charts for more than 70 years? We don’t have the formula, but we know why these pieces wedged themselves into the cultural background of medieval Europe. The music is fabulous, and audiences today love it too.
When the Brighton Early Music Festival asked for a programme of music shared at medieval “minstrel schools”, we found that none of it survives. We turned to later repertoire. Pieces with cultural significance beyond their place of origin survive in many sources. J’ay pris amours, one of our favourites, first emerged in a Loire Valley chansonnier (c. 1460), but settings of this beautiful chanson appear in manuscripts from Central Europe, Italy, Spain, and even the Henry VIII Songbook, compiled more than 50 years later.
Some works are copied without alteration; others, such as J’ay pris amours, are reworked in an astonishing range of styles — quodlibets, contrafacts, in combination with other melodies, and complicated musical puzzles.
Cover Story will be released later in 2026 by First Hand Records, who also released Of Arms and a Woman. John Croft is our recording engineer.

Cover Story is supported by grants from the Continuo Foundation and Angel Early Music.