Notker Balbulus, also known as Notker of St Gall or Notker the Stammerer, was a renowned Benedictine monk at the Abbey of St Gall in Switzerland who made substantial contributions to both the music and literature of his time. These include the Liber ymnorum, which forms an important collection of early musical sequences that celebrate special moments in the liturgical calendar. As the ‘very long melodies’ of the liturgical sequences were a formidable challenge to memorise, Notker created these texts as an aid to holding the melodies within the mind and memory. They are performed here by the acclaimed and insightful Schola Antiqua of Chicago.

This recording featuring the poetry of Notker of St Gall reflects a lifelong project of Schola Antiqua of Chicago’s founding artistic director, Calvin M. Bower. Bower has been studying Notker’s texts for some 50 years, and his edition of Notker’s Liber ymnorum was published by the Henry Bradshaw Society in 2016. This edition won the Claude V. Palisca Award of the American Musicological Society for the best scholarly edition in the field of musicology in 2016.

This album follows on from Schola Antiqua of Chicago’s Missa Conceptio tua (Naxos 8573260) with music for the Advent season. This was considered ‘an absolutely beautiful disc’ in Classical Net, and ‘not only as a wonderful introduction to Pierre de la Rue’s mass setting but also as the definitive recording of the work’ in the Choral Journal.