The music of John Sheppard represents a last glorious flowering of the pre-Reformation spirit in England, akin to Perpendicular architecture. The soaring lines of his polyphony reach heavenward like a spire, his choral textures seem filled with light like an East Anglian church interior. All too little is known of this extraordinary composer. He was choirmaster at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1543 to 1548 and a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal from about this time until his death. Most of his surviving music is for the Latin rite, some of it dating from the brief and unhappy period of Catholic revival during the reign of Mary Tudor in the 1550s. Audivi vocem, a respond for All Saints’ Day, is typical of much English church music of this time in consisting of alternating sections of Gregorian chant and polyphony.

from notes by Collegium Records © 2000