Fount & Origin is an early music ensemble specialising in vocal music of the late Middle Ages. We are committed to reviving unknown works from the period and researching the rich history that underpins their composition and performance. We hope that our work will inspire further interest in this neglected repertory, and that our listeners will come to love the elusive musical traditions which we passionately pursue!
Formed in Autumn 2018 by our director, James Tomlinson, the ensemble of eight singers strive to perform medieval music to the highest standards of choral performance, producing a “warm, clear, luminous sound, with the parts beautifully blended yet clearly articulated” (BBC Music Magazine 2022), and maintaining a strong historical focus.
Not long after its inception, Fount & Origin was awarded the inaugural Stile Antico Ensemble Development Bursary for the period 2019–22. In October 2022 they released their debut album, The Sword and the Lily: 15th-century polyphony for Judgement Day, with Resonus Classics. The disc won critical acclaim, receiving five stars in BBC Music Magazine, and Fount & Origin were selected as a Gramophone Magazine ‘One-To-Watch Artist’. The ensemble now perform internationally, and their members are now resident in four European countries.
“…they produce a warm, clear, luminous sound, with the parts beautifully blended yet clearly articulated…”
Barry witherden, BBC Music Magazine (✰✰✰✰✰)
Our Name
The inspiration for our name, Fount & Origin, came initially from a well-known passage in the Proportionale Musices, a music theory text written in the 1470s by composer and theorist Johannes Tinctoris (c. 1435–1511). Tinctoris marvelled at the musical developments that had taken place in France since the 1430s and argues that they had produced ‘a new art’; he identifies as its wellspring, or ‘fount and origin’ (fons et origo), the early fifteenth-century English school of polyphony, citing John Dunstaple (d.1453) in particular.
“The sonorities are perfect, the tempi are appropriate, and the overall approach is one of restraint and introspection.”
rOB c. wEGMAN (2024)
We chose this name to reflect our artistic interest in this important moment in European musical practice—not only regarding emergent musical styles now associated with the Renaissance in music, but for the changing institutional, economic and intellectual forces which transformed the ways in which music was performed, disseminated and understood. It also reminds us that the cultural wellspring of the late Middle Ages provides a vast yet largely unperformed repertory of music, and that listening to traces of our shared history can today bring us together in often unexpected ways.
Meet the Ensemble
artistic director / bass
James Tomlinson
James founded Fount & Origin as a student in the autumn of 2018. He read Music (BA) and Medieval Studies (MSt) at the University of Oxford, where he held a Senior Choral Scholarship at The Queen’s College, and is now a music researcher, teacher, and performer. He has recently completed his Ph.D. in Musicology at the University of Oslo, Norway, where he is part of a European Research Council project, ‘BENEDICAMUS‘, concerning medieval music and liturgy. His research addresses thirteenth- to fifteenth-century music and culture in Europe. He also works internationally as a choral singer and soloist.
He is always delighted and moved to perform the music he loves with such a dedicated and expert group of musicians.
associate artistic director / tenor
Andrew Doll
Andrew has been singing with F&O since its inception (a concert of Dufay’s Missa Ave Regina Caelorum) back in 2018. He and James met while singing together in Oxford, where James introduced him to the wonders of medieval music – so rich and evocative of their period, but yet (both strangely and sadly) so rarely performed. He hasn’t looked back, and is keen, through his work with F&O, to explore and share these wonders with others.
Andrew is an experienced church musician, beginning as a chorister at New College, under Edward Higginbottom, and is today a Lay Clerk in Christ Church Cathedral Choir, Oxford. Outside of singing, his career began in academia, receiving a doctorate in History from the University of Oxford, but he wanted to follow a different path – first working for his local MP, and now as Speechwriter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. More importantly, he has recently become a very proud father.
mezzo-soprano
Joy Sutcliffe
Joy grew up in North Yorkshire and began her singing career as a chorister at Ripon Cathedral and was a finalist of the BBC Radio 2 Chorister of the Year in 2013. Subsequently, she read music at Durham University, during which time she was a member of the Samling Young Artists programme and Genesis Sixteen.
After graduating, Joy became the first female Lay Clerk of Magdalen College, Oxford, before moving to St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where she sang for Queen Elizabeth II’s Committal Service in September 2022. Joy sings with various ensembles nationwide, including Tenebrae, The Queen’s Six, The Marian Consort and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
Joy’s oratorio solo work includes Handel’s Messiah, Bach’s St. John and Matthew Passions, Vivaldi’s Gloria, Duruflé’s Requiem and Rossini’s Stabat Mater. Other recent solo engagements include Due Donne in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro with Westminster Opera Company, alto soloist for Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners with Orchestra Vox and Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
countertenor
Lewis Hammond
Thanks to James’s proposition in Michaelmas 2018, Lewis’s time with Fount & Origin dates from its very beginning. Before reading Music at Oxford, Lewis was an alto choral scholar at Chelmsford Cathedral and studied at Colchester Royal Grammar School. Between 2017 and 2020, he was an academical clerk at New College where he was known to engage in academic activity from time to time.
During his first year at New College, he participated in masterclasses with Andreas Scholl and created an ad-hoc baroque group known as the Wykeham Consort. Lewis was named conductor of the Oxford University Chorus in 2018. In 2019, he was invited to conduct the University Opera Society’s production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice.
After concluding his studies at Oxford, Lewis moved to France. He studied for two years at the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles under the direction of Olivier Schneebeli and Fabien Armengaud. Among other professional groups, Lewis regularly sings with Ensemble Correspondances (Sébastien Daucé), Les Surprises (Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas) and Ensemble Pygmalion (Raphaël Pichon).
In 2022, Lewis enrolled in the “cycle specialisé” in orchestral conducting at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris. Most recently, he was appointed musical director of the Paris Choral Society in September 2024. Lewis conducts two other vocal ensembles in France: le Fil d’Or (a group of professional singers specialising in 15/16th century English music) and the Flying Fishes (a non-professional chamber choir that performs a range of linguistically themed programmes).
tenor
Matthew Pope
Matt is a tenor, composer, music producer, and pianist who currently sings as a lay clerk at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. He is a versatile performer, and as well as being a proud member of Fount & Origin, he sings and has sung with ensembles ranging from the northern choir Kantos, to the modernist New London Chamber Choir, to the critically acclaimed student jazz group, The Oxford Gargoyles. Most recently, he performed with the new jazz ensemble Little Kitchen in their inaugural concert at the Holywell Music Room in Oxford.
On top of his choral work, Matt has sung in several operas both in lead and ensemble roles. For the past two years he has been a regular in the Oxford student opera scene, playing Mercury in Pepusch’s Death of Dido, the titular role in Charpentier’s Actéon, and most recently, Klaus Kinski alongside fellow F&O member Theo Nisbett in Marcello Palazzo’s operetta, Mount Herzog, based on the story surrounding Werner Herzog’s film, Fitzcarraldo.
In his capacity as a pianist, Matt has just released an EP of improvisations inspired by his time spent in Scotland. The third of these, My Heart’s in the Highlands, sees a further collaboration between Matt and Theo with whom he is once again delighted to be singing, as indeed he is with all of his Fount & Origin friends.
tenor
Joseph Mason
Joseph is a teacher and researcher in early music at the University of Cambridge (from January 2025), with particular research interests in the music of thirteenth-France. After an undergraduate degree combined with an organ scholarship at Lincoln College, Oxford, Joseph completed graduate degrees at King’s College London and the University of Oxford. Joseph enjoys singing with and accompanying various vocal ensembles in the Oxford area and beyond, and for the past three years has been one of the convenors of the facsimile singing seminar in Oxford, where he first discovered the joys of singing fourteenth- and fifteenth-century polyphony. Outside music, Joseph can often be found swimming laps in the local pool or knitting brightly coloured jumpers.
baritone
Theodore Nisbett
Theodore joined Fount & Origin whilst studying music at New College, Oxford, where he was an Academical Clerk. He has since developed a particular interest in innovative performance of the music of the Franco-Flemish school, with Alexander Agricola and Johannes Ockeghem being amongst his favourites. He is currently pursuing an MA in Vocal Studies at the Royal Academy of Music with John Lattimore, and gives regular performances as a soloist in oratorio and on the recital stage. He enjoys singing in under-performed languages, and specialises in the interpretation of late Romantic and Modern Mélodie, as well as the folk song repertory of the British Isles.
Equally passionate about new music and modes of creative expression, Theodore created the role of The Engineer in Marcello Palazzo’s 2024 opera Mount Herzog, and working with the performance art group A Feast for Ears at venues such as the Staffordshire Street Gallery in London. Alongside his performing, Theodore is also an avid painter and writer.
bass
Grantley McDonald
Grantley researches and teaches music from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at the University of Vienna. He began singing with Fount & Origin as a postdoc at the University of Oxford. He has performed and recorded with many other ensembles, including Cappella Pratensis (recent Gramophone Award winners), The Brabant Ensemble, Diabolus in Musica, Chœur de Chambre de Namur, and Trinity Baroque. He spends much of his time in obscure archives and libraries, elbow-deep in parchment, and publishes widely on Renaissance music and philosophy.
bass
Max Cheung
Max joined F&O as one of its founding members when he studied Classics at Oxford University, during which time he sang predominantly in the Choir of Merton College as well as in the Choirs of The Queen’s College and New College. He is now based in London, where his primary occupation as a trainee solicitor at Slaughter and May continues to be leavened by singing with groups including the choir at All Hallows Gospel Oak, I Dodici, and F&O itself. (He is currently on a six-month stint working in New York, where he is singing with the choir at The Church of Saint Mary the Virgin off Times Square.) He is also a cellist, pianist, and erstwhile organist, and outside the legal and musical worlds maintains an interest in classical studies, having contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Epic (Cambridge, 2024).
Fount & Origin - Medieval Music Vocal Ensemble 