Cappella Nova - The Complete Works of Robert Carver

(ASV CD GAX 319)

This series of three recordings presents the complete sacred choral music of the early sixteenth-century Scottish composer Robert Carver. All Carver's surviving works are contained in a large manuscript choirbook assembled over several decades and now housed in the National Library of Scotland. According to various inscriptions Carver describes himself as "dominus", "canonicus de Scona" and three times "alias Arnat". New information has recently come to light regarding the date of birth and later period of activity of the composer's life^†. It now appears that Carver was born in 1484/5 and was still living in 1568.

As I suggested some time ago, Carver was associated not only with Scone Abbey near Perth, but also on the evidence of the "Arnat" alias very likely with the Chapel Royal of Scotland at Stirling. There are many cogent links between composer, manuscript choirbook, foundation and co-founders alike. But there seem to be at least two Robert Arnots mentioned in the burgh records of Stirling at this time. One of them is perhaps our "Robert Carver alias Arnat" of the Chapel Royal, but the other is a considerably more lowly personage, a burgess and bailie of the Town Council.

In musical terms Carver's life spans the shift in Britain from the late medieval decorative style to the progressive and internationally current structural imitation of the High Renaissance, that seems to have taken place in Scotland in the 1520s and 30s. Of course there were many intervening stages along the way, in Carver's case some even appearing alongside one another in the same work.