The name of Noel Bauldewey is not often found among the extraordinary phenomena of an exceptionally rich generation of composers around 1500; this recording may well be the first entirely devoted to his works. And yet Bauldeweyn’s music is characterized by a very individual sound as well as an assured handling of the formal requirements of cyclic settings of the Mass ordinary. The wide geographic distribution of surviving works in choir books belonging to the Papal and Bavarian chapels as well as in the splendid manuscripts originating from Petrus Alamire’s atelier testifies to the reputation he enjoyed among his contemporaries. Some of Bauldeweyn’s compositions, especially the Missa Da pacem, were thought to be by his most prominent contemporary, Josquin Desprez, even into the twentieth century. His motet Quam pulchra also appears on a sheet of music from which an angel is playing in Caravaggio’s painting Rest on the Flight into Egypt in 1586- at least a generation after Bauldeweyn’s music had ceased to be published.
