Barbara Thornton was a singer, musicologist

Musicology

Musicology is the scholarly study of music. The word is used in narrow, broad and intermediate senses. In the narrow sense, musicology is confined to the music history of Western culture...

 and groundbreaking performer of medieval music

Medieval music

Medieval music is Western music written during the Middle Ages. This era begins with the fall of the Roman Empire and ends sometime in the early fifteenth century...

.

Thornton, described as “one of the most eminent medieval voices of our time” (Neumann 1998), was educated at Sarah Lawrence College

Sarah Lawrence College

Sarah Lawrence College is a private liberal arts college in the United States, and a leader in progressive education since its founding in 1926. Located just 30 minutes north of Midtown Manhattan in southern Westchester County, New York, in the city of Yonkers, this coeducational college offers...

, the Conservatorium van Amsterdam

Conservatorium van Amsterdam

The Conservatorium van Amsterdam is a Dutch academy of music located in Amsterdam. This school is the music division of the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, the city's vocational university of arts...

, and the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis

Schola Cantorum Basiliensis

Schola Cantorum Basiliensis is a music academy and research institution located in Basel, Switzerland, and focusing on early music and historically informed performance....

. In 1977, she founded the ensemble Sequentia

Sequentia (music group)

Sequentia is an early music ensemble, founded in 1977 by Benjamin Bagby and the late Barbara Thornton . The group specializes mainly in Medieval music. Sequentia focuses particularly on music with texts, specifically chants and other stories with music, such as the Icelandic Edda...

 with Benjamin Bagby

Benjamin Bagby

Benjamin Bagby is a singer, composer, harpist, and groundbreaking performer of medieval music. Educated at Oberlin College and the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Bagby founded the ensemble Sequentia with Barbara Thornton in 1977...

 in Basel

Basel

Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...

. They moved to Cologne

Cologne

Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...

 that same year, where they lived and worked together for 21 years (Neumann 1998; Zahn 2001).

Sequentia has released many fine recordings, most of them on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi (Weber 2001). In 1982, the group began to stage Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum

Ordo Virtutum

Ordo Virtutum is an allegorical morality play, or liturgical drama, by Hildegard of Bingen, composed c. 1151...

, which proved so successful, both in concert and on record, that they undertook to record all of Hildegard’s musical output—a project completed in 1998 for the celebration of the abbess’s 900th birthday (Neumann 1998). The group has also performed music written in the 12th century from the musical centers Santiago de Compostela

Santiago de Compostela

Santiago de Compostela is the capital of the autonomous community of Galicia, Spain.The city's Cathedral is the destination today, as it has been throughout history, of the important 9th century medieval pilgrimage route, the Way of St. James...

, Aquitaine

Aquitaine

Aquitaine , archaic Guyenne/Guienne , is one of the 27 regions of France, in the south-western part of metropolitan France, along the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees mountain range on the border with Spain. It comprises the 5 departments of Dordogne, :Lot et Garonne, :Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Landes...

, and Notre Dame

Notre Dame de Paris

Notre Dame de Paris , also known as Notre Dame Cathedral, is a Gothic, Roman Catholic cathedral on the eastern half of the Île de la Cité in the fourth arrondissement of Paris, France. It is the cathedral of the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris: that is, it is the church that contains the cathedra of...

.

Thornton died in Cologne on 8 November 1998 at the age of 48, after having suffered for a number of years from an inoperable brain tumour (Neumann 1999).

Sources

• Neumann, Klaus L. 1999. "Barbara Thornton, 1950–98". Early Music 27, no. 1 (February): 169.
• Tick, Judith. 2001. "Women in Music, §I: Historiography". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Press.
• Weber, Jerome F. 2001. "Harmonia Mundi". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Press.
• Zahn, Robert von. 2001. "Cologne". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Press.