Giles Woodforde finds out how one family’s rooftop gatherings turned into an annual celebration of tunes by Renaissance and medieval maestros

You don’t usually associate early music performing groups with pictures of muscle men and scantily-clad ladies. But look at home-grown vocal group Stile Antico’s website and that’s exactly what you will see.

“Two of our singers recently went to the Arnold Schwarzenegger Convention, which is all about bodybuilding,” laughs Stile Antico’s Kate Ashby. “We were on tour to Columbus, Ohio. They were given a lot of free protein drinks, so they turned up at rehearsal completely wired.”

Stile Antico started as an Oxford amateur group in 2001. But the story began earlier, as sisters Kate, Helen, Emma, and Laura Ashby, plus brother Nick, clambered on to the roof of their parents’ Cowley home and started singing to neighbours.

“As we are all very close together in age, singing became a real group hobby and it was something we could share,” Kate explains. “When we were teenagers, our loft was converted and we were able to climb on to the flat roof. We used to watch the sunset and do some singing. It was wonderful.”

Friends joined them and, in due course, the group turned professional. It has subsequently earned an international reputation and 2015 marks the 10th anniversary of that decision to turn professional.

The Ashbys are marking it by staging their second Oxford Early Music Festival.

“We were very keen to start our 10th season here, in our home city,” Kate says.

The festival opens with a massive work: Monteverdi’s Vespers. It involves two Oxford choirs, one founded in 1480, the second formed only last year; Magdalen College Choir will be paired with Frideswide Voices, which aims to offer the same musical advantages to girls aged seven to 13 as Oxford’s boy choristers have enjoyed for centuries.

“Oxford’s choral groups are absolutely key to the city’s musical life,” says Kate. “Daniel Hyde, the director of music at Magdalen and the conductor of our Vespers performance, was very keen for his choir to be involved.

“I train the probationers for Frideswide Voices and we wanted to give them a higher profile; as girls growing up in Oxford, we weren’t able to obtain the chorister experience that the Voices choir now provides.

“After starting with Bach’s B Minor Mass two years ago, we wanted to find another major piece of music to open this festival. The B Minor is a hard act to follow. The Vespers offers loads of opportunities for performers. The piece involves two specialist baroque orchestras, six soloists and three choirs: two children’s, plus one adult.

“It’s a real showpiece. Daniel Hyde will be playing the harpsichord, as well as directing the performance, so he’ll get a lot of aerobic exercise leaping up and down.”

Besides a range of concerts and recitals, this year’s festival offers a couple of challenges to local amateur musicians. They can try their hand at playing a viol – a six-stringed instrument that always looks as if it requires a mighty amount of concentration, even in the hands of a seasoned professional. And Oxford’s Sally Dunkley – an early-music specialist and member of choral group The Sixteen – can reveal to the mysteries of reading a Renaissance-era score.

Does this mean singing from a composer’s spidery handwriting, I ask Kate, or from a beautiful, illuminated manuscript?

“A little bit of both. We’re using the Dow Collection, which now lives in Christ Church library, but was originally prepared for use in somebody’s home. Sally Dunkley will be teaching people how to sing from this sort of musical score: I think it will be a real revelation.

“The workshop links into a project called DIAMM – the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music – which is based in Oxford and is digitising medieval manuscripts from around the UK and abroad. We wanted to link Oxford academic schemes like DIAMM with the local amateur music-making scene.

“The workshop will be perfect for singers who are looking for a new challenge. It will train their brains too.”

With eight events, this second Oxford Early Music Festival will involve a lot of local talent and resources. So what makes the city such an early music hotbed?

“The university has been leading the way in the study of early music for a long time,” Laura Ashby replies.

“You need a really lively, academic mind to find composers nobody has heard of, then search out their scores. That’s started a revolution in early music, much of which has come from Oxford.”

Oxford Early Music Festival
Various city centre venues; details oemf.co.uk
Tomorrow until Sunday
Tickets 01865 305305 or ticketsoxford.com