Manuscripts are our key to the musical life of the distant past as they contain innumerable songs and instrumental pieces for the church, the court, the street and the home that are often unavailable anywhere else. These unique, often richly illuminated volumes bearing exotic names such as Winchester Troparium and Codex Squarcialupi are today locked up in monasteries and libraries across Europe. This, and the fact that they use an arcane notation that leaves a lot to improvisation, means that musicians, in order to bring them back to life, need to combine the drive and flair of Hercule Poirot with extraordinary imagination and creativity.

The best-known of these musical sleuths must be Paul Van Nevel, a Hasselt-born, cigarpuffing musician who has spent most of his life tracing and poring over ancient hand-written scores. He even named his ensemble after one: the Codex Las Huelgas, which moved him to tears when he first discovered it in a Spanish convent in the early 1970s. On one occasion, this passion led him into trouble with the police when he was suspected of tearing off a page from an ancient volume he was copying.

Here is someone who fully deserves his status as the festival’s resident artist. As such, he will take part in a live interview on 25 August, looking back on his adventure-filled career and sharing his passion for composers such as Richafort, Agricola, and Cipriano de Rore. He and his Huelgas Ensemble will also perform three concerts focusing on as many manuscripts: the Codex Las Huelgas, naturally (26 August), but also the Eton Choirbook, a marvellous collection of English church music from the 16th century that has never been out of the eponymous public school (21 August), and the Bologna Q15 which numbers no fewer than 323 pieces, 128 of them unique (24 August).

Other guests of note include Jordi Savall who, with his wife Montserrat Figueras and their ensembles Hesperion XXI and Lux Feminae, will present their own reading of the Codex Las Huelgas (28 August); The Tallis Schollars, who will have another crack at the Eton Choirbook (29 August); and the Ensemble Clément Janequin who, helmed by star counter-tenor Dominique Visse, will sing the Flemish beauties held in the Liedboek van Zeghere van Male, once the property of a Bruges bookseller and now kept in Cambrai, northern France (22 August). Special mention must go to 32-yearold Belgian viola da gamba player Thomas Baeté who will introduce his brand new ensemble ClubMediéval in a concert based on the Codex Squarcialupi. The 14th-century Italian volume has long been an obsession of Baeté’s: particularly puzzled by the 16 folios that were left blank, he will undertake to recreate the kind of music they might have contained (21 August).

The festival will spare no effort to cast its nets wider than this music’s traditional niche audience, offering summer schools in polyphony and choral singing for professionals and amateurs, a course for children aiming to infect them with the bug of musical investigation, and even organising a series of small concerts by young international musicians spread out around Antwerp’s historic centre. Outlandish this music may well be, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyed by everyone.

21 - 29 August
Amuz and other Antwerp venues
www.amuz.be