Ensemble Faronel – medieval and renaissance music.

The ensemble specialises in concerts that introduce audiences to early music with the aid of explanations of the instruments, the repertoire and the contexts of the music.

They are:
David Force read music as an organ scholar at the University of Durham; he subsequently gained an MA with distinction in musicology and a PhD for his research on English domestic music of the seventeenth century. David worked as a Head of Academic Music and Director of Music in independent schools in Cumbria, East Sussex and Kent, and is now a Visiting Fellow in musicology at the Open University. He works as an editor for several European musicological publishers and is the author of the book The Consort Organ and its Role in Seventeenth-Century Ensemble Music (Ashgate Historical Keyboard Series, forthcoming 2025). In addition to freelance period keyboard work, David directs the Mayfield Consort and the early music ensemble Faronel.

Ruth Force studied as a choral scholar at the University of Durham and has worked as a primary school teacher and headteacher in Lincolnshire and East Sussex. A winner of Trinity Laban College’s Bernarr Rainbow Award for her research in music education, she has been involved in developing the National Foundation for Youth Music’s work in primary schools. An experienced solo singer, she sings with the Mayfield Consort and has also co-written and directed several children’s music theatre projects. She and David are two thirds of the early music ensemble Faronel, which specialises in late medieval and renaissance repertoire.

This year they will be joined by the multi-instrumentalist Michael Withers