There's plenty to sing about Aberdeen's music-making tradition, says Roger Williams

For this was the time of the great polyphonic Renaissance composers of the Low Countries including Jean de Ockeghem (c1430-c1496), Jacob Obrecht (1453-1505) and Guillermus Dufay (c1400-1474). These were musical giants whose elaborate works are often supported by fantastical structures - in some ways mirroring the well ordered hierarchies of society and the medieval church itself - paralleled by the ambitious architecture of the major cathedrals of the period.

Plainchant was the bedrock of the daily office as sung at King's Chapel in its early years and also the foundation of the masses and motets which made such a major contribution to the liturgy of the medieval church. The works of Robert Carver (1487-c1546) and his contemporaries at Scone, now happily restored to the public domain, are among the few remains of what is thought to have been a rich and extensive Scottish tradition of performing polyphonic music with its origins in improvisation. This partially explains the sectional nature of much of Carver's work in which relatively simple textures are juxtaposed next to passages of demanding technical exuberance.

Today, the Chapel is used for concerts of secular music as part of the University Music series, and in the last few years string quartets, various baroque concerts and solo recitals have all been featured in a building whose fine, true acoustic matches its architectural beauty. The Chapel Choir has a range of works reflecting both contemporary and older traditions, maintaining the Founder's concepts of supporting the best of the new and the retention of the old.

Bishop Elphinstone would probably be surprised at the dominance of the vernacular, but we hope that he would recognise some of the chants sung at University services. Further surprises would doubtless be caused by the more modern repertoire of works by Bach and Handel, and his aural credulity would surely be stretched by a recent performance of an even more modern work, the Requiem by the French composer Gabriel Fauré. His ears would be stunned by some of the more recent commissions from Judith Weir and John McLeod to celebrate the foundation of the University Quincentenary in 1995.

Recent interest in pre-Reformation culture has produced unusual and unexpected connections. In the mid-1960s, a celebrated professor of Music, Wilfred Mellors, gave a series of lectures on parallels between the forms of medieval chant and the melodic formulae in popular songs written by The Beatles. Now sales of recordings of plainchant and Renaissance polyphony have never been so buoyant, and interest in performance using original instruments in appropriately sized rooms to create the 'authentic' sound has become an important part of modern culture.

The present popularity of plainchant adds yet a further dimension to the interest in 'old' music. Restoration of ancient Scottish chant, which the Glasgow-based Capella Nova have assiduously promoted, is part of a wider movement which has seen new centres devoted to the study of chant, most notably in Paris and Trondheim.

In Britain, over the last 30 years, Mary Berry, with crusading zeal, has inspired many hundreds of singers to perform and study the ancient chant and place it within its special historical context. Perhaps this great interest today in a form of music which arose in a time, and for a culture, very different from our own will ensure that it remains as popular in 500 years time.

Dr Roger Williams is Director of University Music.