Fractio Modi was formed in New York City in 2018, and moved to Brisbane in 2022 when Artistic Director Anne Levitsky took up a lectureship in Music at the University of Queensland. Our mission is to perform early vocal music at the highest level, and to present innovative methods of singing medieval and Renaissance music to audiences both scholarly and public. We aim to make Brisbane the centre of early music in Australia.

Our name comes from the medieval development of rhythmic notation, which first appears in manuscript sources from ca. 1175-1200. This early rhythmic notation, called the rhythmic modes, consists of patterns of long and short notes that correspond to different poetic feet (trochee, iamb, dactyl, etc.). The rhythmic modes are most often encountered in longer phrases of the smaller rhythmic patterns, and these phrases are called ordines (singular: ordo). Sometimes, the normal pattern of long and short notes was broken up into smaller note values—usually, the long note was broken up into shorter ones. This breaking up of the rhythmic pattern is called fractio modi. Because we often 'break up' expected patterns of performance—either by juxtaposing works from different time periods or geographical locations in the same program, or by experimenting with different methods of historically-informed performance practices—we have chosen it as our name.