Like almost all the important things that have happened in my working life, joining the Swingle Singers (Swingle II, as they were about to become) was a serendipitous accident (through meeting an old mate in a pub).  I’d done quite a bit of microphone work but I was still set on becoming what we used to call an oratorio singer (and was still having the odd lesson with Walter Gruner). In no time at all, together with Olive Simpson, Mary Beverley, Linda Hirst, Amy Gunson, John Lubbock and David Beavan, I found myself doing Berio’s Sinfonia in Paris conducted by Pierre Boulez (or was it Luciano himself? I can’t remember). For a young singer barely out of vocal nappies that was quite something. I’d never heard of Berio, and Sinfonia and later A-Ronne became almost an obsession. I had no idea that contemporary music could be that visceral and exhilarating. These days Sinfonia for singers is a bit like the beginning of the Rite for bassoonists: what used to be barely possible after countless hours of work is  now within easy reach of good students, but back then it took over our lives.   The first gigs of the new group were all Berio as it took us about a year to learn the Swingle jazz technique  well enough to unleash it on the pubic (in fact we junked an early attempt at recording Bach after more than 100 hours of rehearse/recording, once we finally discovered how to do it).

I learned a huge amount from Ward. It wasn’t always easy – he often found the English sense of humour quite baffling, which sometimes led to terrible misunderstandings. We were never very good at scat (the English choral tradition has its limits…) but through his previous immersion in jazz he was able to teach us how words work, and how they relate to rhythm and tempo; lessons I’ve never forgotten. The Berio gigs were always amazing, especially when conducted by the man himself. I seem to remember the poor Sinfonia pianist getting fired rather often, and between rehearsals the composer could sometimes be found looking in the window of what used to be called surgical stores. I never did get to the bottom of that one. We were once sitting in a cafe when a Gilbert O’Sullivan song came on the muzak. Berio was entranced: ‘I wish I could write tunes like that,’ he said. Which, actually, he could.

The pop gigs evolved and so did the personnel. Catherine Bott took over from Mary, Amy didn’t like to fly so gave way to Carol Hall, and Simon Grant replaced John Lubbock who was getting busy as a conductor.  After three years some of us were clearly more interested in extended vocal techniques and developing the avant-garde side, and there was a big bust up when Linda, Simon and I left to form Electric Phoenix, along with the manager and sound engineer Terry Edwards. Kate Bott left at the same time to pursue her interest in early music.

What a fantastic time it was (in retrospect) – and how lucky we were to be in the right place at the right time. It was sad that it ended so acrimoniously: I guess we were just young and cocky, and wanted a group that was ours rather than Ward’s (we called him Boss); all of the members of that incarnation of the group went on to have extraordinary careers.  It was a privilege to work with Ward, which I acknowledged  in the preface to my first book, Vocal Authority.

The reason for this digression into ancient history is the story of the group that has appeared online at http://www.jazzhistoryonline.com/, which Olive Simpson drew our attention to. It starts with the French group and continues to the present day (our four mid-seventies years being a very small part of the 50 years the group has been going). If you’re a Swingle fan (or former member) it makes interesting reading.

Programmes

I’ve replaced the rather rambling Ensemble, Being Dufay and Lutesongs pages with a much simpler Programmes page, which gives basic details of my main performing projects for this year and next, which are (in alphabetical order): Being Dufay (and its successor), the Conductus Project,  the Dowland Project, and lute songs. The Red Byrd discography has been updated to include the two latest releases. RB isn’t offering specific programmes but we have a number of special requests in the pipeline and are working on these. The Dowland Project also has concerts later in the year, and we’re still waiting for a definite release date from ECM which we hope will generate some more.  The album will be the group’s most radical (and possibly its last), focusing on medieval music and improvisation. There are  also  more succinct Biography and Coaching pages and a slightly edited entry page.

There are Amazon Stores for both the Dowland Project and Red Byrd, with a complete discography and biography on each. I also have a writer’s page, though you may get a primary school teacher of the same name or the magical Harry (the CD page is pretty basic at the moment, but will eventually have a representative selection).

A History of Singing

The book is due any day now, and the dedicated page here is intended to link bits of it with recordings and concerts. The book doesn’t have a formal discography (redundant in the age of Google) so I  thought I’d take the opportunity to track down various YouTube examples of my own stuff and match them up with references in the book. It does this by means of  a Prezi presentation which I hope will be a bit more fun than just a list of stuff. If this works I may expand the concept to include other bits of writing (such as my chapters in the two forthcoming Cambridge Histories).

Hyperion Conductus project

The first edit is done, so we’re on track to release the first album at the next York Early Music Festival. Mick Lynch has made a short video for  YouTube which can be seen here. It has shots from the recording sessions  and gives an idea of what his accompanying films will look like (it’s not an actual album track…). We’ve already had enquiries about future concerts, and if you would like information about the live version  please contact Robert White (rwhiteam@aol.com). There was  considerable debate about the titles of the CD series; we finally agreed on Conductus l, ll and lll, with subtitles for each one. The concerts are intended to be experimental – trying things out for future recordings but also using ideas that may only work live and not bear the inevitable repetition of a recording.

The next recording period will be in November, and the intention is to launch Conductus ll in the 2013 York Early Music Festival, at a Plainsong & Medieval Music Society event in the Chapter House of York Minster. There is a dedicateed page on this site; you can also see more details on Christopher O’Gorman’s site.  Southampton University’s Cantum Pulcriorem Invenire site has detailed informatio about the whole project, including its academic profile.

Dowland Project

ECM are now planning a spring release of the ‘Night Sessions’ album. Concerts are planned for late spring.

History of Singing

Potter & Sorrell  will be launched at an informal event in the CUP shop in King’s Parade, probably in March. There will be contributions from a section of the CUP choir and (hopefully) some ethnic singing introduced by Neil Sorrell. On February 4th I’ll be doing a recital of English and Italian music with Yair Avidor (lute) at Fitzwilliam College in the evening.

I’m working on a Prezi presentation for a History of Singing page which will link aspects of the book to some of my performing and recording activities.

More soon.

…The Dignity of Art…?

We’ve just finished our first CD of 12^th century song. It was a real revelation:  after the very long gestation period everything finally came into focus and we think we have a ground-breaking album.

Recording as Research

Christopher O’Gorman and I, aided and abetted by Rogers Covey-Crump,  took our first tentative steps back in the spring, sight-reading from facsimiles of the Florence MS in front of a battery of Southampton musicologists led by Mark Everist. These exploratory sessions were often hilarious, and left Chris and me with plenty to think about in the ensuing months. Like most of our fellow performers we three tenors are very much of the get-there-by-the-shortest-possible-route school of practical vocalism, and reading from facsimile would not normally be our first choice (after all, what are musicologists for if not to furnish you with the notes?). We had to decipher ambiguous pitches, four-line staves and strange clefs (not to mention the dreaded ficta  issue) – before we could even begin to have a dialogue with the musicologists about the real issues of the project, which are to do with rhythm.

The old Anderson editions (and most other modern editors) shoehorn the neumes into one or more of the rhythmic modes. This masks the fact that there are two sorts of notation in most conducti (nb pedants: the plural is usually treated as 2^nd declension, though at the time it was considered 4^th), and no one’s really been able to figure out how to make the non-rhythmic bits work (if indeed they are supposed to be without metrical rhythm).

After our first week of experiments, Chris O’Gorman and I took away the facsimiles (plus copies of Anderson to cheat with if necessary) and met from time to time to try to make some progress, helped by the odd extra edited version from Southampton. After much frustration and seeming to get not very far, the pieces gradually began to  come together, especially reading the non measured material from facsimile (or an edited equivalent) – these are the bits that carry the text and are intended to have poetic, rhetorical rhythm rather than measured bars. Eventually it became perfectly natural to merge into and out of modal rhythm for the long melismatic passages that are interspersed with the text-bearing sections.  In the recording sessions I think we proved that the whole thing worked, greatly assisted by Jeremy Summerly as producer, and with Mark Everist keeping a keen eye on  the practical musicology.  It was a joy to do – a knowledgeable and enthusiastic  producer and an undogmatic and creative musicologist made the sessions very satisfying. We also knew that we were doing the music in a way that no one’s done it since the 12^th century (and possibly not then either, of course…): it made a terrific start to the project.

Research as Performance

The first live performance will be a late night event in next year’s York Early Music Festival at All Saints Church on the Harewood House Estate. The music will be the two-voice pieces from the first album (provisionally called The Dignity of Art after the conductus Artium Dignitas). It will be accompanied by a video, commissioned from  Michael Lynch (who did the films for Being Dufay and took the shots on this page).

The project will have a three year recording life span (2^nd the 3^rd albums in 2013 and 2014) and a performance life beyond that for as long as people want to hear it. The next recordings should be a lot easier than this first one as we now know more or less what we’re doing, and our default way of working will be from facsimile for the rhetorical sections (which produced much more convincing results than using edited versions, apparently). There are plans to launch the 2^nd album at the PMMS conference in July 2013 with a concert in the Chapter House of York Minster, also during the Early Music Festival. The culmination of the research will eventually result in a monograph for Cambridge University Press: Discovering Song: Thirteenth-Century Latin Poetry and Music.

One of the reasons for commissioning the video which will accompany live performances was that I wasn’t sure that audiences would be able to take a whole hour of two medieval tenors without falling asleep. In fact our experience so far has been the opposite – the music is exciting, dynamic, virtuosic and even sometimes moving, often with dramatic contrasts between measured and unmeasured sections. The video will certainly be more colourful to look at than me and Chris (though audiences will have the option to do that too, of course), and the whole multi-media experience should create a very special atmosphere that puts audiences in touch not just with creative musicology, but also a magical musical aesthetic of 800 years ago.

Performances are very straightforward to organise – the venue just needs to provide a projector and (large) screen (or whitewashed medieval wall…); Mick Lynch controls the films from his laptop while Chris O’Gorman and I sing music from the albums in real time.  Further details can be had from Robert White Artist Management (RWhiteAM@aol.com).

V A  was my first book. It was based on my PhD thesis, and like many first books it’s very much of its time (as is Bostridge’s review). It still figures on university reading lists, especially in the USA, and I sometimes get asked if I would write the same book today. The answer is ‘no’ (often to the dismay of the enquirer).   I’ve come close to attempting a successor, but disillusionment with academia set in a while ago and the History of Singing that Neil Sorrell and I have just finished is definitely my last foray into anything remotely academic. I suspect poor IB won’t like that either, should he happen to stumble across it, but he can take comfort from the fact that it’s my last in this particular genre.

But having said all that, I have been touched by the reception Vocal Authority had (and still gets) in certain quarters.  Converting the thesis into a book was a long and frustrating process. In the thesis I put the theory chapter last as it was generated by the main body of material and I didn’t want readers to be distracted by my Gramscian analysis if they weren’t that way inclined.  At my viva the examiners asked me to move the theory to the front (in keeping with more usual academic practice). This was in the days when cutting and pasting meant literally that, and it took forever to make the change.  Then having finally done it, I collected the copies from the binders on my way back from a gig, fell asleep on the tube and woke up to find my bag had been nicked. Poor thief – three copies of Vocal Authority, my concert gear and the previous day’s shirt and underwear.  The upside was that my examiners – having eventually taken delivery of a second set of copies –  kindly said they thought it publishable  and suggested I sent the thesis  to CUP, who liked it but said they’d much rather the theory chapter was at the back…

It was worth the agony though. Being a performer can be a humbling experience – people being moved by what you do – but performances die even as they’re born, so their effect is confined to the moment (or the immediate memory). Writing on the other hand stays with you, right or wrong. The Cambridge UL copy of VA has been somewhat cynically (and definitely illegally) annotated in pencil by a reader of the Bostridge persuasion who thinks it’s complete rubbish, and you expect disagreement (better that than readers falling asleep). But the compensation when someone tells you that you’ve changed their life is quite something. It’s happened to me on a number of occasions in different parts of the world with Vocal Authority (not with anything else I’ve written, sadly).  I wrote it to try to explain the world of singing as I saw it then, but it clearly touched a nerve with many singers. There won’t be many bookshelves where it sits side by side with A Singer’s Notebook but both books have in common a singer’s musings on aspects of history and the sometimes rather unworldly profession that we inhabit, and the fact that we can have such differing perspectives is not such a bad thing.

NMC has released a CD of Thea Musgrave’s Wild Winter, which she composed for us in 1993. The recording is taken from the Radio 3 broadcast of the first performance in Lichfield Cathedral in the 1993 Lichfield Festival. I’d almost forgotten all about it, and was surprised by how energised it sounds. The other singers in addition to me and Richard Wistreich are a very lively Ian Honeyman (currently doing a charity walk the length of the country singing for his supper) and Canadian soprano Suzie LeBlanc. We’re accompanied by the supremely elegant Fretwork (including the much missed Richard Campbell, whose memorial service is at St Martin in the Fields on November 28^th). The title of the album is An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge NMC D167.

The Sound and the Fury

…have just finished recording the complete works of Firminus Caron. We already have one Caron CD out, and it’s rumoured that the complete set of masses and chansons will be out before the end of the year. Next year we’ll be re-recording Ockeghem’s Prolationum mass and several versions of the Cuius Vis Toni.

Cantum Puchriorum Invenire

The first recording of this research programme is about to happen, and we hope the release will coincide with the first live outing of the programme in next year’s York Early Music Festival, which will be in the Harewood House church, featuring a newly commissioned video from Michael Lynch. Chris O’Gorman and I have been rehearsing from beautiful facsimiles of the Florence manuscript, and we’re about to find out if our de-rhythmicised efforts actually work.

Dowland Project

We hope the CD will appear early in the new year, but we’re still waiting for a date from ECM.

…and the History of Singing

…is finally done, with the page proofs back with Cambridge University Press. When the book appears (January if we stick to the schedule) I’ll make a dedicated page on this site linking aspects of the book with some of my recordings and concert projects. The Cambridge History of Musical Performance (to which I contributed a chapter on the long 18th century) is due in February, with the Cambridge History of Medieval Music (my chapter is on modern performance thereof) following later in the year. That’s an awful lot of academic stuff for a lapsed academic – it must be time to write a novel…

Having just proof-read my two Cambridge Music History chapters (both should be published next year) and being in the middle of proof-reading the History of Singing I’m more than usually conscious of whether or not I practice what I preach. All of my historical writing is generated as far as possible by the actuality of performance – in a nutshell what singers might actually have sung rather than what composers or theorists may have written (or expected, or hoped for…),  a historical perspective rather than a musicological one. It’s not always easy to incorporate elements of historical practice: the early music movement is very selective in what it chooses to recover from the past, and there are entire institutions dedicated to perpetuating a new and improved version of history.

Much of the time modern singers are at the mercy of conductors, directors of one sort or another, or simply the ideology of modern performance. The latter has its roots way back in the 20^th century, when the composer’s word finally became law. Within the early music movement, despite welcome moves to the contrary in some quarters, there’s still a view that even the 15^th or 16^th century composer was the fount of all inspiration and that a musicologist who works on the surviving manuscripts is his representative here on earth. Unfortunately, many musicologists tend to privilege musical theory rather than performance practice, the rules rather than their application, and in their wish to preserve the integrity of the composer too often resort to what the text books of the time prescribe  rather than the less tidy but more creative flights of fancy that the singers might have enjoyed. You wouldn’t try  to reconstruct Impressionism from art teaching manuals of the period – you’d end up with view of what the teachers might have wanted rather than what their wayward pupils came up with, and a completely distorted view of the past.

There is a major conflict of interest here between musicologists and historians – the former are likely to want something faithful to what they see as the surviving remnants and reputation of the composer, while the latter are more interested in the performances he may have heard. The modern idea of a composer able to demand that performers do his bidding, or indeed that the score might represent a performance at all, is far too often imposed on historical periods when such concepts simply didn’t exist. There are few things more depressing for a singer than having a musicological policeman imposing his or her will ‘because the composer wanted it that way.’ Composition as we now understand it, the creative act of a single inspired mind, perfectly formed in order to be worshipped and interpreted by others, didn’t really exist until Wagner and only found its fully reductive form with Schoenberg and Stravinsky. By treating renaissance composers like their modern equivalents we do the music a huge disservice; we also misrepresent the past and make things much less fun for singers.

From a singer’s point of view, the task of the musicologist is simply to produce a readable score. The edition can have any amount of performance suggestions, but the decisions on what and how to sing should be left to the singers. That’s how it worked at the time.  In the case of renaissance music, there is now a living tradition – generations of singers have grown up knowing the rules of ficta and how to interpret proportion signs. We’ve also grown up with the performance practice sources (such as they are) and we know full well that if a source keeps insisting that singers do things in a certain way, it’s because the singers of the time were reluctant to stick to the rules. The single thread that runs through all my research into performance practice is that singers were (until the 20^th century) a law unto themselves. If everybody had sung according to the rules there would have been no need for the frequent complaints about the tritone and other colourful indiscretions.

So…bring on the creative and spontaneous use of theoretical apparatus – let’s have a plurality of performance practice driven by what feels right to those who practice the performing. We rarely discussed ficta in the Hilliard Ensemble, and we had an understanding that the first voice to encounter a problem would set the mode for the rest of the piece. Next time it could be different – there are usually many possibilities (often no right answers) and we wouldn’t want to be stuck with the same solution for ever. On one early trip to the USA we sang at a conference and afterwards an eager PhD student came round to ask if we raised cadential leading notes in late medieval polyphony. ‘Sometimes,’ was our reply. The distaste and incomprehension on the face of the student, whose entire academic career was devoted to getting a definitive answer to this question one way or the other, was a wonder to behold.

It’s coming up to the first anniversary of my return to freelancing.  It’s also the anniversary of my first attempts at blogging (thankyou Ned for getting me started – I’m afraid my efforts are never going to match yours).

Made it!  I was very heartened by so many people  seeming to think I was doing the right thing. Only a few said  I was brave (a polite way of saying I was stupid) and it’s been a very exciting year.

I’ve been quite pleased that the academic/pedagogical side hasn’t disappeared altogether.  I still get asked to do keynote conference papers, and the doctoral examining has branched out into Europe (really interesting).  I’ve done lots of coaching and workshops from Scandinavia to Slovenia, and  I’ve encountered some really creative students wanting more than just one-to-one singing lessons. A bit like having postgrads but without all the bureaucracy.  It’s ideal really – I  get  to do the interesting stuff and none of the boring institutional bits. Can’t help feeling a little Schadenfreude thinking of my ex-colleagues about to start a new term…

I wonder if it’s actually possible to give yourself completely to a regular job or project and still keep the freshness (maybe the naivety) that attracted you to it in the first place.  Three of the most important things in my life have been Electric Phoenix, The Hilliard Ensemble and my university job. I loved and left them all, and for the same reasons:  once I’d got the hang of them and found myself unable to think in terms of permanent revolution any more I just couldn’t knuckle down and get on with it. I never did get to love big brother (though at York I came pretty close once or twice).  A very great friend of mine once said I couldn’t cope with success, but I think it’s more a case of just not wanting to  grow up. I’m actually very lucky to be able to earn a living as a permanent adolescent – like most of the performers I know, in fact.

It’s been liberating to be able to pursue my own projects, whether in performance, writing or teaching. It hasn’t always been easy – the ECM recording sessions were a bit of a shock to the system (my mistake, and it all turned out OK in the end), and CUP took a while to understand what we had in mind for the referencing system in the history book; and telling a conference in Germany that they should all change their singing teachers when one of them was Francisco Araiza was a bit daft. But on the whole I think I’ve got away with it. There’s been lots of interest in the tenor book, and I’ve corresponded (at length in some cases) with people all over the world who know much more about the topic than I do.   My friend Larry Josefovitz, for example  – I don’t think he would object to my calling him that even though we have never met – was able to guide me through the Jewish part of the singing history as a result of his having read the tenor book. Larry’s an Orthodox Jew, an American Zionist, and I’m a heathen with a secular European take on religion and the Arab/Israeli comflict, yet in metaphysical and musical matters we have a huge amount in common. Venn Diagrams again.

The gigs have been fantastic – whether sweltering in Seville with Ariel Abramovich, going to Tampere  for jury service and Being Dufay, or  busking with Gavin Bryars at Opera North’s Howard  Assembly Rooms.  I’ve also been inspired by some amazing music throughout the year. Not just by friends and colleagues but by musicians I’ve never met. At the top must be Gianluigi Trovesi, whose ECM recording Profumo di Violetta in some ways epitomises the permanent adolescent musical life. You can’t categorise his music: there’s not a trace of the old avant-garde or of post-modernism either – along with 70s Genesis, Satie or Percy Grainger  he probably wouldn’t cut it in contemporary academia.  We’re going to miss the CD format when it’s gone – just taking the album out of its sleeve is an adventure: the Sascha Kleis  cover (typical ECM – where does that water come from? Bergamo’s on a hill…),  the Roberto Masotti photos, and the touching liner note by Trovesi himself about the town bands that he grew up with in the northern Italian valleys. Then there’s the music – an exhuberant pillaging of Italian opera from Monteverdi to Mascagni. Has ‘Pur ti miro’ ever sounded more eloquent than as a flugelhorn and saxophone duet, or the windband arrangement of the Orfeo fanfare more riotous? He even makes you wish you could play the clarinet. And it all happens in a magical acoustic representation of  the cathedral piazza in Bergamo – where I’ve been so many times with family and friends (and I’m still waiting to be paid for a gig I did in the opera house two years ago).

THE FUTURE

The coming year is also full of excitements: three CDs to record between now and Christmas, and 2012 will see the release of the new Dowland Project album (actual date to be anounced at the end of September), the first Cantum release (July at the York Early Music Festival) and several more Sound & Fury CDs. On the publishing front,  CUP will launch the history of singing and two other Cambridge Histories that I’ve contributed chapters to (page proofs for the history book are due back at the Press at the beginning of October and it should be in the shops in February). Gigs and workshops continue to materialise, and I’ll even have time to start on a new book…

I’ve just been a guest at the Stimmwercktage at Adlersberg near Regensburg. Stimmwerck is one of the most enterprising and creative acappella groups around, and each year they devote the first  weekend in August to one particular composer or manuscript. This year it was the Schalreuter Handschrift, a huge collection of 16th century motets and psalms, many by composers who are otherwise unknown or whose works only survive in this manuscript. The music was collected from the Protestant cantorate all over southern Germany at a time when the Protestants were seeking to create a functioning liturgical music which would rival that of the Catholic establishment. It’s extraordinarily rich stuff (some of the motets are over ten minutes long) – shades of Josquin but in a parallel universe.

Adlersberg is in an idyllic spot on a hill just outside Regensburg. It’s essentially a church (wonderful acoustic) with  a large inn, the Prösslbräu,   attached. Instead of the nunnery that the church supported, there is now a small brewery which has been in the Prössl family for five generations. It’s the perfect venue for a small festival – music and sustenance  straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. In fact we shared our dressing room space with a horse and a goat, both of whom were very friendly.

As well as joining Stimmwerck for some stunning motets and doing the occasional lute version with Paul O’Dette, I was asked to give a workshop on singing renaissance music. It was bursting with people, and there were some very courageous and receptive singers. I talked for about half an hour first, beginning with the reasons why the modern singing of renaissance music is like it is, and contrasting it with instrumental practice. Early instrumentalists generally have a much closer relationship with actual history, having the benefit of a thriving community of practice with players and makers actually having to do research (as opposed to singers rarely being able to get round the singing teacher problem). I also talked about the real life of renaissance music – the actual use to which it was mostly put (as opposed to the surviving manuscripts which had relatively little use), and Paul O’Dette and I busked a version of one of the Schalreuter pieces. Using the original polyphony as source material for doing your own thing was standard 16^th century practice; we did a different version in the evening concert and had the students trying to improve on the original too.  Sometimes workshop participants are bemused by my take on early music (they’ve usually been taught the difference between renaissance right and wrong) but times are definitely changing – and this was one of those wonderful occasions when you could see the lights going on  in people’s heads.

A big thankyou to the Stimmwerckers – Marcus, Klaus, Gerhard and Franz (seen here with yours truly, goat and horse).  It was a  privilege to be part of it.  Stimmwerck have many enthusiastic supporters of all ages, and there was a real sense of a musical community coming together to have a great time.    If anyone fancies rolling up next year, they’re doing music from the Trent Codices – some of the most amazing music ever written – so book early to be sure of a seat. Deutschland Radio are broadcasting some of this year’s music Sunday 21^st at 7.00 if you’re near a computer.

New Release early 2012

ECM have confirmed that the new Dowland Project album will be released next year.  We won’t know the actual date till September, but it’s likely to be sometime before April. This is particularly exciting news as it will bring together all the musicians who’ve played for the band, Stephen Stubbs, John Surman, Barry Guy,  Maya Homburger and Milos Valent.  It means we’ll be able to  perform in various permutations, depending on players’ availability (and promoters’ budgets), and we’re hoping that everyone will be in Europe in September 2012 so we can do concerts then (if you’re a promoter reading this, please contact Robert White Artist Management: RWhiteAM@aol.com).

History…

This will be our fourth album, and as it’s so difficult to get everyone together, possibly our last. Unfortunately, we all now live in different countries (Steve Stubbs in the USA, John Surman in Norway, Milos Valent in Slovakia,  Barry Guy & Maya Homburger in Switzerland and I’m in York).  It’s been a wonderfully inspiring adventure, which began twelve years ago with Manfred Eicher’s famous response to my original suggestion of Dowland….’ah, but you don’t want to use any of those boring early music players, do you?’. To which I replied after only a nano-second’s hesitation ‘…er, no of course not.’ The first album didn’t have the name, we just called it Dowland. The original plan was to put my name on the front but I couldn’t agree to the other players not being there too, so I joined them on the back. We always referred to it as ‘the Dowland project’, so when the second album ‘ Care Charming Sleep’ came round, the name chose itself. But there’s no Dowland on it, some people pointed out. It’s as in the Monteverdi Choir doing Bach, I’d reply, not entirely accurately.

This is what we looked like at our launch gig in Bremen back in the twentieth century:

Steve Stubbs has always been the engine room of the band, and having played with everyone from Chuck Berry to William Christie there’s nothing he can’t cope with or be inspired by.

Steve and I have worked together for years, since we first met soon after I joined the Hilliard Ensemble. Barry Guy I’d known even longer, and I’ve been involved in some iconic Guy works over the years. He wrote Hold Hands and Sing for Electric Phoenix back in the seventies – a Dada-based riot of a piece featuring the Magical Movement Machine –  and then the multi-instrumental Waiata for me and Philip Pickett (bits of which Richard Wistreich and I still perform); he wrote Un Coup de Des for the Hilliard Composition Competition and I used to do it regularly with students at York. John Surman I only knew as a jazz legend, but I very quickly got to know and enjoy his wonderfully quirky playing across that creative borderline where we operate (not to mention his sense of humour – he could literally dumbfound me mid-piece). Maya Homburger and Milos Valent came, like me, from the world of early music, but from that end of it which, like jazz, knows few constraints. We work very closely with producer Manfred Eicher, whose input into the recording sessions has always been transformative and inspirational.

The ‘Night Sessions’

The working title is ‘Night Sessions’. It’s been very hard to keep quiet  about this,  as I think it’s by far the best thing we’ve done. Most of the tracks  date from 2002 after we recorded  Care Charming Sleep. In fact it’s just a single session which we recorded having finished the album and spent the evening celebrating. Way past my bed time Manfred suggested we go back in the church and record some more. We didn’t have any more music so we used medieval poems as a basis for improvisation. The result was  radically different from anything we’d done  before  (Barry, Maya, Steve and JS all at their brilliant best). We didn’t even think of releasing it as it was so  different from anything else we’d done , and we thought that people would be completely baffled by it.  So time passed and in 2006  we recorded Romaria as a step t0wards this  new direction. The Romaria sessions included the  bizarre 14th century Fumeurs Fumee (with its impenetrable text about smoking dope of some sort), one of several medieval pieces that didn’t fit with the rest of the material, and we decided to  put these with the Night Sessions music to make a complete album. It’s certainly the most extraordinary record we’ve ever made: medieval music in the usual Dowland Project style, plus medieval-inspired improvisation that transcends all of the usual parameters by about a million miles.  All the improv pieces are single takes so it has a fantastically live feel to it.

More details on the release and tour dates as we get them.