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Richard Wistreich, John Potter, Singing early music: a conversation, Early Music, Volume 41, Issue 1, February 2013, Pages 22–26, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cas155
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When John Potter and Richard Wistreich founded their ensemble Red Byrd in 1989 they announced that they ‘believed that the point of singing music of the past is to illuminate the present’.1 This was an attempt to distil something of the conversations and ideas they had been exchanging for a number of years, while each worked in various different early and contemporary music ensembles. For this special edition of Early Music they publish a recent conversation (conducted this time largely by email) about singing, the early music movement, and higher education.
Richard: When Early Music hit the newsstands for the first time in 1973, you were freelancing in London with some of the seminal early music groups, including David Munrow’s Early Music Consort, putting into practice his occasionally weird ideas about historical singing. You also joined Ward Swingle’s new Swingle II, which set extraordinary new standards for precision, polish and breadth of repertory. Meanwhile, I was joining King’s College Choir in Cambridge and beginning my apprenticeship in another parallel world of bizarre vocal authority. How lucky I was to arrive in London four years later when the experimental years of the first early music revival had not quite come to an end (I was fortunate to join Michael Morrow’s Musica Reservata for its final year) and the commercial power of the record industry had not yet established its stranglehold on so much professional activity in the UK in the performance of music from before 1750 in ways that soon afterwards began to dominate the lives of most rank-and-file musicians.
