John Potter is best known for the many years
of his excellent work with the Hilliard Ensemble, but he has
had experience of many different musical environments over
the years.
He was a member of Swingle II, Ward Swingle’s English ensemble;
he put in stints backing such luminaries as Mike Oldfield, Manfred
Mann and The Who. All this happened before he joined the Hilliard
Ensemble in 1984 – he sang with them for eighteen years – so too
did a spell working with John Whiting in a voice and electronic
duo. A post-Hilliard incarnation was as Reader in Music at the
University of York. A colleague in the music department in York
was Ambrose Field. Field is best known as a composer working with
digital technologies - he has won several awards from Linz’s Prix
Ars Electronica. Field’s page on the website of York’s music department
describes his research interests as “Composition, Post-modernism,
Crossing Genre and Style Boundaries in Music”. We need hardly
be surprised that Potter and Field should have found themselves
collaborating. The results are rewarding and intriguing.
The third track here, ‘Being Dufay’, apparently had its origins
in a commission for a festival held in Vigevano (in Lombardy);
the suite which now carries the same title has been performed
live on a number of occasions, generally accompanied by films
made by Michael Lynch (see the Artlynch website).
This multi-media presentation has attracted very favourable reviews
in both Europe and Australia.
Even without Lynch’s visual input, as on this CD, Being Dufay
is a satisfying experience. Apart from the voiceless ‘Presque
quelque chose’, each track features John Potter’s singing of melodies
and words from Dufay’s songs; these vocal interpretations are
elaborated upon, transformed, commented upon, supplemented, introduced,
decorated, absorbed, processed, hidden, revealed – and much else
– by Field’s electronic input. Just as Dufay often worked with
pre-existing musical materials, employing them as the cantus firmus
for his own compositional activity, so here Dufay’s melodies themselves
are made to serve a similar role (though that it not to say that
they are simply made subservient) in Field’s work. The precise
process varies from track to track, though there is a methodological
unity to the disc heard whole. In ‘Ma belle dame souveraine’,
for example, Potter’s voice emerges from, and disappears into,
what one experiences as an electronic evocation of space, creating
illusions both of surrounding silence and distance and of a containing
resonance. Elsewhere Field creates what one might, by analogy,
think of as a kind of film music, related to the ‘story’ told
- or more accurately implied - by the brief fragments of Dufay’s
music and text. It is interesting that Field’s own booklet notes
include the phrase “full audio technicolor” to describe the effect
created at the close of ‘Je me complains’. At times the electronic
sounds dominate and enclose, even submerge, Potter’s voice;
at others the electronic materials are altogether more fugitive,
no more than gestures of sound, as it were, evanescent and
on
the very borders of silence. Sometimes the sounds Potter produces
are in no way mimetic; at others one hears unmistakable allusions
to, say, the song of birds.
Those who remain suspicious of electronic music are urged to
give this a listen. It is music which persuasively invites
the listener’s
attention. In Being Dufay the early composer’s lines (verbal
and musical) are forgotten and remembered, uttered anew in a different
world from that in which they had their origins, being recreated
in a fashion which effectively acknowledges our necessarily fractured,
but fascinated, relationship to music that comes to us from over
a half a millennium ago. Being Dufay enacts both that music’s
innate enduring strength and its historical fragility, movingly
articulates the tenuity of our hold on it. This often very beautiful
disc, explores the ways in which accessing the music of the past
necessarily involves our re-creating it, demonstrates how we can
choose to make it ‘authentic’ for ourselves in a manner quite
distinct from the ‘historical’ authenticity pursued by many
Early Music practitioners.
Glyn Pursglove
John Potter (tenor) 
