It was November 1973, nearly 26 years ago actually. At the time I didn’t think it would be successful. I had no idea what I was doing and I was just 20 years old at the time. I was literally doing what young people do: I identified something that I enjoyed doing and wanted to do more of it. I was at Oxford, with good singers all around the place, and I made the most of that. I had no plans, except that I had no plans to do anything else. Without calculating, I knew that I was going to go on with it, but the idea that it would be a success never crossed my mind.

It was your passion and you embraced it, a happy road taken?

Yes, but the really hard decisions came 10 years later. At the start we were just an amateur undergraduate group of friends singing music we loved. To turn that kind of thing into a professional touring ensemble requires some very hard decisions. We were more or less forced to go professional during Maggie Thatcher’s first government. The laws about who should be paid and dealing with the unions got very strict in about ‘79 or ‘80. I think we went professional about ‘81.

Were you performing mostly in the UK at that time? Had you come to the US?

We came in ‘81, as a matter of fact. It was an amateur tour; nobody was paid-well, not properly anyway. It was arranged by a friend who had some contacts and we sang in churches.

It seemed that the driving principle behind many early music performances of a decade or so ago was an almost maniacal need to achieve “period authenticity”—trying to recreate the sound of the Sistine Chapel choir and so on. The Tallis Scholars stepped outside that by having women sopranos in the group.

We would have used women sopranos anyway, because we have no idea, and will never have any idea, what Renaissance choirs sounded like. Full stop, end of discussion.

So you think that obsession was rather silly?