CARWOOD: I don’t set out to be different from The Tallis Scholars, or whoever. We have an individual sound because there are certain preoccupations in my mind, in David’s mind, and indeed in the minds of the singers about how we perform the music which makes us different. This is something which early music reviewers don’t always pick up on. They may complain about the number of singers who are common to these groups, but the fact is that they’ve all got different directors who all want very diverse things. Peter Philips wants a beautiful sound—that’s his big thing. Harry Christophers likes a very emotive performance where he pulls the tempos around. So we’re all after differing things. We’re very much into liturgy, text and academic excellence, and trying to do things in as well informed a way as we can.

In other words such stylistic differences as there are between the groups is something that evolves?

CARWOOD: Yes. If I didn’t have something different to say, I wouldn’t be doing it—I’d leave it to everyone else.

SKINNER: I was just thinking back to when the group got started, and I remember it was about the time Harry Christopher’s had just given his tenth anniversary concert in Oxford. But apart from The Tallis Scholars and The Sixteen, there was nothing else happening back in 1989. Apart from smaller ensembles like the Hilliard Ensemble and Gothic Voices, who are not really in our domain, we were really the first of the younger generation choirs, followed shortly afterwards by quite a few new groups. So I don’t think we were particularly seeking something new. We were young, excited about this music and just wanted to get it performed in the best way that we knew how. And, of course, we’ve both grown up quite a bit since 1989. We didn’t start recording until 1993, which was a good thing.

What about your early repertoire. Were you doing the kind of thing you’ve gone on to record?

CARWOOD: Yes, because it’s David’s period. The first thing we ever collaborated on as a team was done for Christ Church Cathedral Choir, the Taverner Missa Mater Christi [on Nimbus]. David edited all the polyphony for that and we had this rather mad idea of doing it as a reconstruction within the context of a service. Liturgical reconstruction was rather the fashion back in those days.

But not today, I think. Peter Philips was scathing about them in his interview for Goldberg. What opinions do you have on the topic?

SKINNER: There have been so many recordings of masses, right from the earliest times of recording history and it was not until the 70’s that we had the first reconstructions. So it took until then for people to hear the mass, one of the main compositional forms of late medieval times, within its proper context. That’s not to say that you should always reconstruct a mass within its correct liturgical setting, but the movements were not intended to be dovetailed into each other one after another. They are supposed to be separated by certain elements of liturgy and drama. But there’s also a practical element—if we’d tried to reconstruct all the Ludford and Fayrfax masses we recorded, the series would have been twice as long. We did make a point in the Ludford series of including the Propers, which I believe to be an important element. It’s a thing we should have continued into the Fayrfax, but reviewers gave us a really bad time for doing it.