Surely the other argument in favour of using a certain amount of contextual plainsong is that the stark contrast heightens the effect of the polyphony. Personally I’m rather puzzled as to why there has been this big reaction against any form of reconstruction.

CARWOOD: It may have some connection with the reaction against “authenticity”, which has also become a dirty word. I have to say I don’t like it at all. I think with both reconstruction and authenticity, we’re just shying away from the idea that something is right or wrong.

But we’ve now surely reached a point in early music where there are few prepared to be that dogmatic about what is “wrong” or “right”?

CARWOOD: I hope so, but I think in presentation things can sometimes appear that way. I don’t think its “wrong” to perform a mass end-to-end or that you must have a liturgical reconstruction all the time. But there is an important element to it and people ignore it at their peril.

Let’s move on to talk about your recordings. Until very recently they have concentrated on series. The first was that devoted to Nicholas Ludford, a bold move at the time because people were just not doing Ludford. How did you come to devote so much time to him?

SKINNER: Ludford was actually Andrew’s idea. We were looking for a composer who was unusual and hadn’t been previously recorded. At the time I was working on the two English choir books, Caius and Lambeth which contained music by both Ludford and Fayrfax. I very badly wanted to do Fayrfax, but since Harry Christophers was about to do a Fayrfax series (which in the event never materialised), we decided on Ludford. There were four complete masses, so logically four volumes. Whether, in retrospect, we were commercially wise to do them end-to-end without recording other things in the middle is a debatable point, but at that time Ludford’s biography was coming to light, so we could now reconstruct the man’s life. I suppose musically that’s not that important, but it meant we could put flesh on his bones. But after that Fayrfax was the next logical step, and that led naturally through the Caius and Lambeth songbooks to the discovery of the Fitzalan Chapel at Arundel, which has connections with William Byrd. So these things are all tied together. The Byrd project is our first real departure into something quite major and marks the start of a new era in which we’re trying to do things differently. The disc of music associated with All Soul’s College, Oxford [ASV CDGAU 196] marks something of a departure, because I think you can only record so much English polyphony the way we’ve been doing it.