When I don’t have any other choice, I use instruments. Certain princes’ courts liked instruments—polyphonic music is always more or less courtly music, whether it happens to be secular or sacred—while others preferred a cappella music. As for me, I like to stick to the spirit of the time, and singers represent the spirit of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries just as the symphony orchestra represents the nineteenth century. All Renaissance composers were also singers, but not necessarily recorder or crumhorn players.

What about you? Did you used to be a singer?

Yes, I still sang in the Huelgas Ensemble’s early days. But it didn’t take long to realise that it’s very difficult to listen and conduct as well as sing one of the parts. To return to your question, though—should this music be performed with or without instruments?—the answer lies in the context for which the music was composed. Certain generalisations just don’t hold water, especially the one that claims that polyphony in this period wasn’t written for instruments or womens’ voices. That’s true of Palestrina, but he worked for the Pope. Lassus is another question. His employer was a Bavarian prince, and he not only could, but often had to use instruments. I suppose Willaert liked womens’ voices—though only for his secular music, of course, not the music that was sung in church. Womens’ voices were more widely used towards the end of the Renaissance—especially in Isabelle d’Este’s court—and in the court in Mantua, which was practically the equivalent of an opera.

Another falsehood is that all the composers of the period wrote the same sort of piece, without any individuality. That’s only true of bad composers. Good composers are the ones that add something original to the basic rules of counterpoint. Like Manchicourt and Brummel; in fact, like Richafort.

How do you know which composers added that special something?

It has to do with the idea of time, with all-round timing, if I can use such an expression. With tactus, to use the technical term. It means a highly developed sense of how long each note should last. By extension it means a legato line—an art which is practically non-existent nowadays. That’s really the biggest problem, finding the perfect rhythm. It’s like water in Japanese drawings. In almost every case we’ve destroyed, or at least lost touch with, the notion of timing.

Are you trying to recreate the past?

No. I often think of Umberto Eco, who said that the wish to be surprised is the most important quality you can have. And that’s the difficulty of making this very unusual music interesting for modern audiences: making it interesting without concessions and without added ornamentation. I’m not trying to be ‘authentic.’ I know I’m dealing with twentieth century—twenty-first century!—singers, and with twenty-first century audiences, too.

What surprises me as an audience member in 2001 is that I can listen to an entire programme of music by Richafort and not experience a single moment of boredom or a lowering of tension. Yet the rhythm is the same from beginning to end, and the sounds are very similar, too.

Yes, but it’s not monochromatic at all; in fact, a lot less so than Josquin. You know, it’s important to introduce a sense of perspective into this music, and other music as well. Perspective is used in architecture and painting to divide up the space. In musical terms, introducing a sense of perspective means attempting to widen the tessitura.