Guillaume Dufay, Ambrose Field, John Potter

Being Dufay places short vocal fragments by Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474), sung by the British tenor John Potter, inside the electronic music of the composer Ambrose Field. Across seven connected pieces the Renaissance lines are never altered. Field treats them as a cantus firmus, the borrowed melody around which Dufay and his contemporaries built their own works, and writes new layers of sound around them. "Then as now, music was not forever fixed but lived and breathed through the imaginations of former musicians and their listeners," Field writes in the liner notes.

Potter sang for eighteen years with the Hilliard Ensemble and later taught at the University of York, where Field, a prize-winning composer of digital music, was a colleague. The project began as a commission for voice and electronics from a festival in Vigevano, near Milan, and the BBC later broadcast the work. Field then spent three years developing his sketches into the full cycle. Potter's voice was recorded in 2007 at Bishopthorpe in North Yorkshire. The album was mixed in 2008 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo by Field, Manfred Eicher and Jan Erik Kongshaug, with Eicher as producer.

Potter contributes no more than about eight minutes of Dufay phrases, chosen by the two musicians together, to an album of almost fifty minutes. The rest comes from editing, composition and processing, including a detailed digital model of his tenor that Field used to generate a female backing chorus. In the opening Ma belle dame souveraine the voice seems to rise out of a wide electronic space and sink back into it. The twelve-minute title piece grew out of the Vigevano commission, while Presque quelque chose is the only track without voice. Elsewhere the electronics move between dense, enclosing textures and faint gestures close to silence, at times hinting at birdsong.

Critics heard the pairing as a meeting rather than a collision. John Kelman of All About Jazz called it "one of the most hauntingly beautiful records of the year". Barry Witherden wrote in BBC Music Magazine that "Potter's singing here is exemplary, and I can think of few singers so suited to such music." Reviewing the disc for MusicWeb International in 2010, Glyn Pursglove read it as a document of how modern listeners re-create old music for themselves, and urged anyone suspicious of electronic music to try it. In concert the cycle has often been performed with films by Michael Lynch, which are not part of the recording.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 2071, first released in February 2009, with liner notes by Ambrose Field.