Secret History presents sacred music by Josquin Desprez and Tomás Luis de Victoria in the form later musicians gave it. The two were not contemporaries and worked in different countries, yet tablature versions of their masses and motets circulated among lutenists across Europe. Tenor John Potter takes that practice as his method, reducing the polyphony to one or two sung lines while vihuelas play the rest. He calls it "the secret life of the music", and the album explores what happens to music after it is composed.

Potter is joined by soprano Anna Maria Friman of Trio Mediaeval, by three vihuela players including Ariel Abramovich and Jacob Heringman, and by a viola da gamba on two Josquin pieces. The sessions took place at the Propstei St. Gerold in Austria, where Potter had earlier recorded Officium with the Hilliard Ensemble and albums with The Dowland Project. The booklet dates them to February 2011, though the album appeared only in 2017. Manfred Eicher produced, Peter Laenger was the engineer, and Potter wrote the liner notes.

About half the disc is Victoria's Missa Surge propera. Potter sings a single line, Abramovich and Heringman take the remaining parts on vihuela, and Heringman adds five brief preludes of his own between the movements. Friman joins for the Benedictus and Agnus Dei. The Josquin section sets chant beside polyphony: Inviolata and Obsecro te are first sung as plainchant, then played as vihuela intabulations by Enríquez de Valderrábano. The programme opens with Jean Mouton's Nesciens mater and ends with Nymphes des bois, Josquin's lament on the death of Ockeghem, and Victoria's O magnum mysterium for two vihuelas.

In The Guardian, Erica Jeal read the title as a reminder that old choral works were treated "not as fixed monuments but as music ripe for adaptation as intimate chamber pieces". Fabrice Fitch in Gramophone found the result "most stimulating, particularly in the Mass". With the tenor part heard on its own, he wrote, one becomes aware of how well crafted all of Victoria's lines are, where an all-vocal performance tends to focus on the top voice.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 2119, released in August 2017.