October 13th was the 20th anniversary of the release of Care-Charming Sleep, the first Dowland Project album under our new name. It won a Diapason d’Or and there’s a sheaf of fantastic reviews on the ECM site.

The enigmatic cover (by Czech artist Jan Jedlička) is one of only two of my ECM albums in colour (the other one is Being Dufay).  On the album you’ll find 2 versions of Ancor che col partire, which is also one of the chapter headings in my Song: a History in 12 Parts, with its very colourful cover by Luke Bird:

The two worlds were due to interact next week when the Dowland Project was to assemble in Stuttgart to record a mixture of our current repertoire and some new material related to the book. Sadly, I've got Covid so we've had to postpone yet again. I was looking forward to having all my musical soulmates on the one album in case it’s my last (you never know!), so we’ll evententually be joined by my Alternative History colleagues Anna Maria Friman and Ariel Abramovich hopefully early in the new year.  The music will include Britten, Satie, Butterworth, Grainger, Warlock, Merula and Hildegard…but don’t expect the songs to sound like any of the recordings I recommend in Song – it’s a stand-alone DP album (a late follow-up to the Night Sessions) in which we do our thing whatever the source material. 

I’ve just been a guest on the BBC History Extra podcast. It should appear sometime in November. Quite challenging to deal with a whole book in half an hour, but Jon Bauckham gently extracted some nuggets and we had a wide-ranging chat. I also had a lovely chat with Ellen Cranitch for her Vespertine programme on RTE. It went out late on Saturday 21st (starts about 36.55 for around 50 minutes) and featured Dowland Project tracks among others, illustrating some of the songs in the book. 

More later about the new Gavin Bryars book and the article David James and I have written for Gramophone celebrating 50 years of the Hilliard Ensemble.

There's a new photogallery from the Alternative History gig in Peniscola earlier this year.