About the Author

John Potter was a chorister at King's College Choir School, Cambridge, and later a choral scholar at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge University. His teachers include the great tenor Peter Pears; his early career included spells with the BBC Singers and Swingle II, and he was a founder member of the avant-garde ensemble Electric Phoenix. He was a member of the Hilliard Ensemble from 1984 to 2001, a career which included collaborations with jazz musicians Jan Garbarek and Peter Erskine, and with whom he won four gold discs. (As a session singer he worked with Mike Oldfield, the Who and with Emmerson, Lake and Palmer, and he has recorded with the Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.) In addition to recording John Potter has a very active career as a performer and vocal coach, both on the European mainland and in the USA, and is artistic advisor to the Tampere International Choir Festival (Finland). His singing teaching experience includes periods at Goldsmith's College, University of London and the Akademie fur alte Musik, Bremen. He was appointed to a lectureship at the University of York in 1998, and in 2003-4 he was the holder of an Edison Fellowship at the British Library. Among his many publications is Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (Cambridge University Press, 1998).