John Potter’s musical collaborators include the composer Ambrose Field and the lutenist Ariel Abramovich, as well as The Dowland Project, Red Byrd and the Gavin Bryars Ensemble. A writer and scholar as well as a singer, he has published three books on singing and was until recently Reader in Music at the University of York.
John's performing career began in the seventies, when he found himself singing with Ward Swingle's English group known as Swingle II. In rapid succession he co-founded and then left the avant-garde group Electric Phoenix, and briefly joined the New London Consort. He then persuaded the Arts Council to fund the first ever vocal synthesizer, a terrifying machine constructed by Ian Macintosh, but then had second thoughts about being his own sound engineer and started a voice & electronics duo with John Whiting (known as Electronic Vocal theatre).
The experience of touring with Henry Brown's And the Word was Made Flesh, with its semi-pornographic set and props that included a real gun (which a constable from the local police station eventually confiscated) convinced the duo that the road was not for them. After an excursion into backing vocals for Manfred Mann, the Who and Mike Oldfield (among others) and deputising in sundry early music groups, John joined the Hilliard Ensemble in 1984 and stayed there for 17 years. The Hilliard experience was often exhilarating and it was an opportunity to work closely with such figures as Arvo Pärt, Manfred Eicher, Jan Garbarek and Peter Erskine. In 1989 he started Red Byrd with the bass Richard Wistreich as a way of exploring other performance possibilities. During this time he completed a PhD at the Open University with Richard Middleton, the fruits of which became his first book Vocal Authority (Cambridge University Press) in 1998. He joined the Music Department at the University of York the same year and from then on Steven Harrold began to take his place for more and more Hilliard concerts. As he became increasingly part-time with the group he was able to accept Manfred Eicher's offer to make records of his own for ECM . This resulted in the Dowland Project, which has now made three albums (one of which was a Sunday Times record of the year) with another still to come. Red Byrd continues to flourish, with ground-breaking recordings of 12th century music for Hyperion. John's current projects include several new ventures: Being Dufay (with electro-acoustic composer Ambrose Field) and the Ciconia Ensemble (with Anna Maria Friman, Susanna Pell and Jacob Heringman), as well as his ongoing work with the Gavin Bryars Ensemble and duos with lutenist Ariel Abramovich and harpist Jan Walters.
The 2009-10 academic year will be John's last in academia and from October 2010 he will concentrate on his portfolio of freelance activities: performing, coaching and artistic consultancy as well as developing creative teaching projects.