There are perhaps more likely places for a new musical species to be propagated than the choir vestry of an English provincial cathedral. For centuries these vestries, hidden away in the fabric of the country's great churches, have tended and nourished tradition. Rarely have they functioned as hothouses for breeding musical novelties. Yet in one such room, during the Second World War, two musicians planted the seed of a vocal phenomenon that was to flourish rapidly, bearing magnificent musical fruit in our own time.

The choir vestry in question was that of Canterbury Cathedral, and the two musicians who met there on that afternoon in 1943 were Michael Tippett and Alfred Deller. Tippett, then thirty-nine and fresh from the notoriety of his new oratorio A Child of our Time, had travelled down from London to hear a short choral piece of his, which the cathedral choir had commissioned. He did so at the invitation of the cathedral's precentor, Canon J. W. Poole. But Poole had another agenda for Tippett's visit, and that was to have him listen to the voice of Deller, an alto lay-clerk at the cathedral. Tippett, as a rather unworldly man whose ethical conscience had recently landed him in prison for conscientious objection, hardly fitted the standard mould of a musical impresario.