The Dufay Collective has been performing and recording its unique brand of early music since 1987. During this time the group has performed at major festivals and toured throughout the world, receiving critical acclaim from Cairo to Carlisle. The group has made a series of highly successful recordings of a wide-ranging repertoire of instrumental and vocal music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, including the Grammy nominated 'Cancionero'.

Their recordings have all met with critical acclaim, but never resting on their collective laurels the group, now directed by William Lyons, strive to create entertaining and informative performances and recordings. They can also be heard on the soundtracks of several feature films including Hamlet, Harry Potter 3 and Shrek 3.

Bill Lyons

In sixty-four did Ada D
Give birth unto the boy that's me.
I never settled very well,
School for me a merry hell.

But Mr Lawrence he did order:
"You should learn to play recorder."
Thus was a path lain out for me,
It was indeed my destiny

To play the shawm, the crumhorn bold,
The curtal, pipes and flutes quite old.
I studied these at Guildhall School:
My mistake, I was a fool.

That fateful day it then did dawn
When this Collective it was born.
With Lewin, Bevan, Skuce and more
We wowed them all on every tour.

I teach at Guildhall, RCM,
MD at Globe every now and then,
Recordings many have I made,
Airwaves full of the tunes I've played.

I too compose, for what it's worth,
And plain ignore my widening girth.
So here I sit at forty-five
Amazed at how I'm still alive.

Vivien Ellis

The Rime of the Ancient-Music Singer

It is an Ancient-Music Singer
And she stoppeth one of three
'By thy cropped grey hair and tattered jeans
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

The concert-hall doors are open'd wide,
And I want to go in:
Here's my ticket, they're tuning up:
May'st hear the awful din.'

The Critic, corpulent and cruel,
Pen sharpened for invective,
Has come from Fleet Street to dissect
The Dufay Collective.

She holds him with her skinny hand,
'There was a life', quoth she.
'I'll call the management, you crop-haired witch!'
Eftsoons her hand dropped she.

She holds him with her glittering eye
The Critic stands stock still,
And listens like a three years' child
The Singer hath her will.

'Lend me cash for the Karaoke machine,
(You know I once sang at Aldeburgh)
Will it be 'Albatross' by Fleetwood Mac,
or 'My Way' by Sinatra?'

The Critic sits down at the bar
Thinks: 'we've got a right one here'
And thus sang that ancient vocalist
The Early-Music Singer:

'Regrets, I've had a few
the Dufay Collective, one I could mention,
I did what I had to do,
And saw it through, without exemption.

Concerts, blah blah blah blah,
Reviews, blah blah blah, Blah bah,
World tours, blah blah blah blah,
CDs, blah blah blah, Blah bah.

'I've lived a life that's full,
I've sung with psaltery and Steinway;
But more, much more than this,
I did it my way'.

'Hang on', quoth the Critic,
'How do you know about poetry?'
The singer laughed a hollow laugh,
'I teach English Key-Stage 3.

My mother said a proper job
Would stand me in good stead.
She was right, now that is all
That's bringing in the bread'.

'Let's forget the concert,
Tell me more from your perspective',
quoth the Critic to the Singer, 'after all,
it's just The Dufay Collective.'

Jon Banks

Jon Banks plays things that take a while to tune;
The Gothic harp that's strung with sheep's insides,
The dulcimer, gittern and psaltery besides,
And, for a modest extra fee, qanun.

The music of the East is Jon's delight;
He plays santur with Sufis from Iran,
For Burning Bush he is the accordion man,
Does session recordings if the money's right.

He labours much in universities;
Eastern music, temperaments and acoustics
He lectures on, and also books produces
Fraught with footnotes and bibliographies.

Though each may be slight, these strands become effective
Woven in the tapestry of the Dufay Collective

Peter Skuce

As a baby, Peter Skuce showed a remarkable tendency to soil his nappy whenever Cliff Richard came on the radio, and it was this that first led his mother to believe that he was destined to be a fine, discerning and talented musician. At sixteen and a half, his school friend Derek claims to have heard him, seated at the pianoforte, playing 13 semiquavers in the right hand against 9 in the left - a feat that, 4 months later, he proved tragically unable to repeat on Thames Television's popular talent contest Opportunity Knocks. Many believe that he never really recovered from the shame and social humiliation of this painful fiasco, and cite it as the root cause of his subsequent petty temper tantrums and regrettable tendency to pass wind in public places.

These unfortunate traits, however, did not prevent him from enjoying some degree of social acceptance amongst Christian ramblers, members of the Dufay Collective and a select circle of bus ticket collectors, which included Henryka Kollinsky, a young sewage worker from Detroit whom he met in 1979 and later married. Sadly, on November 16th 1982, after just two and a half weeks, the marriage ended acrimoniously. Friends described the break-up as messy. Peter was distraught and inconsolable - even the news of the death of Arthur Askey failed to cheer him up for long.

With his popularity in decline, and as he approached 50 years of age, Peter began to talk in grand terms of staging a comeback. He made a number of desperate and ultimately fruitless attempts to win social credibility amongst a younger public. These included an ostentatious use of the word 'less' instead of 'fewer' and arriving at concerts of renaissance music on a skateboard. However, in private things were never quite as hopeful. He continued to battle long and hard against the debilitating psychological effects of epiphenomenalism, as well as his patent failure to master the use of the imperfect subjunctive in Spanish adverbial conjunctions.

In the last few weeks of his life Greenwich Social Services noted "a certain listlessness" in his demeanour and concluded that Peter was suffering from exhaustion brought about by chronic self-abuse. His claim that his tiredness was in fact the result of the nightly abductions he suffered at the hands of scantily clad aliens with enormous breasts, who repeatedly subjected him to unspeakable medical procedures... were all too easy to dismiss. However his final disappearance remains unexplained and, apart from what forensic officers described as "glutinous cellular residue" discovered on the toaster, no trace of the body was ever found, leading police to take the alien abduction theory rather more seriously.

He will be sorely missed.