The Choral Evensong Trust has been registered as a charity since 1 July 2020. In this page we will take you through what we do, what we spend our funds on and how you can donate.
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The Choral Evensong Trust is a unique charity working to locate and promote choral evensong via an easily accessible web-based platform. The website ChoralEvensong.org enables users to search for nearby evensong (and vespers) services listed by date and location. The organisation has identified the importance of raising awareness amongst the wider public of the high quality choral music being performed in the heart of their community, and in some of the country’s most beautiful but under-used buildings.
Our three pillars:
1) Choral Evensong is a unique British tradition, and an important part of our cultural heritage.
2) Evensong provides free music in the heart of the local community.
3) Evensong offers musical training and performance opportunities to young singers.
Who benefits?
The Choral Evensong Trust believes that every person in every community should know about, and have access to, high quality music and the benefits that it brings, including:
- Greater understanding of and appreciation for art and culture, resulting in a greater variety of interests and a richer spiritual life;
- Improved trust and cooperation through closer relationship and engagement with the local community, which also helps to combat isolation (particularly in the elderly);
- Reduced stress, improved sleep, greater happiness, and even reduction in chronic pain and an increase in life expectancy;
- In the case of musicians, many improved life skills, such as discipline, listening and teamwork, as well as better academic results and life fulfilment for children and young people.
- For further benefits please read Guy Hayward’s PhD on Choral Singing and Community
Proven popularity
“Choral Evensong” has been broadcast by the BBC for nearly 90 years and claims to be the longest running radio outside broadcast in the world. A quarter of a million people listen to the two transmissions each week and invariably we receive many messages of appreciation for the beauty of the music and the timeless quality of the words.”
Stephen Shipley, BBC Senior Producer
What we do
The Choral Evensong Trust set up its website at the end of 2015, and has since engaged over 700 churches, chapels and cathedrals. The organisation works to bring new audiences into churches, including children.
Our Key Aim is to see an increase of attendance at Evensong services in all churches, chapels and cathedrals. The Church of England keep accurate records of church attendances in both Cathedrals and Parish Churches. Attendance of Choral Evensong has risen by 62% over the last ten years, and we hope to double the number in the next five years.
We are currently achieving this by:
- Nationwide publicity and PR that have resulted in the following press
- Investing in Tourist Information Website Partnerships, specifically: Visit London / Time Out London / Experience Oxford / Visit Cambridge
- Hosting a number of “Choral Evensong Receptions” (Evensong followed by drinks reception) for influential individuals within local communities, such as representatives of local schools, hotels, residents’ associations, universities, cultural societies, other religious denominations, chambers of commerce, the local tourist office and the county council, and have organised these at: The Old Royal Naval College Chapel, Greenwich; Queens’ College, Cambridge (article); Westminster Abbey; Leicester Cathedral (article); Portsmouth Cathedral; Lancaster Priory; Southwell Minster; Christ Church, Southgate; St. John’s, New Alresford.
- Increasing the organisation’s presence on social media on Twitter and Facebook
- Organising a ‘Choir of the Month’ feature, that promotes choirs of the highest quality, and in particular those who webcast their Evensong recordings for anyone to listen to.
- Facilitating a poster campaign to publicise Evensong more effectively in local communities. In 2018, this involved seed funding 12 choirs by paying for the designing, printing and delivery of 1000 A5 poster flyers customised for their choir to be distributed in their local area.
- Launching an ‘Evensong for Schools’ campaign, and working with the Choir Schools Association to create a national online directory of school music outreach programmes that originate from the church choral tradition.
- Working with Kathryn King to promote her ground-breaking Virtual Reality research into listeners’ appreciation of Choral Evensong.
What we need donations for
Being largely a digitally-focused charity we spend our funds on website development and digital marketing to bring the end user, the evensong attendee, and the provider, the evensong choir, the best experience of using our website to discover and promote evensong services. We also occasionally fund initiatives like evensong receptions and local poster campaigns, and the schools campaign to take ordinary schoolchildren to experience evensong.
In general, we are aiming to create demand for evensong, because its supply all over Britain and Ireland is already so plentiful, yet more people need to know that it exists.