Ralph Allwood – Old Royal Naval College Chapel Choir, Greenwich; Queen’s College Chapel Choir, Cambridge; & Rodolfus Foundation

The Director of the Old Royal Naval College Trinity Laban Choir, Dr Ralph Allwood, recalls a particularly enhanced evening service!

I have always loved Choral Evensong, and for a time I didn’t put into words what it was that I found so captivating. Now that I realise that the genius of Cranmer produced such a wonderful balance between Old and New Testaments, and between a young woman praising God for a forthcoming wonderful birth and an old man preparing joyfully for a peaceful death, it means that much more to me. That so many first class composers have loved it sufficiently to add to the repertoire makes it that much more glorious.

However, moments of drama and even humour have their place in Evensong too. I have noticed that the unusual happening in a solemn context often produces greater humour than the unusual interrupting the mundane. When the unusual is appropriately dramatic, too, it can be overwhelming.

In 1986 I took 55 16 to 20-year-olds to Salisbury Cathedral on a Choral Course to record an Evensong for Radio 3 with Adrian Lucas accompanying. They were an excellent lot, and we were all looking forward to a wonderful experience. We arrived in heavy rain and wind.

Shortly after we had started the psalm, singing about high winds, rocks and mountains, the rain outside changed into a powerful storm, with thunder and a heavy downpour. Obviously, our already very considerable enthusiasm changed to great excitement as the storm built. And it didn’t abate for the readings or for the wonderful Giles Swayne Magnificat. The Dean in his prayers simply couldn’t be heard, and it was particularly amusing that he didn’t attempt to raise his voice from his delightfully gentle Anglican drawl.

But we couldn’t have hoped for better in the anthem, Stanford: For lo! I raise up. There were huge cracks of thunder as the storm drew nearer and we sang of bitter, violent and hasty nations with their dreaded weapons. Then, right at the climax, with the massive first inversion B flat minor chord, the thunder managed a terrifying final crack, a direct hit, and the organ was fused into silence. As we sang, ‘But the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the world keep silence before him’, I was sad at the thought that we wouldn’t have that wonderful pianissimo 32’ note from the organ pedals to end the piece. I needn’t have worried. It was provided at precisely the right time by a distant and final rumble of thunder.

Of course, the final hymn was Lead, kindly light, amid th’encircling gloom.

Ralph Allwood is Director of Music at the Old Royal Naval College Chapel, Greenwich.  The broadcast of BBC Radio 3’s Choral Evensong will be coming live at 3.30pm from the Chapel, on Wednesday 18th September, 2019, and repeated on Radio 3 the following Sunday.  Click here to listen to the service.

Lead, kindly light amid th’ encircling gloom

Choristers are only human and no less subject to the ‘human condition’ than anyone else; if a situation is so funny, and the urge to giggle becomes hard to ignore, there are some circumstances when we should all just give in and go with the flow. So, if you’ve always thought that Evensong is all about silent solemnity and utmost decorum, then prepare to be enlightened – no pun intended! Here’s a bitter-sweet story from a former Director of Music at an Essex church, who recalls just such an occasion.

“Some years ago, I was accompanying evensong on a rather gloomy evening in November. They were hoping to put new energy-saving light bulbs in the church but were waiting for the old bulbs to go before they did so. During the Magnificat a couple of bulbs went out. Then later a couple more until one by one, they all expired and the church was left in semi darkness. We all soldiered manfully on until it got to the part in the Collects where it says “lighten our darkness we beseech Thee, O Lord.” At that point, the vicar began to laugh out loud, the choir just collapsed with laughter and couldn’t carry on. We decided to finish with “Shine Jesus shine” and call it a day!

The church is sadly in decline, so there won’t be a website, hardly anyone goes there now, the choir is long gone and the vicar is on long term sick leave. All very sad.

It is a very sad state of affairs in a huge number of churches. Twenty-five years ago there was a robed choir and a thriving church in our small village; now only a handful of folk attend as the congregation ages and dies/goes into a home. Those who are still there, however, work tirelessly to make ends meet. But for how much longer?

Even sadder, I was Director of Music in a church elsewhere for some years. My main task to develop the choir. We had an excellent year 2017/18, a superb Nine Lessons and Carols, which I devised in true King’s, Cambridge, style and a super full choral evensong for Royal School of Church Music Sunday, raising a fair amount for choir funds. The choir also sang a couple of secular pieces, unaccompanied, in the amazing Flower Festival concert. We had a robed choir of between 10 and 12, plus some extras who joined us for special occasions. We had developed a repertoire of contemplative pieces to sing during communion, which the congregation often commented were very helpful. I had instigated an annual choir party in which we sang various singing games, had quizzes, lots of food etc.

Then…in August the Vicar sent me an email out of the blue saying that in future during Communion, the choir should sing only one hymn, a Taizé chant, or a unison hymn (and very quietly) which she would choose, accompanied by piano, not organ. This was to be followed by some sort of improvisation on the piano. This virtually wiped out the choir. She couldn’t seem to be moved from this, so I had no choice but to leave.

Now there are no improvisations on the organ – a staple ingredient of most services, and no-one is responsible for the choir. The current organist just practises hymns with the few that haven’t left.

I gather the singing is now almost non existent and not a good standard, they don’t robe and don’t sit in the choir stalls. Yes, this was all for the sake of “progress” i.e. getting more people to come to church by not having a robed choir and instead singing Taizé chants etc.

I still miss it dreadfully even after a year.

I am still devastated by reports of my friends who remain there, of how sad they all are at the demise of music in the church. I used to organise all kinds of different concerts, songs of praise etc. That’s progress. And as far as I know, no new people are attending, and those who are still there are getting increasingly upset at the situation.”

This is just one reason why this website is so important because, through following our features, such as Choir of the Month – in chapel, cathedral and parish church – and the varied articles in our blog to promote church music, we can turn this situation around!

You will be pleased to know that our author currently sings with a visiting choir that regularly deputises at cathedrals while the resident choir is on holiday.

Shouting in the Dark:  reflections on Advent Sunday

I know it’s no longer Advent Sunday, but until that certain midnight, we are still in Advent!  So, to the latest instalment of views from the inside to take our readers over Christmastide, from Alex Silverman, who is joint Director of Music at All Saints’, Leamington Spa.  Read on…

“I’ve been in the job since May but it is only now, at the onset of winter, that I am reintroduced to an old friend – the robed walkabout.  It takes me by surprise as we step out into the cold air: a toenail moon winks knowingly from behind the bell tower as we thread quietly through the drinkers spilling out of the next-door pub. These incongruous moments of choir-meets-world are special: it’s a privilege to stand with your friends and do something which is at once totally traditional and yet a little bit nuts. I recognise that same pride, purpose and sense of belonging which has kept me coming back to choral music, and I think of my younger singing selves: in my twenties, a tenor-for-hire following a donkey through Central London traffic – who doesn’t love Muletide?;  the teenager dashing through cloisters in shoes with holes for soles; and the spiky-haired chorister climbing uphill to chapel, checking every other step for the weight of the medal round my neck.

On this cloud of soft-focus nostalgia I follow the choir through the West door and into the gloom.  There is no immediate sign of the choral scholar – never yet on time – who is to start the service from the far end of church.  After what seems like an hour I hear the click of the vestry door, followed by footsteps.  From 40 yards and in pitch black, I can hear that he’s still wearing the wrong coloured shoes, but it’s too late to do anything about that.  The footsteps mellow as they begin to climb the pulpit steps, and a hush descends… immediately shattered by an ear-splitting KSHhhhhhh – the unmistakeable sound of Carols for Choirs 2 making heavy contact with a well-placed reader’s microphone.  The organist recognises this as his cue to give a starting note, and finally we have music.

‘I look from afar.’

‘And lo…’ the Baritone replies from the gallery.  It’s going well, this.

‘Go ye out to meet him and say:’

As one, the choir light their (electric) candles; I give a theatrical upbeat, complete with raised eyebrows and sharp breath in through the nose, then… nothing.  I have forgotten to pick up a candle myself and as such, in this moment, I am completely invisible.  The choir, to their immense credit, are unperturbed.  They know that if they could see me, I would likely be encouraging them to sing, and so they do – very well, in fact.  We have run though the Matin Responsory three times, always in the light. Each time it has been somewhat ragged, and the tenor line has gone loudly sharp. In the dark, and without my bothering them, the singers listen and breathe together – timing and tuning are immaculate.  I flap through to the end as best I can, though why is anyone’s guess: the congregation have their backs to me, the choir can’t see me, and without a candle of my own I cannot see the music on my stand.

I think it’s fair to say that my Advent Carol Service improved as it went on. But this moment of glorious helplessness will stay with me.  Conductors often joke about how little they are truly needed after the first beat – it was humbling and quite enlightening to see this principle illustrated so clearly in practice. I learned something about trust – that I can afford to conduct less and let the choir sing more.  A contradiction of my musical life is that for all the enjoyment I clearly still derive from swishing through town in a cassock,  I have always preferred rehearsal – the problem-solving, the promise of a measurable upward curve – to the pressure and finality of public performance.  But as I watched the choir perform so beautifully despite me, I was reminded how important it is to step back and appreciate the work of those around you, and how lucky I am to have the best seat in the house. I am going to make sure I stop talking and gesturing to listen properly to our choir more often:  such a simple thing for me to do – or not do – which might just help to get the best out of the musicians I work with.  And maybe next year we’ll rehearse at least once with the lights off.”

(Photograph:  Choir in rehearsal, Andrew Gorsuch)

Something of a cautionary tale for choir conductors and directors everywhere, perhaps?  One this is certain, very few services ever come off completely blemish-free.

Choir of Hull Minster – Sarina Elsdon

As Hull’s tenure of City of Culture status rushes to a close, and we get ready to hand over that honour to Coventry in 2021, and as the Choir of Hull Minster sang a special choral evensong at Coventry Cathedral this past weekend to mark that honour, and as choral services are temporarily ceasing because of the current crisis, I felt it the appropriate moment to offer some sideways glimpses of culture that may not be immediately obvious.

Having robed up for morning service at the Minster a few weeks ago, having a spare moment to myself, I had a nosey look around the music cupboards, as one does.

Opening up one great wooden door I wasn’t really surprised to see a shameless display of graffiti, gouged out with the pen-knives of boy-choristers past.

Being a woman now in her fifties, I felt strangely humbled.  These boys were not merely lads bent on some minor vandalism, scoring their names into church furniture.  These were my predecessors, my choral forefathers, preserving not just their names against the grain, but their dates of choristership as well.

Makes a person think.

The west wall of the Song Room is covered in formal group photographs.  I wonder who, in those photos, made their marks on the doors…?

These youngsters had what I never had:  a musical training while their brains were being set and wired.  I had to come it in my early twenties, at a time when the choral scholar is graduating university and either moving on or moving out.  My entry point was the door marked ‘exit’ for others.  And now, years later, being officially a back-row singer, and massively content to take my cue and tuition from the countless chapel choral scholars with whom I shall never work in person, it gives me a great thrill to be a part of this great, sprawling choral tradition, sharing their experiences from a geographical and temporal distance.  Those individuals will always have my unrequited respect and professional envy.

We who sing this music are hugely privileged, but in a peculiar way.  This privilege has nothing to do with materialistic concerns, but is significantly centred on a perverse form of bloody-mindedness!  You have to be pretty tenacious to sing an inside part, and to be able to hold your own on the top as well sometimes, especially when you’re singing a descant and you hit that minor second in ‘Hark the herald angels sing’.  This is the craft of musicianship.

What we joyfully describe as the ‘choral tradition’ is basically some of the most extensive music that we have in the entire repertoire.  It has the right to stand alongside the large-scale orchestral and choral works from the whole canon of classical music from around 1500 onwards – of course, this is just a number plucked out of the ether.  Art and culture go back a lot further than that, but 1500 is a good place to start.

Sacred music falls under the category of ‘work music’, and as such it fulfils a function, much like dance music does in the secular world, from minuets to the hokey-cokey.  But because the church provides such a singular work-place in which this art can unfold, it somehow gets sidelined into a branch of musicology that only deals with historical semiotics, e.g. Paul Doe on Thomas Tallis, and any cultural valence music-in-ritual holds for academic study is confined to ethnomusicology which, in turn seems to favour music from non-Christian belief systems.  This sometimes leaves poor old church music to fend for itself in the cultural stakes.

Naturally, sacred music is an expression of the spiritual self, a great declaration of Christian faith.  But it doesn’t end there.  The art goes on, as long as we go on, as long as faith goes on, and as long as dedication goes on.  Church music does not just belong to the Church, or to Christians.  It belongs to anyone and everyone, to any individual who resonates to its frequencies.

It is a curious thing that church music is held to be part of the development of human culture, and yet there seems to be a reluctance to count it as cultural experience.  It is no less a cultural experience than any pieta or painting that depicts a biblical scene.

And somehow, we are back to the graffiti.  Those choirboys left, not necessarily art, but a legacy nonetheless.

In the end, any art, whether music, painting or sculpture, or even ballet, is a massive statement –

WE WOZ ‘ERE

Let us not starve ourselves of culture.

Sarina Elsdon was ChoralEvensong.org’s Website Assistant.  She gained her Master’s degree in Historical Musicology from Hull, where she was a Chapel Chorister, and currently is a ‘back-row’ chorister with two church choirs, including Hull Minster.  She is a member of the Knitting & Crochet Guild, and in her spare time can be found teaching knitting techniques and working on her designs.  She lives in Yorkshire with her musicologist husband, Peter, and their daughter, and is a practising Pagan, and a passionate supporter of Interfaith.

Post script

Coventry Cathedral is an amazing place, the very essence of culture, with the ruins of the two older cathedrals nestled close to the modern building.  And the acoustics are an absolute treat.  A big thank-you to everyone for making us all feel so welcome.

Philip Rushforth – Chester Cathedral

Time after time one reads or hears testimonies from former child choristers, regardless of profession in adulthood, that the musical training they received as children was second-to-none, set them up for life, gave them what no other of its kind could give.  Philip Rushforth, the Director of Music and Organist at Chester Cathedral, knows this phenomenon from personal experience, and has penned this, the latest article in our ‘Lofts & Stall’s series.

I used to know a little boy whose mother said to him that she was putting him in for a voice trial with the idea of him becoming a chorister at Chester Cathedral.  He wasn’t at all keen and in fact berated his mother for having arranged it, but his audition went well (having sung Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer as his audition piece)! and he was accepted into the choir.  He remembers that when he first sat in a service and heard the organist play, he wanted to be the organist of Chester Cathedral. His chosen path was to win an organ scholarship to Oxbridge but he was frequently told that because he was hopeless at maths he wouldn’t even matriculate, let alone be offered a place.  However, having failed his maths at school three times he was still accepted at Cambridge.  As things turned out, it was his days as a chorister that set him up for a life in cathedral music and he never looked back.

That little boy was me.

The job of a chorister engenders a professional approach to all things in life; it encourages teamwork, discipline, time-management, and a love of music.  Claudio Monteverdi, Franz Schubert and Joseph Haydn were choristers; actor and musician Dudley Moore was a chorister; many other cathedral and college organists were choristers.  [As was Roger Taylor, the drummer of Queen!  Ed.]  The first monks of the Monastery in Chester sang their chants under the Benedictine Rule more than 900 years ago.  Henry VIII re-established the former Monastery as a cathedral in 1541 and God’s praises have been sung ever since.  Other cathedrals and choral foundations in the UK offer their choristers an education through their own choir schools; Westminster Abbey, York Minster, Durham and Hereford Cathedrals are examples.  Chester Cathedral used to have such a school, but it closed in 1976 and since then all the choristers have been taken from all over Cheshire.  The demographic make-up of the choir is very wide and children from many different backgrounds achieve a huge amount through their singing and music-making.

The choir sings eight choral services each week in term time, which equates to around 384 sung services each year and these are shared between the boy and girl choristers and the lay clerks of the cathedral.  Our timetable is such that when one set of choristers is singing evensong, the other set are rehearsing.  Weekends are alternated between girls and boys which, for them, works well from the point-of-view of the family.  My only real wish would be that we could have morning rehearsals, but the logistics of this would be too complicated and so the choristers rehearse after school each day, except on a Wednesday, in the magnificent purpose-built Song School which is on the site of the old Monk’s Dormitory and was completed in 2005.  The cathedral provides bursaries for the choristers and this level of support and commitment from them and their parents enables us to maintain consistently high musical standards.

New music is the lifeblood of many cathedral and collegiate chapel choirs and sponsorship has enabled me to commission new music from composers including Anthony Piccolo, Philip Moore, Francis Pott, Howard Skempton, Matthew Martin and Charlotte Bray.  In 2013 & 2016, and with support from The Friends of Cathedral Music, we were privileged to work with the City of London Sinfonia and Stephen Layton.  A series of concerts were arranged at eight cathedrals, including Chester, where I had the opportunity to direct and play an organ concerto with this superb orchestra.

Working at the cathedral is a huge privilege.  Even with such a hectic school and family life it is the choristers who continue to impress me with their achievements.  I believe that being a chorister is the single greatest leg-up a child can be given and I know professional people in other walks of life – having been choristers themselves – who say that they owe their entire career to their experience as a chorister.  I am fortunate to be able to say the same thing.

Philip Rushforth is Director of Music and Organist at Chester Cathedral where he has had a life-long association as chorister, and ultimately, since 2007, as Director of Music.  A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, former Assistant Organist of Southwell Minster and Royal College of Organists prize-winner, he directs the cathedral choir in their daily worship, broadcasts, recordings and tours and as a recitalist has performed throughout the UK and Europe.

Next time you’re attending a service, in person or on the radio, listen to the choir not as a body of singers accompanied by an organist, but as a music lesson in situ, and see if you can hear the learning taking place.  And remember, former choristers are everywhere, and too numerous to mention!

If you are, or were, a church musician of any description, professional or amateur, player or singer, and you have a story to tell, please get in touch with us via our Contact form, quoting ‘Lofts & Stalls’ in the subject box.