The Chorister Thing
Forty years ago I became a chorister at New College, Oxford, not really knowing what to expect or what I could contribute, other than I knew I could hold a tune, I could learn the ropes from my older brother who was already there and I knew too that I loved Christmas Carols (which seemed to have more connection with ‘choristers’ than anything else I could think of then, on my relatively limited musical horizon). The surplus (white, girlie overgarment), cassock (black, secretive, monkish robe) and ruff (Elizabethan, crinkled and starched collar) we had to wear made us feel different and special from the other – sometimes jeering, sometimes envious – boys at school, as did our gowns (black, demonic) and mortar boards (square, wobbly to wear, eccentric) in which we crocodiled to the chapel each morning and evening. Nowadays you might call it Hogworts Chic. Then, in the heyday of the Beatles, Hendrix and Twiggy, it was merely far out.
Beyond the fancy frocks, being a chorister began as a series of fairly rigorous vocal excercises and ended, at 13 years old, with us all being able to sight-read any piece of music they put in front of us, pretty well note perfect. For me, too, I caught a lifelong bug for the pipe organ, the musicians’ equivalent of trainspotting. It wasn’t until I subsequently went to a secondary school that didn’t have choristers singing in chapel every day that I realised that what we had been doing was a somewhat out of the ordinary experience for a 7-13 year old boy. Up till then I had assumed, naively, that it was ‘normal’ to sing Tomkins, Tallis or Tye in between football, hockey and athletics or maths, history and science. I thought that the quirky Brit church composers I sang every day of my life at choir school (Samuel Sebastian Wesley, Charles Stanford, Kenneth Leighton, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons and Edmund Rubbra, for example) were the great composers. I knew Bach was a giant and that Mozart and Beethoven were up there too, but Beethoven didn’t do a Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis so he was pretty much off our musical radar. Wagner- who the hell was he?
We got to sing centre stage in the most atmospheric and theatrical religious rituals of the year (Christmas, the Passion and Remembrance stick out), occasions I can still recall as vividly as if they were yesterday, almost down to the smell of the chapel – beeswax pew polish (pungent, comforting), underseat oil-heating (sweet, rank) and 400 soaked duffle and raincoats (overpowering). We terrified each other in the dormitory after evensong with ghost stories and conspiracy theories about unspeakable college students (“expelled for gross moral terpitude, apparently”) or spectral priests lurking up the haunted bell tower. Gruesome tales of 18th century castrati or the practice of chorister-snatching from the 17th century were recounted as if they had happened a few weeks before. We were singing 17th century music as if it was just off the shelf – so why not the yarns?
But most of all, the experience embedded music in the fibre of my being from an early age, not as a solo pursuit in lonely practice rooms, or as a series of graded exam hurdles, of individual trophies and prizes, anxious parents and traumatic competitions, but as a thoroughly communal, team effort. We were better – miles better – as an ensemble than any of us could have hoped to have been individually. We sang as group, we played and worked and joked and fought and caught ‘flu as a group. Collectively, we soared. There’s no other word for it. The sound of 16 trained boys or girls scaling some great musical height in the echoey grandeur of a cathedral, abbey or college chapel is thrilling. It’s one of the things we do as a nation that is quite unique, musically outstanding and culturally without price. The French closed down the last of their once-numerous cathedral choirs in the early 20th century and the sound they made, those choirs, has never been recaptured since, despite strenuous government efforts in recent decades to breathe life back into their lost tradition. Every time I hear Fauré’s or Duruflé’s Requiems, which were written for French cathedral choirs not unlike ours, I feel sadness at their casual extinction.
The choristers I sang with in Oxford back in the late 60s nearly all went on to jobs in music and the arts. Big, responsible jobs. The experience was simply too powerful to put in a box and forget about. We had learnt how to perform, how to communicate, how to put our best foot forward as a team, how to organise our time, how to concentrate for long spells, how to discern between the excellent and the mediocre and how to breathe life into pieces of music that had been lying around or neglected, yellowing manuscript paper for hundreds of years. Thanks to the DfES’ Music and Dance Scheme, any British child can now have this amazing, life-changing experience no matter what their background. We can be immensely proud of this tradition and its extraordinary rewards. Isn’t it time we shouted it from the rooftops?
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Howard’s article on composing music for the Church in the 21st Century was also included in a book – Composing Music for Worship – edited by Stephen Darlington and Alan Kreider, along with articles by other leading composers in the genre. The book was published by Canterbury Press and can be found (and ordered) from here.