And the choir sings on

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Killing time in Beverley Minster the other day I caught sight of the list of past organists painted up on a board. Within the past 200 years this magnificent building, which has no choir-school of its own, has played host to John Camidge, A.H. Mann and H.K. Andrews. All three went from there to the very top of the cathedral organists’ ladder: Camidge to York Minster; Mann to King’s, Cambridge, where he presided over the first broadcast of Nine Lessons and Carols in the Twenties; and Andrews to New College, Oxford, where he pioneered the music of Byrd (and died a famous death while giving the inaugural recital on the new organ at Trinity).

Those names in such a place show again that the supply of musicians from our larger parish churches to the cathedrals is not now what it once was. Even 50 years ago musical boys and men hoping to work in a cathedral choir were expected to have done some sort of apprenticeship in a parish church choir first. By these means boys would acquire the rudiments in the tricky business of pointing Anglican chant, collating words and music in hymn books and singing in their head voices (pop music, which is almost every young child’s experience of singing these days, is routinely pitched too low) before ever applying to a cathedral. And there was more of a sense of this chain  — boy chorister, adolescent choral scholar and finally lay-clerk or organist — amounting to a self-sufficient career for life. That sense is still there, but nowadays organists will only consider a cathedral posting straight away, or they do something else; the supply of boys has dwindled, and those who do apply usually have to be taught from scratch; and the lay-clerks will always put their concert careers first.