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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.
The scene has shrunk and the motivation shifted, as the primary reason for joining a good choir has changed from worship pure and simple, to money, status and educational advantage. The music in ordinary parish churches, with little money and less glamour, stands little chance of making a contribution to this way of looking at the profession, and many are the doom-sayers who claim that the choral tradition, without the old grassroots supply, is on the verge of extinction. They point to the parallel case of cricket, which has successfully rescued itself in recent years from being too closely associated with expensive schools, while acquiring plausible folk heroes like Freddie Flintoff. Where is the Freddie Flintoff of the choristers? Jesus is not the player he once was, and the numbers are down.
Choir-schools have an image problem with many parents, even as they acknowledge that the benefits of singing in a tightly disciplined environment must be considerable. It is hard to think of a more effective way of encouraging a child to develop his mind than putting him in the middle of a professional performance of something like Handel’s Zadok the Priest and letting him get on with it. Most other school activities have nothing to rival this, an activity both physical and intellectual at the same time, which furthers reading skills in music and literature almost incidentally. The problem is the single-sex boarding-school regime, which to many potential parents seems to belong to a previous age.
What belongs to the present, however, is the against-the-odds increase in standards in the leading cathedral and collegiate choirs of today. Despite what the doom-sayers say (and have said to my certain knowledge for the past 30 years) the show not only goes on, but does so both at a higher professional level and with a greater serious-minded commitment than ever before. Boys who know nothing about classical music when they start in one of these choirs will eventually be contributing to recordings, broadcasts and concerts with a proficiency which even H.K. Andrews could not have expected.
My view is that the extinction of this great tradition is far from imminent, but two things would reduce the chance of it still further. I know it is modern and PC to try to mix girl choristers with boys, but it has now been tried and it has not been found to work. This is obviously a pity but it is not something which should be forced. The other is to get round the need for young children to have to board away from home. I have heard all the arguments in favour of boarding, and I don’t believe them. Compulsory boarding puts a lot of well-disposed people off, and so it should. Bring that anomaly into line with contemporary thinking and the sky would really be the limit.
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