Death of a choir

Always make your redundancy announcement when the people at the receiving end of it are on a high. This seems to be the favoured method of today’s managing executives, who perhaps imagine that adrenalin will somehow anaesthetise the blow of getting the sack.

For the Cambridge student choir St John’s Voices, the news of its imminent disbanding and the redundancy of its director Graham Walker came just two minutes after the light was switched off at the end of a three-day recording session of Russian choral masterpieces last week.

In a two-paragraph round-robin email to the choir that evening, the Master of St John’s College, Heather Hancock, explained that, in the light of findings by an ad-hoc committee (plus a report on the contribution of the chapel to the wider life of the college), the ‘council has decided to adopt a broader approach to the provision of co-curricular opportunities in music for our students, including in different genres’, and that as a consequence, the college’s funding would be redirected and ‘St John’s Voices will be disbanded at the end of Easter term 2024’.

The news was greeted with an outpouring of dismay and fury, not only by choir members, but also by hundreds of supporters across the country who are getting wearily used to signing petitions and writing letters in an effort to save the nation’s musical institutions. These signatories (Sir Simon Rattle and Rowan Williams among them) can’t bear to see the diminishment or disbandment of something specific and excellent that does exist, in favour of something unspecific and well-meaning that does not exist.

The brutal disbandment of yet another choir may seem a minor matter in the scheme of recent arts-world debacles, but it’s symptomatic of the casual ‘drop bombshell and retreat behind your comms team’ methods of today’s managerial class, who can’t bear to keep institutions as they find them but feel an urge to leave their mark, often woefully ignorant of exactly what it is that they’re destroying.