Alexandra Coghlan

Divinely reticent

The distinctive tone of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge depends on self-effacement: the uniformity of 30 voices singing as one

Earlier this year The Spectator published an article in celebration of Evensong — the nightly sung service of the Anglican Church. Attendance, it seems, is not just up but dramatically so. While church visitor figures across the UK have fallen steadily and substantially since the 1960s, congregations at sung services have swollen up to ten times over, often rising to three figures. Why?

The answers come easily enough. In an increasingly volatile world, the certainty and beauty of Evensong offers a welcome still point — time and space to contemplate, meditate, an opportunity to listen to voices raised in a candlelit chapel and experience spirituality aesthetically rather than intellectually.

The greatest appeal of all, however, seems to lie in the idea of continuity. To attend Evensong is to take part in a great tradition that has continued unbroken in these ancient buildings for centuries, to become part of something bigger and more enduring than oneself. It’s a comforting idea but one, as Timothy Day’s I Saw Eternity the Other Night so elegantly demonstrates, that is more fiction than fact.

‘A source of grief and shame to well disposed and well instructed persons.’ That was the composer S.S. Wesley’s damning verdict on the quality of cathedral singing in 1849. Others saw the choirs as ‘schools for irreverence’, horrified at their ‘untrained and uneducated’ personnel and the lack of ‘refinement’ in their performances. Far from being the envy of the world, as convention would have it, English church music was in a lamentable state, and had been for some time.

But if ancient tradition is revealed as a 20th-century invention, it raises the more interesting question of why it was necessary to invent it in the first place? Could it be that what we’d like to champion as a triumphant constant of our national history is in fact much more unstable, a touchstone for ever-shifting and sometimes inadmissible priorities of class, gender, politics and aesthetics?

Day’s book sells itself simply, as a history and unpacking of the famous ‘King’s sound’ — the distinctive, and for many unequalled, tone of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge.

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