CE Chapel of St John's College, Cambridge Wed 27th April

[DracoM]

Is the implication that both local and independent schools are cutting back on sundry kinds of musical provision? Or that their horizons are shifting focus? Or the students' are more interested in destinations otherwhere than Oxbridge?

I ask because from time to time we do get threads on The Choir chronicling shifts in funding, aspirations in all manner of different ways in schools and mapping their likely impact on the more specialised musical life of lay-clerk, organ scholars etc? Or, more ominously, is it just among musically-inclined male students that this is more pronounced?

[Caussade]

No, none of these. Simply that fewer and fewer people can combine high-level singing with high-level academic ability, and that Admissions will always take the strongest candidate now, regardless of whether another candidate _almost_ as good would be useful to the chapel choir. There's recently been a big upheaval in the way choral trials are timed and conducted, so time will tell whether this helps at all. And if a student is shelling out something like £30K fo a university degree, they're rather less likely to be interested in committing huge amounts of time to an activity that distracts from the business of getting a degree. There's always been a massively disproportionate number of sopranos applying for awards.

[ardcarp]

Admissions tutors will no longer bend the rules as they might have ten or fifteen years ago. In the early 80s organ scholars only had to get EE grades to get in. Try that now.

I wonder if bending still applies to drawers of wood and hewers of water?

[subcontrabass]

That's not the same thing as a shortage of applicants per se (although organ scholarship applications in recent years have been noticeably a bit thinner on the ground: not enough to go round all the colleges offering places in some years).

Nothing new in that. In 1964, the year in which I gained an organ scholarship at an Oxford college, there were 12 applicants in total for 11 organ scholarships. One candidate did not turn up for the practical.