CE: Ely Cathedral Wed, 30th Jan 2019 [L]

[Finzi4ever]

T The original dedicatee Leeds treble, Paul Dutton, must have been an extremely fine singer and musician.

Indeed he was/is. In the ?70s he made a significant number of choir and solo recordings, particularly with Harry Mudd's famous 'Abbey Records'.
Latterly a tenor and conductor Northern Voices possibly - others here will certainly know.

[ardcarp]

The aforementioned soloist found this review rather amusing! It's very challenging solo writing indeed. Suffice to say, this massively narrows the options in such instances wherein latterly, on balance, Plan A could no longer be absolutely guaranteed to be vocally 100% secure by the time broadcast day comes, even if still more than capable of doing it very well indeed under most circumstances. The original dedicatee Leeds treble, Paul Dutton, must have been an extremely fine singer and musician. (Presumably the original dedicatee Leeds bass, John Wheeler, was rather good too.) I suspect the distinctly non-trivial solos, both in the Mag and in the Nunc, are the main reason why these canticles are sung so rarely. The soloists basically have to put blinkers on, more or less shut everything else out, trust totally in their own reading skills, pitching and rhythmic accuracy, believe that what comes out must be what the composer intended, and fire. Balance is a big problem too, because the writing is sometimes rather unrealistic, with solo lines pitted against thick choral textures, and one simply has to try to find a way of making a really big noise and take some of the dynamic markings with a very large pinch of salt. That might not necessarily be the case in other acoustic conditions, but it certainly is under the Octagon of Ely Cathedral!

I wonder if you'd spend a moment explaining the acoustics of Ely, from a singer's point of view. I'm sure Forumistas would be interested. There's also the Chapter House.....

I've attended concerts there (non-vocal as it happens) held under the Octagon and enjoyed the experience. I've also sung CE with a visiting Cambridge choir (tenor solo in Howells Coll Reg Nunc as I recall) in the choir stalls and found the acoustic a tad disappointing.

[Finzi4ever]

I wonder if you'd spend a moment explaining the acoustics of Ely, from a singer's point of view. I'm sure Forumistas would be interested. There's also the Chapter House.....
[/SIZE]

No Chapter House, but the famous (semi-)detached Lady Chapel has the most wonderful resonance, the best by far in ... East Anglia, at the very least (preferable to King's).

[ardcarp]

the famous (semi-)detached Lady Chapel

Yes, that's what I was thinking of!

[mopsus]

So, Quilisma (or anyone else), why is there no Chapter House at Ely? Is it like Hereford, where the Chapter House was neglected and fell into ruin? Or is there one somewhere, but it's architecturally undistinguished?

[Vox Humana]

The aforementioned soloist found this review rather amusing!

Am I correct in guessing that this is because she was a last-minute substitute? (My source is usually reliable, but I know nothing of his.)

[Quilisma]

Wow, so many questions! Where do I begin? OK then...

The Chapter House of the old Benedictine Cathedral Priory was demolished a long time ago. The original layout (and indeed architecture) of the entire complex was very similar indeed to that of the Benedictine Cathedral Priory at Winchester, and presumably was modelled on it (or indeed in certain aspects possibly vice versa). The Chapter House stood to the south of the South Transept, probably (as at Winchester) separated by a slype, in what is now the south car park, to the east of the south door. Ely is very fortunate to have maintained the majority of its (former) monastic buildings intact after the Priory was dissolved in 1539, largely because Henry VIII repurposed some of them to house his new King's School, founded when the Cathedral was refounded in 1541. (King's Ely, as it has been officially known since 2012, sometimes suggests that it was founded in the late tenth century and that it had Edward the Confessor as an alumnus, but that is somewhat fanciful, particularly as even after the Reformation the Cathedral maintained its own school as well, albeit at least latterly a very small and makeshift affair, well into the twentieth century.) Luckily the Lady Chapel was also repurposed as a second parish church, and remained as such until the 1930s, so it too was saved from ruin and demolition. But those structures which were left redundant came to be seen as a nuisance, and I think what was left of the Chapter House was pulled down in the eighteenth century, along with the east range of the cloisters beyond the end of the South Transept, of which only the internal wall, with windows blocked up, remains. The south and west sides of the cloister also do not survive, whereas the north side has been repurposed as the Song School and the Lay Clerks' Vestry (which also houses the Choir Music Library) and another general purpose room outside the original Prior's Door. The inside of the cloister is now the Bishop's Garden. Interestingly (or perhaps not), the Bishop does not live in the Bishop's Palace, which is simply unnecessarily enormous for the purpose. The Old Palace is now used by King's Ely. The Bishop lives in what is termed the Bishop's House, which is what used to be the Prior's Lodge. Somebody once told me I was incredibly ignorant for saying that the Bishop lives in the Bishop's House, on the grounds that "bishops live in palaces". Well, this one does not, because there is a Bishop's Palace but it is no longer used for that purpose. (The Bishops of Ely also used to have a London residence at Ely Place, formerly Ely Palace, in Holborn, but again this is no longer needed so has passed on to other uses.) As for today's Chapter House, the Chapter Office (or more accurately Chapter Offices) are housed in what used to be the monastic Infirmary, at the end of Firmary Lane, and there is a Chapter Room in there. The Deanery adjoins, with internal access.) It is also curious that Ely has never had a specific dedicated Cathedra, and is arguably therefore not a Cathedral at all! The story goes that, in 1109, the monks of Ely Abbey, then under reconstruction, were perfectly happy just as they were and were not particularly interested in their foundation becoming the seat of a new Bishopric, but that they then had the first Bishop of Ely forced upon them at the behest of the Pope, and supposedly it was somebody who had done a terrible job in Wales so needed to be put somewhere else, and perhaps the Fens were still somewhat out of favour with the Norman authorities because Hereward the Wake had held out against the conquest, not that this was anything to do with the monks in Ely Abbey; so the first Bishop of Ely was not exactly welcomed with open arms at the time... Suffice to say, relations between Bishop and Cathedral are now very cordial, especially now that the Bishops of Ely no longer also have extensive ex officio secular powers as de facto Counts Palatine of the Liberty of the Isle of Ely! The past is another country...

As for the internal architectural and acoustic characteristics of the Cathedral buildings, and the story behind them, I shall have to address that in a second post, perhaps this evening!

[ardcarp]

Thanks Q. Await episode 2 with imterest. These quirks in ecclesiastical history are fascinating. I sang in a small medieaval Devon church last year which has an archpriest...one of only two in the country (the archpriest being answerable only to the ArchBish of Canterbury, not the Diocesan Bishop). The place also has a heart burial, an alabaster tomb containing the heart only of one of the Courtney family. The practice was supposed to have been banned by some Pope or other in the 13th/14th century.

[Quilisma]

That sounds like a fascinating place!

As I said, until the fourteenth century the layout of Ely Cathedral was very similar to Winchester Cathedral at that time. The Monks' Quire was in the crossing, directly under the original central tower, where the Octagon and Lantern now are. The screen was not in its current position; rather, there was a stone pulpitum to the west of where the Octagon now is, with the result that the Nave was not so disproportionately long and what is now the Quire and Presbytery was rather less bunched up than it is now. In the fourteenth century, work began on the Lady Chapel, but while in most other places this had been tacked on to the east end of the building, there was not enough room to extend eastwards on the desired scale, so instead it was conceived as an almost completely free-standing semi-detached building at the north "shoulder" of the Cathedral Church. But work on the foundations for the Lady Chapel caused a disturbance in the very shallow foundations next door, probably as a knock-on effect of a water channel being re-routed, thereby causing a change in the soil conditions. One night, just as the monks had left the building after a particular service, the central tower collapsed, but miraculously nobody was killed. Alan de Walsingham had the genius idea to spread the load more securely by removing one bay on each side of the crossing and creating an octagonal space, and tying it together with a lantern tower made of wood. Progress was extremely rapid, especially considering that it was a completely experimental engineering project and there was nothing of the like anywhere else in the world. Meanwhile, the enormous Lady Chapel was itself completed relatively quickly as well, and became one of the architectural and artistic glories of all Christendom. It suffered so much at the hands of the iconoclasts at the Reformation, and is now so stark and white and airy, that it is hard to remember that it used to be an overwhelming psychedelic kaleidoscope of colour, intentionally "out of this world" like a vision of the garden of Heaven, and with an extremely resonant yet clear acoustic, somehow cosmic in general effect.


Back in the Cathedral, in hindsight it seems strange that this wonderful new Octagon was still not open at ground level. The Monks' Quire remained in situ as before, under the central tower (which was now the Lantern), and the stone pulpitum still blocked it off from the Nave. The acoustic conditions of the Cathedral would have been very different then from now; presumably the north and south wooden back panels behind the Quire on either side helped to focus the sound and direct it upwards into the Octagon and around the building. But by the late eighteenth century it was thought desirable to make the most of all that wonderful potential space and integrate the Transepts and Nave into the Octagon, so the Quire was removed from the Octagon and relocated right at the far east end of the Chancel, and the stone pulpitum was demolished. But although there was now a massive amount more open space in the centre of the building, the new location of the Quire proved to be completely unsatisfactory, so in the early nineteenth century it was moved again, to its current location, just to the east of the Octagon. The shrines of St Etheldreda and the other saints had been removed at the Reformation, and the High Altar was moved further to the east than its original location, which, reflecting the fact that the original location of the Quire was further west than it now is, is rather close to where the Quire now is.

The effect of having moved the woodwork of the Quire into a new and less spacious location, not in the centre of the building, is that it does not aid the resonance of its own accord, and the sound tends to travel in strange ways. One needs to make a very "present" and energised sound if it is to travel at all. (It is not a question of volume, but rather tone quality and clarity of articulation, often tending towards the "assertive" end of the spectrum, and it is definitely the case that a bright and even slightly edgy timbre is far more successful in those conditions than anything mellow or spongy.) The acoustic conditions are rather odd: if one is listening in certain locations, there may be parts of the ensemble which are barely audible at all, because they are in an acoustic shadow, whereas further away one can hear more clearly.

The challenge of singing from the Octagon Stalls (which, of course, is NOT the same as when the Quire itself was fixed in the Octagon under the Lantern!) is in some ways quite similar. The Octagon is a big space, and the sound just tends to disappear into the depths of the building. It is not easy to coordinate from side to side, because one cannot necessarily hear the other side very well, and one is angled in a V in any case, ideally directing most of one's sound across the expanse of the Octagon and into the huge long Nave and back towards the clock at the west end. People sitting in the Nave tend to find that they can hear the choir better if they sit a bit further back, while towards the front they get a lot of power and thrust from the organ (especially if they are sitting on the south side, because the organ is on the north-east) but the choir is barely audible. The Nave is even longer than it was when the stone pulpitum was on the west side of the Octagon, and it is somewhat tunnel-like, or perhaps more accurately like a gorge or canyon, with height being more obvious than width. Unlike at Winchester, the Nave did not receive a Perpendicular upgrade, so it is still the original Romanesque structure, and the ceiling is wooden (with a painted frieze) rather than stone. So projection is the name of the game: the sound will not just travel of its own accord, one needs to send it out there. That is the main reason why the organ received a rather French-style upgrade under Arthur Wills in the mid 1970s: the building was crying out for more thrust and attack and less woofiness, stodge and "mud", and that is what the rebuild achieved (rationalised somewhat during a second rebuild at the turn of the millennium).

The acoustic challenges presented by the Lady Chapel, with its seven-second decay, are just as acute, but in fact the solution is not too dissimilar: one must avoid congestion and fog, and this means that articulation needs to be clean and definite and tone bright and focussed, and the real enemy is tentativity, which leads to messiness. It is a glorious place in which to perform suitable music in a suitable way, but a terrible place in which to perform unsuitable music in an unsuitable way. One particular visiting artiste, who is not exactly known for downplaying the significance of his own concerts within Ely's musical calendar, once decided to stage a Bach B Minor Mass in the Lady Chapel, and I understand that the outcome was just as one might imagine... Whether or not this was down to a deficiency of the building as a performance space is a moot point!

[mopsus]

One particular visiting artiste, who is not exactly known for downplaying the significance of his own concerts within Ely's musical calendar, once decided to stage a Bach B Minor Mass in the Lady Chapel, and I understand that the outcome was just as one might imagine... Whether or not this was down to a deficiency of the building as a performance space is a moot point!

I used to sing for him when I lived in the area and have rather happier memories of, for example, singing all six Bach motets in one weekend in a College chapel in Cambridge. But he has not moved on and does the same repertoire over and over (to judge by its website, his choir is now inactive, but he has a way of reinventing choral groups under new names). A lot of the people who sang in the Lady Chapel B minor Mass (given by what was billed as 'one of Europe's leading choirs'!) are known to me, and in fact I stumbled across the dress rehearsal for it as I was singing services that day with a visiting choir. What I heard afterwards was that the opening of the final 'Dona nobis pacem' movement was sung unaccompanied, but that the singer who started off picked the wrong note, with bitonal results when the orchestra came in....

[Quilisma]

I used to sing for him when I lived in the area and have rather happier memories of, for example, singing all six Bach motets in one weekend in a College chapel in Cambridge. But he has not moved on and does the same repertoire over and over. A lot of the people who sang in the Lady Chapel B minor Mass (given by what was billed as 'one of Europe's leading choirs'!) are known to me, and in fact I stumbled across the dress rehearsal for it as I was singing services that day with a visiting choir. What I heard afterwards was that the opening of the final 'Dona nobis pacem' movement was sung unaccompanied, but that the singer who started off picked the wrong note, with bitonal results when the orchestra came in....

Gosh, what a small world! I sing regularly with several of his ex-singers and a couple who still sing for him. I must stress that he is a very accomplished musician, pioneer, impressario and force of nature, and very much a good thing. But some of the projects (most notably that particular one) don't seem to have been fully thought through from a practical perspective; and, especially as the publicity for the sample concert which I attended (some years later than that one) billed these occasions as the absolute pinnacle of Ely Cathedral's annual musical calendar, one wonders whether it was perhaps not necessarily the most self-aware thing in the world, especially as their concerts in more acoustically suitable settings (such as Cambridge college chapels) are, or have in the past been, so very successful.

If I have understood correctly, comparing the radically different accounts of sources on both siders, some kind of misunderstanding over a months-long sculpture exhibition which they latterly discovered was going to remain in situ during a planned concert of theirs (as it did for everything else during that period without any inconvenience whatsoever to, or complaint whatsoever from, anybody at all) provoked them unilaterally to cancel that concert and relocate it somewhere else, whereupon they were very uncomplimentary indeed about Ely Cathedral to everybody who had ears to hear. I fear that, after a long time in which they did concerts in Ely Cathedral at least once a year, which were always well attended, they seem now to have decided to abandon it as a venue altogether.

[mopsus]

I fear that, after a long time in which they did concerts in Ely Cathedral at least once a year, which were always well attended, they seem now to have decided to abandon it as a venue altogether.

No, they seem to be down to give a concert in the Lady Chapel on 15th September this year, although this is not mentioned on the choir's website.

I found that the Cambridge 'town' choral scene was not all that large and I kept meeting the same few people in lots of different places. The same thing can apply in places that are a lot larger; when I moved on to Manchester I noticed a lot of overlap between the chamber choirs in that city, even though in those days there were very few of them. Also, some choirs (such as Bath Camerata around here) just do have a large number of former singers, so the chances of running into one of them are high.

[ardcarp]

Thanks for Vol II Quilisma (post 24). Nothing gives me more pleasure than wandering around churches/cathedrals and trying to figure out their architectural 'evolution'. Such a shame that in many glorious French churches any printed information is scarce...often absent. As with Ely's Lady Chapel, similar acoustical problems prevail at Buckfast Abbey. Great for Renaissance polyphony, but doing a Baroque Choral choral/instrumental work results in a mish-mash for the listener, especially as the only space large enough to site the performers is East of the choir in that great space under the chandelier.

Incidentally, the lovely CD of Amner verse anthems was, I think, recorded in Ely's Lady Chapel...very successfully.

[Quilisma]

No, they seem to be down to give a concert in the Lady Chapel on 15th September this year, although this is not mentioned on the choir's website.

I found that the Cambridge 'town' choral scene was not all that large and I kept meeting the same few people in lots of different places. The same thing can apply in places that are a lot larger; when I moved on to Manchester I noticed a lot of overlap between the chamber choirs in that city, even though in those days there were very few of them. Also, some choirs (such as Bath Camerata around here) just do have a large number of former singers, so the chances of running into one of them are high.

Ah, good, I'm glad they are coming back after all! It was, after all, a silly misunderstanding, and they may well in fact have benefited from a great deal of favourable treatment over the years as regular and faithful clients... I have to say, I certainly support what they do and am generally very much in favour. (Having said that, some of their publicity could perhaps be a little bit more sensitive. A couple of years ago they did a concert of Fayrfax et al, and the poster proclaimed that they were "bringing the glories of the English choral tradition to Ely", furnished with a massive image of King's College Chapel. But I suppose it's just a fact of life that some people will naturally assume that anything of any quality going on in Ely must have been imported, most likely from Cambridge, and that it's all basically outreach to a place which supposedly needs to be schooled. To those of us who have been lucky enough to "go native" this ingrained patronising attitude seems risibly and rather quaintly naïve, especially because it's unlikely that the University in Cambridge would ever have got off the ground without the active support, lobbying, initiative, assistance, generosity and continuous benefaction of Ely Cathedral Priory, and that symbiotic relationship has never really disappeared...)

Yes, of course there's a huge University choral scene in Cambridge, but a lot of people who are still around and are no longer involved in it. There are at least four regular very good and very busy amateur chamber choirs based in Cambridge which are not directly linked with the University, and several more which operate frequently but irregularly, and these attract people from all over the area. There is of course some overlap between the membership of these choirs, especially for big projects, and people do come and go, but there is certainly no lack of quality singing for very keen people who happen not (or no longer) to be in one of the college choirs to do.

[mopsus]

But I suppose it's just a fact of life that some people will naturally assume that anything of any quality going on in Ely must have been imported, most likely from Cambridge, and that it's all basically outreach to a place which supposedly needs to be schooled.

In this neck of the woods, I feel a little the same way about the Edington Festival. 'Music within the liturgy', carefully thought out and sensitively performed, is to be found in the area (outside Bath Abbey), despite a long local history of Evangelicalism. I'd love it if one or more of the Edington groups joined forces with a nearby church choir for an event; that really would be outreach!