Originally posted by Braunschlag
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It's the familiar, affectionate name for Westminster Cathedral. -
Was everything in that KCC service taken at a slow pace, or was it just the hymn? Pretty much all of the St. Thomas service felt laboured, from 'I slowed down' to 'Blessed City'.Originally posted by Philip View PostComment
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It was a good number of years ago so I honestly can't remember, it's just Blaenwern that stuck with me!Originally posted by Triforium View Post
This was another thing about the St Thomas service, I couldn't reconcile the tempos in Blessed City. For all that some of the opening was taken quite slowly, I expected the last section to be more stately. It didn't seem to gel. I sat down was certainly very slow, I don't envy breath control at that pace!Comment
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They weren't. You are absolutely right about the high standard being achieved by Stanley Vann in the 1960s, but you've omitted Christopher Robinson, then at Worcester.Originally posted by Triforium View PostComment
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Once upon a time Stanley Vann broadcast Britten's Ceremony of Carols with his choristers. I wasn't expecting to be blown away...but I was.Comment
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Not forgetting Thalben Ball at the Temple Church. The sound may be a bit dated now but certainly a very high standard. Nobody, in my view, has sung hymns like they did. Such musical phrasing.Originally posted by Wolsey View Post
Last edited by PeterboroughDiapason; 04-07-19, 11:23.Comment
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Yes, of course, Christopher Robinson and George Thalben Ball. In listening to the recordings from the 1920s on this site - https://www.recordedchurchmusic.org/historic-recordings , and the corresponding youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoJ...C9b0_32eNHJf0w , a stodgy, almost stilted quality to much of the singing comes through. I don't believe it's due to the technical limitations of recording at the time. The King's example under Mann in 1929 has some of the same elements. Yet, 30-35 years further on in the early 60s, improved standards, and indeed several styles of singing begin to emerge, which do not sound particularly odd to our ears today, over 50 years later.Originally posted by PeterboroughDiapason View Post
Perhaps the question is not only what drove the improvements in collegiate and cathedral/parish church choirs, but why the style was so remarkably different from the 20s to the late 50s vs the 60s to now.
Have just received the Timothy Day book - am looking forward to the read.Last edited by Triforium; 04-07-19, 19:00.Comment
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Interesting thread! I must have a look at this Timothy Day book: it sounds to be right up my alley. I'd wholeheartedly concur about all the names mentioned here. At the same time, having read his highly outspoken and in some places somewhat tendentious autobiography, Thine Adversaries Roar, I suspect Michael (Stockwin) Howard would be most put out not to have warranted at least a passing mention as one of the leading lights of the mid twentieth century! He seems to have considered himself as such, and in his book he has precious little positive to say about many of his contemporaries apart from Boris Ord, George Guest, Henry Washington (and presumably George Malcolm) and the countertenor John Whitworth... He doesn't "name names" as such, with the exception of his Ely predecessor Sidney Campbell, about whom he is unduly catty. I understand that MSH was considered by some to be a "choral pioneer", but his achievements at Ely in the 1950s certainly capitalised on the best elements of the Campbell legacy (with the continuum of the same Assistant, Campbell's own protégé, and latterly Howard's successor as Director for the next 42 years, namely Arthur Wills)... It would be fascinating to hear James Bowman's recollection of this time, as I understand he was a chorister under both Campbell and Howard. I believe the Ely choir under Michael Howard (1953-1958) was indeed highly rated by some, and they too did one of the earliest live broadcasts of Ceremony of Carols, which is also available on the Archive of Recorded Church Music YouTube channel. It's entirely fair to say that under Arthur Wills (1958-1990) there were some very good patches and some frankly not very good patches, with radical fluctuations of proficiency from year to year being par for the course, reflecting the radical fluctuations in recruitment and personnel which seem to be inherent in places of this type; but unfortunately people seem very much more inclined to remember the rough patches and ignore the good patches, and this is how reputations stick. I have to say, though, that I have enormous respect and admiration for what they DID achieve in those days, at a time when it was far from the norm for lay clerks to have received a very high level of state-of-the-art technical or musical training and when the voice training of choristers was done largely on an ad hoc basis and not necessarily by people who were themselves vocal specialists. Much progress has been made on this front over the past few decades, but there is still the lingering perception among many people that it hasn't. I have to admit that when I made it known that I was moving here, nearly six years ago, at least a couple of my musical associates wondered aloud why on earth I should want to sing "there, of all places", but it mostly turned out that they had never heard the choir and had formed their opinion on the basis of their own inevitably negative supposition and lingering rumour of fourth-hand reports from maybe a few decades earlier. I get very defensive about this, not for my own sake but because negative reputations tend to self-fulfil, and we can really do without that!
One of the fascinating things about being a lay clerk here is that although none of the current team as such has been around for more than ten years there are a number of people still very much on the choir scene who have been here for very much longer than that: two former lay clerks who arrived in 1982, and not forgetting AWW himself, still a regular in the congregation, who has been here since 1949! (There is a 1982 broadcast from here which was very recently uploaded to the aforementioned YouTube channel, and in certain respects it sounds remarkably dated...)
Of course, we are now in another period of transition following the end of Paul Trepte's 29-year tenure at Easter and the elevation of the fantastic Edmund Aldhouse (previously Assistant since 2013, repeating what happened with AWW in 1958). PT left a very healthy, quirky and characterful legacy, which EGBA is making a point of carefully curating and developing organically in his own direction, with his own insights into where and how improvements can be made, rather than dismantling it and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A great deal of thought has gone into all of this, and it is already bearing good fruit. After all, there are numerous well attested examples of excellent practice to emulate, including all the names which have already been mentioned on this thread. A change of régime (if handled right!) is certainly an exciting time to be part of a choir. I look forward to discovering what will happen, but certainly the basic thread of continuity (which goes back at least to the 1950s) is going to continue: our trademark tendency towards assertive, gutsy, bright-toned singing will remain part of the terroir of the place, just as the building demands. Maybe EGBA will prove to be one of the great directors of the coming era: I wouldn't doubt it! (He certainly has good ideas about psalms...)
We (or at least I) seem to have strayed from the point somewhat. Oh dear. Sorry!Comment
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A fascinating post, Quilisma. Thank you. I've just ordered a copy of Howard's book. I wonder how much this thread is going to end up costing me?
A lot of people found Sidney Cambell difficult to get on with. I never heard him criticise Howard. On the contrary, I recall him approving very much of the 'Italianate' choral style that Howard produced from his secular choir Cantores in Ecclesia (although he didn't seek to emulate it). It wasn't at all to my taste - and still isn't, if I'm honest. I didn't like the continual fp attacks, or the way that suspensions were sung with little hiatuses that made the dissonances apt to disappear (which sort of ruined the whole point of them). However, there's no denying that the choir were rather good.
This Ely Choral Evensong from 1957 is also well worth a listen. The ensemble is occasionally a little ragged, but there's much to admire, especially the crystal clear diction in the psalms. How many modern choirs are so easy to understand? It's something that stands out in the Cantores in Ecclesia recording too.Comment
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Yes, the points you mention are exaggerated and certainly not the way I'd do them - tiresome on repeated listenings - but the engagement with text and the intricacies of the counterpoint is captivating.Originally posted by Vox Humana View PostA fascinating post, Quilisma. Thank you. I've just ordered a copy of Howard's book. I wonder how much this thread is going to end up costing me?
A lot of people found Sidney Cambell difficult to get on with. I never heard him criticise Howard. On the contrary, I recall him approving very much of the 'Italianate' choral style that Howard produced from his secular choir Cantores in Ecclesia (although he didn't seek to emulate it). It wasn't at all to my taste - and still isn't, if I'm honest. I didn't like the continual fp attacks, or the way that suspensions were sung with little hiatuses that made the dissonances apt to disappear (which sort of ruined the whole point of them). However, there's no denying that the choir was rather good.
This Ely Choral Evensong from 1957 is also well worth a listen. The ensemble is occasionally a little ragged, but there's much to admire, especially the crystal clear diction in the psalms. How many modern choirs are so easy to understand? It's something that stands out in the Cantores in Ecclesia recording too.Comment
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Fascinating listening! I agree, this hardly matches the idea I have in my own mind about how one would most likely approach performing this kind of repertoire, but then again, I definitely exist and operate as a musician within the context of our own era, and I daresay my own preferences and prejudices are not atypical of someone who was a keen and active participant in the musical scene of the more easterly of England's ancient universities in the latter 1990s and early and mid 2000s (and previously, in the early to mid 1990s, a music scholar in a certain school with its own surviving medieval collegiate choral foundation, and before that, for a year either side of 1990, a member of a now defunct county-wide boys' choir, which more than made up for having been turned down for a choristership in the narrower sense!)... If we view Michael Howard's approach in the context of the time, it was clearly a reaction against the pre-war "romantic" approach to early music as exemplified by editions by people like Edmund Fellowes, with lots of extraneous markings and swells and changes of tempo. A reminder that MSH was heavily influenced by Henry Washington, whose editions are relatively uncluttered. It's ironic, then, that MSH's published editions (I'm thinking particularly of Batten Short Service) are in some ways more like Fellowes than Washington, littered as they are with prescriptive editorial interpretative markings (and the odd arbitrary change of tempo), and particularly something which seems to be a favourite phrase of his but whose meaning is anyone's guess (he also uses it in his own compositions): "at a round pace". Very helpful, thanks, MSH...Originally posted by Nevilevelis View Post
Anyway, while the emphatic and rather aggressively punchy and choppy delivery now seems as mannered as the soupy gloop which it sought to replace, the general idea, that clarity of text and texture is paramount, is of course an excellent principle and has largely been retained. Latterly, David Wulstan and his disciples (perhaps most notably the Tallis Scholars in the old days), in addition to being firmly wedded to the idea of doing everything at high pitch, went for absolute clinical (almost quasi-computerised and synthetic) purity, giving the impression that any expression or "emoting" was completely out of place; but luckily this too is now dated. I'm a great advocate of the way in which most early music ensembles now approach singing early music, which seems to take the best elements from each different school and apply it as a sensible organic compromise.
Thinking about it, my formative experiences of doing early music seriously were with Tim Brown, who had gleaned influences from many sources. As a chorister at Westminster Abbey he sang under William McKie (who had done work experience in the challenging acoustic conditions of Ely in the 1930s), and one of their countertenors at that time was John Whitworth (who happened to be originally from Ely but had sung for Boris Ord at King's Cambridge), and John Whitworth was one of Michael Howard's great inspirations as a singer and frequently worked with him, not least in helping to train the Ely choristers (of whom James Bowman was one). Then TCB was a choral scholar at King's under David Willcocks, but was also very much in on the new wave headed by John Eliot Gardiner and his friends, as well as what was about to become the King's Singers. Then he sang at New College under David Lumsden and was very much part of what people like the Clerkes of Oxenforde were doing at that time. In any case, the continual emphasis on clarity of articulation, on physical engagement, and on doing what you need to do to make a sound which will work optimally in the space in which you are singing (even if it might sometimes seem rather grotesque and unmusical from your own vantage point), was very much a Clare Leitmotif under TCB, and although we have moved away from the more extreme end of almost violent chiselled attack (which you do hear, at least from the choristers, in some of the archive recordings from the Wills era, along with aspirated melismata...) this is very much in line with what one might term "the Ely school". (I note also that, in addition to the element of the Campbell/Howard/Whitworth/Wills continuum, Paul Trepte, like TCB, worked under David Lumsden at New College, but probably his most major influence is Donald Hunt, both at Leeds and at Worcester, and he also has a very healthy lifelong passion for orchestral music and opera, as well as organ and composing, of course.)
I suppose the moral of the story is that one can always learn all sorts of lessons from all sorts of people, and each of them in turn will have learned all sorts of lessons from all sorts of people. It's an endlessly fascinating world.
(It's also interesting to hear that Sidney Campbell professed to be a fan of Michael Howard's work. Considering how uncomplimentary Michael Howard was about Sidney Campbell, and about the fact that he had missed out on the Ely job in favour of the latter when he applied in 1949, I suspect it was a case of making a point of being more gracious. Arthur Wills was full of praise for both of them, of course.)Comment
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A lot of people thought that about the Clerkes of Oxenford, but I remember one of them telling me how wrong that perception was. Wulstan was apparently always going on about singing more sexily and making comments such as, "No wonder the birth rate's falling," and indeed the warmth of the Clerkes' interpretations shows. Compare, say, a Tallis or Sheppard track directly with one by their more professional imitators and the differences are obvious. Of course, the Clerkes had more singers, but I don't think it's just that.Originally posted by Quilisma View PostComment
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