6.30 Sept 11th The Choir 'Back to School'

[DracoM]

Indeed!

BBC support for one of the great longstanding glories of the English musical scene, which has inspired countless numbers of the most important composers in English music, and with performances usually to the very high professional standards? Yes, a weekly CE - for which many many thanks as ever, and after that .............well, that's about it actually, despite having a programme dedicated to choral music called The Choir in which cathedral choirs feature ............ rarely if ever.

[Chris Watson]

Maybe Good Old Auntie Beeb is simply trying to counteract the bias shown, in these pages, against those of us who dare to devote our professional lives to singing :)

[DracoM]

Hey, Chris Watson! No one is decrying earning a living as a pro singer at all! That's below the belt.

And it is a matter of regrettable statistics that apart from CE, cathedral-based choral music - sung by a pretty large tranche of the pro singers in UK I would have thought - gets a good deal less coverage than you'd expect with a weekly or nearly BBC prog entitled 'The Choir'!! Composers, DoMs, organists, parents, teachers, kids themselves - future listeners to R3 one would surmise? - many fans are all in the demographic, but.............none of that seems to interest the production team much in Cardiff or encourage them to check out what is under their nose. Oh dear.

[decantor]

I take the view that, for several decades, the Beeb has been trying to put distance between itself and anything perceived as the Establishment. In doing so, they have flirted with an anti-establishment stance, and the established church is a soft target, coming into its own only at major festivals, especially at caroltide.

But shock-horror at the notion that there is any resentment against the pro choirs around here! I am personally grateful in particular for the pre-Renaissance choral repertoire that has been made available by such choirs - everything from Léonin (Tonus Peregrinus) to Ockeghem (Tallis Scholars) by way of Machaut (Oxford Camerata)..... and much more besides. Furthermore, the two types of choir are 'rivals' over only a small part of the sacred repertoire, mainly from the Tudor period. If you want to hear Stanford, Howells, Leighton, or Mathias on CD, it is not hard to find a cathedral or college offering.

[Chris Watson]

I wasn't having a dig at you Draco! Just one of your correspondents, who vexed me slightly. I'm not sure you're right about this, though. Nobody denies the importance of the Cathedral tradition in the English choral world, but there are thousands of choirs out there in the UK, amateur/professional/choral soc/chamber/school/childrens'/Cathedral/college/university and I think that, proportionally, the Cathedral world is actually rather well represented by Choral Evensong and the radio and television broadcasts at Christmas and Easter. And if I've understood it correctly, the Aled Jones program is about getting into the singing world as a late teenager - ex choristers are only some of the people to whom it is relevant, therefore. As I said before, it is rarely the case that more than 30% of the people on stage in the pro choirs were Cathedral choristers, and the other countries in Europe seem to manage very well without the tradition that we are lucky enough to have kept. I don't like to disagree with you about this, as I am a huge fan of all this Cathedrally and can out-geek most of my friends in conversations about canticles and psalm chants and my favourite organ stop, and I go to hear Evensong whenever/wherever I can, but I do think that there is a chance that you might be being a Little narrow minded in this case. Sorry!

[DracoM]

The point I am trying to make - obviously in vain - is that this particular The Choir programme purporting to talk about 'budding young professional singers' did not so much as once mention the cathedral / school tradition which is so live in the UK as a route in any shape or form. If you are talking about the skills acquired / necessary for pro singing, at some point, you might just mention such eg school DoMs, trekking / paying parents / cathedrals / teachers etc etc as part of the trajectory. This programme did not.

Incidentally, I am fully aware of the fact that the European tradition does not have a similar structure to UK. Regular cathedral music in too many bits of apparently catholic Europe is frankly pathetic, and it would be good to know what the career structure etc is there that does indeed provide excellent youg pros - another strand to the programme that might have been extremely interesting. In the Netherlands, Germany, there are some famous boy/girl led choirs from whom, one presumes, later fine singers come. So what's the ladder?

Now, in defence of the other routes into Oxbridge and from there into the choirs featured, I think it might have been fair to have done a bit more homework and picked up the phone to one or two other names instead of the laziness we saw. I mentioned Malcolm Archer and his extensive background, but there are many others who have done huge work to prepare young singers for the pro life in the way of providing expert guidance.

I readily confessed to having been deceived almost certainly through my own naive stupidity. However, given its title, I did not quite bargain on a programme with that billing being merely a vehicle for the promotion of The Sixteen's Genesis project and the Eton Choral Courses > virtually half an hour of the Rodolfus Choir. It was of course the now customary R3 formula: lots of promo chat + tracks. It was not in any way shape or form investigative, analytic, explanatory, evaluative or enlightening. Hardly surprising given the track record of the presenter.

[Simon]

Cosy little get togerthers with old pals, Draco!

I do it sometimes in my own line of work. There are circumstances where it produces the best or the fastest results (and at times both) and you know exactly where you stand. You aren't about to be let down by the chap whose head you held over the sink in dorm 4 when he'd got sick after his first bottle of Strongbow aged 16 and with whom you shared life, food, laughter, tears, school, play and almost everything else for most of your formative years. The OST works, has always worked and is fine as long as it isn't used corruptly. OST or not, we all tend to favour working with those we know well and trust.

But there's a major difference: my work doesn't involve financially beneficial publicity for private groups via a publicly-owned, mass-reach medium to the detriment of other groups that are left out in the cold for no objective reason.

[decantor]

The point I am trying to make - obviously in vain - is that this particular The Choir programme purporting to talk about 'budding young professional singers' did not so much as once mention the cathedral / school tradition which is so live in the UK as a route in any shape or form.

Your point was perfectly clear, Draco, and has won sympathy if only by implication. My point was that the omissions you regretted in the programme were probably not the result of blinkers (or laziness) in Cardiff, but of a deliberate policy originating in London (or Salford). If I happened to be right, it would be an even more regrettable problem.

I didn't hear this edition of The Choir - mainly because I didn't realise it had restarted so hot on the heels of the Proms. Nor can I help with information on continental systems - though the Thomaner choir start their boys early in the school. But, to be fair to AJ & Co, they did devote some time a year or more ago to Mark Opstad, who runs the Maitrise de Toulouse where both boys and girls start singing at a young age. But don't some of our own conservatories offer choral opportunities to juniors?

[DracoM]

Yes, yes, decantor, oh yes, indeed: if conservatoires do operate such schemes, then why, for Pete's sake, did this programme with that title not mention it?

I keep coming back to it: this was a blatant and thinly - well, actually not very thinly - disguised promo, and not an explanatory or analytic programme at all.

[ardcarp]

a blatant and thinly - well, actually not very thinly - disguised promo

...but that's not unusual on R3. In Tune, a programme which I usually enjoy when I get a chance to hear it, manages to run on a low-ish budget because, as I understand it, performers come along and strut their stuff on air without payment because it helps them to publicise forthcoming concerts/events. Agreed this isn't necessarily promo for R3 programmes.

[DracoM]

Yep, and the magic word there, ardcarp, is budget.

And here endeth the credibility of such a programme which is clearly destined to be just another chat + trax thing 'with a choral twist'. No research beyond a glance at the Rodolfus / The Sixteen websites and three phone calls, no depth knowledge exhibited or actually needed, and that's it. Listen to some of the specialised R2 programmes on Blues / Jazz / folk to get the flavour of what happens when a dedicated expert gets in charge. They're not wonderful, but they do at least emanate from a team that gives every impression of having roots firmly in the fields they are covering. Not the case with AJ, I fear.

As such, a mega-yawn.