In quires and places where they sing

An unexpected musical experience

I have two small children and a busy job. I don’t have a lot of scope for hobbies, other than sleeping and eating.

But - I also travel about 2,000 miles a month on East Midlands Railway, up and down between Market Harborough and London.

I work away, and tap away on my laptop.

But I can also listen to things on headphones too.

And this year I have been travelling in a fug of beautiful choral music. The springtime fields have never looked better scrolling by.

The reason for this unexpected binge of sacred music is pure chance - I discovered a poll of choir directors & singers of their favourite pieces. This provided a motherlode of good recommendations, and opened up lots of avenues of exploration.

I’ve always had a soft spot for this kind of stuff¹. But I can’t claim to know this world well, and the upside of that is there’s a lot of new territory to explore.

Reasons I love this stuff

I love it for multiple reasons:

First, I am a strong believer in the Lindy Effect, and if a tune is still being sung after hundreds of years, it is very likely to be fantastic. Thomas Tallis wrote If Ye Love Me in 1565, (the same year the pencil was invented). The fact that it is still popular now basically tells you that it is going to be amazing.

Second, there’s also something very pleasing about the way great tunes are shared around Europe and have mutated many times along the way. One tune can have multiple sets of words in multiple languages and, vice-versa, a text can turn into many pieces of music. For example:

• The traditional German tune Es ist ein Ros entsprungen has become in English both Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming but also A Great and Mighty Wonder. It got its current melody in 1609, but the words have been kicking around in Christian hymns since at least the 8th century.

• Good King Wensleslaus is a story about a tenth century king of Bohemia, married up with a 13^th century carol (Tempus adest floridum) discovered by 19^th century English hymnwriter Thomas Helmore in a Finnish song book from 1582. Boom!

• All Creatures of Our God and King got well known because Vaughan Williams arranged it in 1906, but the melody is from 17th century German Easter hymn Lasst uns erfreuen, and the words are an adaptation of a Umbrian Italian text from St Francis of Assisi in 1225.

• Puer nobis nascitur, AKA “Unto Us Is Born a Son” was translated by an Edwardian monk, but first appears in the 14th-century German text the Moosburg Gradual, which in turn is a kind of Greatest Hits of French pieces from the 12th and 13th centuries… and so on.

Third, I also love it because the choir is both a living instrument, and an immortal one.

Sure, Fleetwood Mac were around for a long time and had a lot of personnel changes, but there are plenty of cathedral choirs that have existed for many hundreds of years. The choirs of York Minister, Hereford, Winchester, Rochester and Wells are all older then England.

And I like the fact that they have their own weird quirks and traditions. For example, take Salisbury Cathedral. When boys or girls qualify as full members they have a ritual involving bumping their heads on the “bumping stone”, which has worn away from hundreds of years of this sort of thing. These days they also gently bonk new members on the head with an ENORMOUS prayer book.

Kids are capable of much more than we think. My son (6) loves being allowed to use an axe to chop wood, and though I always worry for his tiny fingers, it is very good for his morale to be allowed to do this grown up thing.

Choirs are a hardcore example of that, where some of the finest and most complex music you can imagine is being performed by… a constantly-shifting ensemble of 7-to-13-year-olds - which is amazing when you think about it. Some of the music was also written by incredibly young people (of which more in a second).

Composers I didn’t know

There are many more² reasons to love this music and there is so much more of it than I can describe here... but let me mention a couple of composers I didn’t know.

Herbert Sumsion (1899-1995)

I had never heard of him until this year. He is amazing. Having been a cathedral chorister from age nine at Gloucester Cathedral, he was paid to be the organist of a nearby church from age twelve. He later fought on the western front, and was organist of Gloucester Cathedral from 1928 to 1967. He was born in the year they sent they sent the first ever wireless telegraph message, and died when Take That went to Number 1 with Never Forget.

They don’t make them like that any more.

Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book “Outliers” popularised the idea a lot of success comes from people just having a really huge amount of practice (10,000 hours) and there definitely is something in that idea.

Sumsion was friends with Elgar, Gerald Finzi and Vaughan Williams, but has quite a distinctive sound of his own. Wikipedia tells me that: “Sumsion displays a fondness for parallel thirds in the accompaniment, detached bass lines, and the descending minor third in the melody.” Sadly I’m not musical enough to know what that means, but even I can hear he has a particular sound, and it’s wonderful.

They that go down to the sea in ships seems to be his most popular work, and it is gorgeous, with the organ and choir rising and falling with the stormy sea, providing a rare opportunity to hit the most gigantic pipes and really low notes on the organ that vibrate all your internal organs.

Sumsion wrote several settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimmitis, including versions in G major and A major. There are fabulous recordings by St John’s Cambridge, with magnificent choral leaps and lush, warm resolutions.

Loads of his other pieces are fantastic too. He had an amazing range. He could do everything from hair-stand-on-end sparsity (Psalm 102) to incredible warmth. He wrote amazing music for Watt’s Cradle Song, based on a text written two centuries earlier in 1715.

William Crotch (1775-1847)

Returning to my point about extreme amounts of practice, the unfortunately named William Crotch really did start young.

From Wikipedia:

“William Crotch was born in Norwich, Norfolk, to a master carpenter. Like Mozart, he was a child prodigy, playing the organ his father had built. At the age of two he became a local celebrity by performing for visitors, among them the musician Charles Burney, who wrote an account of his visits for the Royal Society. The three-year-old Crotch was taken to London by his ambitious mother, where he not only played on the organ of the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace, but performed for King George III.”

That’s a strong start.

I was professionally interested to learn that:

“He may have composed the Westminster Chimes in 1793, which are played by Big Ben each time it strikes the hour.”

His produced settings of lots of psalms – they are all great. Psalm 123 “Unto thee lift I up mine eyes” is particularly amazing.

His best-known piece now seems to be “Lo, Star-Led Chiefs” from his oratorio Palestine, which is really pretty.

Michael Praetorius (1571 – 1621)

Writing at the start of the seventeenth century in Germany, but influenced by the trendy new sounds wafting over the Alps from Italy. He seems to be most famous for his setting of Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, though he didn’t write it - it is from a little earlier. He was incredibly prolific. In terms of secular music he wrote Terpsichore - a massive collection of 300 instrumental dances, many of the collected from all over Europe.

But the things I like most are his massive, massive… huge pieces of sacred music.

His setting of In Dulce Jubilo takes a gentle little tune and turns it up to 1,000.

The fast-paced Nun Komm der Heiden Heiland sounds like something from much later and sounds kinda like Bach, but a century earlier.

His accessibly-named collection Polyhymnia caduceatrix is full of fantastic tunes, but he also seems to have had a commitment to ordinary people making music and wrote a whole cycle for children - from which the stand out hit seems to be Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, (though Bach’s version from a hundred years later seems to have eclipsed it)

Vaughan Williams (1872 - 1958)

I really love his famous works: The Lark Ascending… Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and his Pastoral symphony.

But I didn’t really know his sacred music. It’s fantastic - and I had never listened to it before.

He wrote fab settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis.

His versions of The Truth Sent From Above, O Clap Your Hands, We Sing For All The Unsung Saints, O Taste and See… All People That on Earth Do Dwell… they’re all great.

Conclusion

This is wonderful, gorgeous music. But it turns out it’s under threat, from financial struggles and the wider decline in mainstream Christianity.

The campaign group “Pipe Up for Pipe Organs” says that Britain is losing nine pipe organs a week. Cathedral schools are struggling too.

More positively, the CEO of the Cathedral Music Trust is visiting 100 choirs by bike to fundraise for choir music, and the Royal School of Church Music has a project to revive or establish 200 choirs.

These struggles are all the more reason that, having enjoyed hearing all this music by chance, I felt I should pass it on to you.

And any suggestions for further listening are very welcome!

Happy Easter!

1. As a teenager I loved Stravinsky’s Pater Noster and Symphony of Psalms. I come from a place with a lot of singing, and I was pleased to find that Apple Music Classical says that the artist most similar to (world famous) Kings College Cambridge is… Huddersfield Choral Society. As an aside, Apple Music Classical is underrated, and lets you explore in lots of dimensions – composers and pieces and choirs and conductors and more.

2. Oh, I also love the absolutely wild conservatism of the album art that accompanies this music. Like, 90%+ of the album covers are a picture of a cathedral or church. Of the rest, 5% are choirs singing, and the other 5% are serene abstract art. In fairness, what you see is what you get. And I love the obsessive quality of it. Over the period 1986-2016 Priory Records released a series of albums entitled Great European Organs. There are a hundred records in it.