There was I, all robed up and about to sing a festival evensong (with about 120 other choir persons, you understand, not on my own) and I suddenly realised that there were only about three choristers there who were medal-less: me, and a couple of tiny trebles who appeared to be about six years old. It was a mite embarrassing. People were giving me sideways looks as they clinked and clanked their processional way to the choirstalls, some of them bent low under the weight of a veritable ironmonger’s-shopworth of gongs. “Poor old git,” I heard one of them say, pityingly: “ ’e can’t ’ave bin in t’job long. ’E ent got no tin yet.”
It’s a bit horrifying when you realise that old anno domini has been creeping up on you, and you’ve been doing church choir singing for more than half a century, on and off, with no medals to show for it. When I were a lad the head chorister had a gong with a red ribbon, and the rest of us had blue to show that we weren’t the head chorister. Now the ribbons are all colours of the rainbow, and I find it all quite bewildering. A fellow bass from Broughton took me on one side and tried to explain it. “That one’s the Bishop’s Award”, he said. “That’s the Dean’s, and that’s the Archdeacon’s. That one’s Long Service, and that’s Loyalty and Perseverance. “What’s that green and pink one, then?” I asked in all innocence. “Ah!”, said my friend. “That un’s special. You only get that when you’ve done Stanford in B-flat 500 times or Amazing Grace twice. It’s like the George Cross, see? Bravery in the face of adversity.”
The event was, of course, the annual festival evensong and presentation of awards organised by our local branch of the choirpersons’ union, the Royal School of Church Music, held in recent years in Blackburn Cathedral. There is quite a lot of music to rehearse in a very short time (two 60-minute sessions) and much of it is unfamiliar to many of the singers, so it is always a severe test of the old sight-reading skills. This year it was even more so: coming so soon after Advent and Christmas, the event, on Saturday 17 January, had given little time for preparatory rehearsals in the parishes and everybody was thrown in at the deep end, with a 74-page book of music to rehearse and perfect by 3:30pm. It was a severe test for us peasants from the sticks, who are used to pootling our way through Sunday services, mostly singing jingles in unison, but this year we had some real experts singing with us, and some good stuff to get our teeth into besides.
Blackburn’s cathedral choir is - or should I say its choirs are - among the best in the land, even though there is no choir school to provide intensive musical education for its junior choristers. All the more reason therefore to celebrate the accomplished musicianship of the boy and girl trebles of the cathedral choirs, and that of the children of the other choirs of excellence in the diocese, many of whom were there singing on the day.
Something that should be a cause for rejoicing for at least 50% of human beings is that girls are no longer locked out of the choir vestry lest they squeak or tease the boys or want to sing Amazing Grace all the time. It is a revolution that has happened in my lifetime and I am glad I was there to see it. I don’t know whether this experiment was ever tried, but it should have been, to counter the more ludicrous physiological arguments that the anti-female brigade (that included my dad) used to haul out: take six nine or 10-year-old boys and girls in any proportion, stick ’em behind a screen and have them sing Oh For the Wings of a Dove one at a time, in random order, then say which were the girls and which the boys. I’m surprised it hasn’t been done on the telly. How, I suspect, would the mighty be fallen. If a boy of 10 has the priceless opportunity to grasp and display the subtleties of Renaissance polyphony (Tallis and Byrd are routinely sung in our cathedrals) why were girls denied that opportunity for so long? Thin end of the wedge, perhaps?
Richard Tanner, the cathedral’s director of music (who was in charge on Saturday) was full of praise after the rehearsals. He directs courses in the US, and he told us random assortment of choristers that what we had achieved in two hours would have taken a week on the other side of the pond.
And let him have the last word on what choristering is all about.
How do we sing the Lord's song in a strange land – the strange land of early twenty-first century society? We get as many people to sing it as possible because we see that in doing so we are advancing the mission and ministry of the church, a church which says to each and every person: your talents and gifts are precious. They are to be used for God's glory.
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