The Ark

The Choir of Christ's College at Cambridge University dates back to the 15th Century when it was founded by royal charter. Internationally-renowned organist and the Choir's Director of Music since 1984, Dr. David Rowland, reflects on their long tradition of Christian sacred music.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: Fancy a career in singing? There's no better place to start than Christ's College, Cambridge, Choir that is. Hello, this is The Ark and I'm Rachael Kohn.

Of course, there are a couple of requirements. First you have to be a student at the College, and then you have to pass the audition, given by Music Director, David Rowland. And if you're lucky enough, you might end up going on tour, like the one that brought David and the Choir to Australia. I was keen to know how many college choirs bring music into the life of Cambridge University.

David Rowland: There are about 25 college in Cambridge, and most of those colleges have their own chapels with their own choirs, some of them very famous: King's especially as I'm sure you've heard out here. A lot of them obviously much less famous.

Rachael Kohn: Well that's plenty of competition. In fact are there formal competitions amongst you?

David Rowland: Yes there is, I suppose you could say it was a formal competition. Every year, singers apply to be undergraduates, and they apply to a central competition, and we try and get the best for our own colleges, so it's a bit cut-throat.

Rachael Kohn: Do you mean that undergraduates apply to be members of the choir?

David Rowland: Yes, pretty well all of the choirs in Cambridge are made up of undergraduates, even the big-name choirs. They're undergraduates and they're only there for three years usually, maybe four.

Rachael Kohn: Well that puts a lot of pressure on a choir if the personnel is constantly moving through.

David Rowland: Yes, it is. It's one of the more difficult aspects of my job actually, and other Directors of Music, because you do get a constant turnover. The choir is about 24, 25 strong, so every year we can reckon to lose a third of those perhaps, and of course it doesn't always quite work out as you expect, because some people are doing four-year courses. So you try to get a turnover year by year and replace them. Every September I wonder where the next choir's going to come from. And then in October I look back and realise it's OK.

Rachael Kohn: Is it possible to hang on? I mean there must be people who don't want to leave.

David Rowland: Yes, well we have a number of graduates in the choir as well, so we've had people in the choir for five or six years, but that's pretty much exceptional. Most of them are in the choir for three or four years.

Rachael Kohn: Now I understand that women have been a more recent inclusion in the choir.

David Rowland: Yes, women started coming into Cambridge in the 1970s as undergraduates in mixed colleges. Before that, there had been some single women's colleges. What used to happen before the 1970s is that most organ scholars or Directors of Music would try and get women singers from Girton or Newnham Colleges, or women's colleges. And then in the 1970s colleges began to go mixed, so more mixed choirs were established. Christ's went mixed I think around about 1980 so that was quite a big change for choirs, and I think actually it did a lot of good for choirs because the status of choirs suddenly rose and suddenly the standard of choirs rose very strongly at that time.

Rachael Kohn: Gosh, I'm surprised at that, I would have thought that there would have been a certain prejudice against women coming into the choir and that the reputation would go down.

David Rowland: Well I think there were some prejudices at the time, yes. Actually though it's more than 20 years ago and it's very much a non-issue now. Cambridge went through quite a period of change at that point, but I was an undergraduate around that time myself, and my wife was one of the first women to arrive at Selwyn College, and looking back on it, it was really rather funny.

Rachael Kohn: And were you both members of the choir?

David Rowland: I was an organ scholar myself, so I directed the choir as an undergraduate. My wife didn't have anything to do with the choir.

Rachael Kohn: Well where does Christ's College Cambridge stand vis-ŕ-vis the others?

David Rowland: Well I'm biased, I guess. There are those choirs in Cambridge that have full time Directors of Music, and there are five of those choirs that have one person devoted wholly to them throughout the year, and they tend to do a lot of broadcasting, a lot of touring, a lot of recording. I'm not full time at Christ's, so I would say we're on the rung of the ladder that's just below those five choirs, but a lot better than many of the choirs in Cambridge. I would say we're kind of semi-professional standard. We do quite a lot of recording, broadcasting and touring, like this tour.

Rachael Kohn: Well there must be a great attraction to be part of such a long tradition; how far back does it go in fact?

David Rowland: Well we're not entirely sure. The College itself goes back to 1448 when it was first founded. It was then re-founded in 1505.

Rachael Kohn: Why was that?

David Rowland: Well it's essentially because the King wanted the site that the College was on to found another College, which turned out to be King's College, and he moved our College, which at that time was called God's-house, outside of the city walls into a new site. So the College was re-founded in 1505, where it is now. I guess there must have been some kind of choir there right from the start, but we don't quite know what that was. We know that during the English Civil War the organ was buried in the College garden because it was under threat. So obviously the music in the College chapel must have had its ups and downs.

Rachael Kohn: Did it survive that burial? Was it exhumed?

David Rowland: Well I think it was exhumed, but the instrument we have in College now, a lot of it dates to 1705, yes, it's a historic instrument. We're very proud of it, it's been restored fairly recently, so it's an authentic early 18th century sound.

Since the organ was put in, I think the choir has gone up and down. Church music in England generally really went through the doldrums in the 18th century and early 19th century, was resurrected again in the mid-19th century with the Oxford movement especially being influential. And through the 20th century I think English church music has increasingly been in a very healthy state. Christ's College choir itself through the 20th century was largely conducted by organ scholars. They only appointed a Director of Music in 1984, and that was me, I'm the first Director of Music that the College has had. And with somebody who isn't a student running the choir, you get a kind of consistency that builds, so I think the standard has come on in the last 20 years or so.

Rachael Kohn: Well what's the choir's commitment every week?

David Rowland: We have two services a week to sing in chapel. This varies between College choirs; some choirs sing every day in the chapel for a service. We just do two a week, at Evensong on Thursday and Evensong on Sunday, and then the choir rehearses before both of those services and on a Wednesday as well.

Rachael Kohn: Well what is the repertoire?

David Rowland: I try to vary the repertoire as much as possible. I think it's good for the choir to have a mixed repertory, that's to say music from the 16th century through to the present. We only have 8-week terms, so our time together as a choir is limited. As you know the choir changes every year, so there's only so much we can do. But mostly it's music for Anglican services which means to say that there are some set texts, like the Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis that we sing on a regular basis, and then there are anthems which by their nature have to be usually less than five minutes or so. So that restricts our repertory, but I think you'll find in Christ's College chapel the kind of repertory you get in most cathedrals up and down the country.

Rachael Kohn: Well Cambridge being the place that it is, with some of the most illustrious names in science and literature, like Darwin and John Milton, would have had some fairly famous members in the choir; do you know of any?

David Rowland: Orlando Gibbons is one that springs to mind, composer of a lot of church music in England. His father was actually the Director of Music at King's College back in the early 17th century. Gibbons himself grew up in Cambridge, then went on to London. More recently there have been a number of quite famous soloists who've gone through: Robert Tier, tenor, a well-known English tenor, and actually a lot of the professional choirs these days are full of people who've been through Cambridge choirs, choirs like the Taverner Choir, the Monteverdi Choir, predominantly people who've been through Oxford and Cambridge choirs, because that's where they've got the kind of necessary experience for that sort of choral tradition, singing in small choirs, where you're brought together for a short period of time and then produced the goods on a small amount of rehearsal. A member of our current choir, aspiring singers, we have one bass who wants to make a career in opera. He's just finished his second year at the moment.

Rachael Kohn: Well in fact what is the mix? Would most of the students who front up for an audition be interested in pursuing a career in music?

David Rowland: No, far from it actually. We have a big mixture. People reading for degrees in a very wide range of subjects. We have a couple of vets in the choir, we have medics, we have engineers, and people reading arts and humanities subjects. Out of the 24 or so that we have at the moment, I guess we have three or four music students. But that's true of music in Cambridge generally, not just choirs but instrumentalists as well. There are a lot of very good musicians who are reading all kinds of subjects. Some of them will go into the music business, having read a degree that's completely different. There's quite a tradition in England; you think of people like Jonathan Miller for example, he's a medic; people start from all kinds of backgrounds and go into music careers.

Rachael Kohn: I don't know how close you get to all the members, but I was wondering if it's a family tradition. Do students who participate in a choir have parents who did so as well, and so forth?

David Rowland: Some do, yes, that again varies. There are quite a few in the choir who have come through families who've traditionally sung in cathedral choirs, as children. And then they carry on their singing. There are others who've been complete novices, remarkable really because we have a couple of singing teachers who come to Cambridge regularly, and I often find the people who've done very little singing, go to a singing teacher for a month or two, suddenly develop at that age I think in particular, people can develop very, very quickly. So we have both.

Rachael Kohn: Well going on tour, as you are now, must be a great challenge for the singers, and I wonder whether they are drawn from a special sort of cream of the crop of choirs over the past few years, or are they simply the current choir?

David Rowland: No, they are simply the current choir, yes. We left about one or two people behind, but otherwise we have the current choir, yes.

Rachael Kohn: And do you usually perform in churches?

David Rowland: Yes, we do. A lot of our repertory is accompanied by the organ, so that gives us some restrictions. We do do some unaccompanied programs, but mostly it's in churches, not just because of the organ, because of the acoustics as well, and the kind of music we sing is written for buildings with quite large acoustics, and it works best in there. So we do try to go for churches rather than concert halls, for example.

Rachael Kohn: And how much of your repertoire is drawn from contemporary composition?

David Rowland: Not all that much. We try to perform a large range of music written in the last 500 years. Some of the music we perform in concert is music we perform in services; some of the repertory that we sing is drawn from a wider choral repertory. We do quite a lot of European church music. We sing Bach motets for example, we're singing a big Verdi piece as well. So I try to pack in as much variety as possible. So while we do sing some more recent compositions, it's very much part of the overall package of a mixed repertory.

Rachael Kohn: Gosh, does it help for the students to have studied Latin at some point?

David Rowland: They certainly need to be familiar with that, yes. We do sing a lot of Latin text to people, but also Italian, French as well. So it stretches me to be doing all those languages, but we usually have language students in the choir who can help us with German, French, Latin pronunciation.

Rachael Kohn: Well David Rowland, how did you find yourself as Music Director of Christ's College Cambridge choir?

David Rowland: I sang in a choir myself as a choirboy. I wasn't very good, so I decided to take up the organ, and I took up the organ when I was 11 or 12, and then applied for an organ scholarship in Cambridge at Corpus Christi College, and got that. So for three years as an undergraduate, I played the organ for services there. So that's where I got the bulk of my training I suppose as a director, and then the post came up at Christ's while I was still a post-graduate student, and I applied for that, and that's where I've been ever since, since 1984.

Rachael Kohn: Any plans to shift Colleges, or are you loyal to Christ's College?

David Rowland: I think it's not the kind of thing you do in Cambridge. Most people don't shift Colleges. Allegiances are quite strong. I do do other things outside, and that's fun. Just at the moment I'm the Director of the Welsh National Youth Choir which is quite a different experience.

Rachael Kohn: Wow, terrific voices come from Wales, don't they?

David Rowland: Yes, Bryn Terfel was a former member of the Welsh National Youth Choir.

Rachael Kohn: So do you have your eye out or your ear out for another Bryn Terfel?

David Rowland: Well I guess so. I find working with singers absolutely fascinating and you never quite know who's going to come through a choir. And so you do listen out for individual voices, you try to encourage them, but of course you never know at that age where they're going to end up.

Rachael Kohn: David Rowland is Music Director of the Choir at Christ's College, Cambridge, and one of their recent CDs features the music of Benjamin Britten.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: For the next couple of weeks The Ark will replay programs from earlier this year that you might not have had a chance to hear, beginning with the real life of fallen prophet, Kalil Gibran. So listen to The Ark next Wednesday at 2.15, with me, Rachael Kohn.

Guests

Dr David Rowland
is a Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University and has been Director of Music at Christ's College Choir, Cambridge University, since 1984. In 1981 he won the famous international St Alban's Organ Competition. He recently published the Cambridge Companion to the Piano and has written extensivley on the history and practice of early keyboard instruments.

Christ's Church Choir Cambridge
Christ's College Cambridge was first established as God's-house in 1437. The chapel choir still performs twice-weekly Evensong Services, as well as performing throughout the UK and around the world. The repertoire includes sacred and secular music from the 16th century to the present. The Choir usually comprises 8 sopranos, 6 altos, 4 tenors and 6 basses, along with two organ scholars. Every member is auditioned and attends the University of Cambridge.

Further Information

Christ's College Choir
http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/choir

Christ's College, University of Cambridge
http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/

Australian Tour Dates - July 2003
http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/choir/Tours.html