I’ve written before about the new choral foundation at Merton College Oxford, where I was an undergraduate. I was able to hear the choir last Saturday, though at a rather sad occasion: the memorial service for Tom Braun, who taught ancient history while I was there.
There’s a certain awkwardness surrounding this kind of event. Merton has a policy of not announcing deaths of Fellows on its website; instead, rather as happened with Soviet-era Pravda, their names are quietly removed from the list of Fellows. Subsequent memorial events are, as at some other Colleges, advertised discreetly so as not to attract people who just go for the refreshments afterwards. In fact I’ve found you get people at gatherings in memory of Oxford classicists who seem to regard anyone they don’t recognise as being such an interloper. (I hasten to add they aren’t Mertonians!)
The choir can be another source of awkwardness at memorial services. The sound it produces is wanted, but not necessarily at the cost of the physical space it takes up. So it may be shunted round a corner somewhere (at Merton in my day this tended to mean in the antechapel). This was certainly not the case on Saturday; although there were upwards of 300 in the congregation, the choir was in the centre of the Chapel, occupying the stalls on both sides (something I thought I’d never see!) Another novelty was the use of amplification; and if and when I return for another service I will make sure not to be seated in front of a speaker, so that the chaplain’s voice appears to come from the chaplain!
The choir (with organists and conductor) were not the only musicians present; there was a small chamber orchestra, a harpist (Frances Kelly) and Emma Kirkby. She sang Mozart’s Laudate Dominum from the Solemn Vespers and a song by an acquaintance of Mozart, Stephen Storace. We also heard the slow movement of K299 in an arrangement for harp and the choir and orchestra performed Bach’s single-movement cantata no. 118. For completeness, I’ll mention that the postlude was BWV544 and there was a psalm and three hymns. The final hymn was Nun Danket but not in the standard translation. This one factored the final ‘Amen’ into the metre (rhyming it with ‘been’), but that didn’t stop the organist from playing a plagal cadence afterwards, so we sang ‘Amen’ twice.
This service would have been outside the usual round of services for which the choir sings, and it didn’t seem to be taxed by what was asked of it. It is still new, and I hope that I’ll be able to hear it again in a couple of years when it has its full complement of choral scholars.
[October 2009: I heard the choir again and they were sounding stronger and more confident. The chaplain asked rhetorically why it had taken nearly 750 years to think of setting up a choral foundation. Things have come a long way since the time – less than a decade ago – when even singing Dec and Can or doing more than one choral canticle setting a year would have been anathema!]