In a previous post I described what happened when I tried to join a chamber choir in Manchester in the mid-1990’s. To summarise, there seemed to be a great shortage of places in such choirs, at least for sopranos. Now I’ll describe what happened when I looked at church choirs.
During my time in Manchester I was told that the RSCM estimated only a handful of church choirs in the diocese sang regularly in four parts. I sang in what I believed to be the best of them; we had a fixed repertoire of a few communion settings, and a weekly evensong (using a canticle setting once a month). The repertoire was mostly familiar to me, though there were some pieces, such as anthems by Eric Thiman, Arnold in A and Wood’s St. Mark Passion, which I’ve never sung before or since.
We gave occasional concerts, visited cathedrals and other churches and did radio broadcasts (for these last we were usually joined by students from the RNCM, and a couple sang with the choir regularly). Our conductor would ensure that if you were capable of doing a solo you would get something appropriate to your ability from time to time. I did occasionally also sing elsewhere, such as in the choir that performed on feast days at the Roman Catholic church of the Holy Name.
As in Bath, there seemed to be almost no overlap between parish and chamber choirs (as far as I could tell from my very limited contact with the latter). There were signs that the church music scene had once been more active; visiting other churches I would find choir stalls in churches with no choir, or a library containing music which was now too difficult for the choir there. I’ve recently heard about a group of streets in Longsight named after church composers.
I used to look enviously at the newspaper listings for churches in London in which there was a different programme of interesting communion and evensong settings each week, or hear about the choirs in these churches from university friends who sang in them or attended their churches. Now I realise that there is a much larger number of singers to choose from in London, and probably a certain minimum of population is needed in order to recruit such a choir, but is that minimum really larger than the population of Manchester? Given that Londoners are (I assume) not more religious than Mancunians, why was there such a big difference?
I’m not sure that it’s because many London churches pay singers in their choirs, as I know of at least one choir which is unpaid and yet of a standard to have done a Radio 3 evensong broadcast. Maybe it has more to do with the fact that at the highest level the choirs contain aspiring professional singers and this creates a culture more generally in which there is a place for demanding repertoire to be well performed.
The existence of so many choirs implies a stock of hundreds of singers in London who are willing to devote time to rehearsing and performing music for services. This stock is regularly replenished with people who’ve learnt the repertoire in chapel choirs at university or, when younger, in cathedral choirs. Do all such people who want to carry on performing in services, but don’t aspire to singing professionally, gravitate to London as a matter of course? Were there really not enough of us in Manchester to make a choir? Or were there actually enough, just no obvious place for us to go?
[July 2013: There are now more options for women – the Manchester Cathedral voluntary choir went mixed a few years ago. The choir of St George’s Stockport has also started using sopranos since the 1990s.]
