A recent visit for a retirement dinner and some interest from a visitor to this site prompts me to write about my time at Merton College, Oxford, and in particular about the Chapel Choir there (I was also involved in running the Music Society and the Kodály Choir).
Merton Chapel has a resonant acoustic and this, combined with its distance from any main roads, makes it a popular venue for recordings. I was recently given a lovely recording of the Tallis Scholars’ anniversary concert there, for example. Sometimes I believe I’ve been able to identify the building on a recording without knowing that it was made there.
The main organ is at the west end and was once memorably likened to a vanity unit (by John Mark Ainsley in his lay clerk days). It was paid for by a donation, under rather complicated conditions. One of these was that a trompe l’œil painting should be displayed around and underneath the instrument, depicting the nave that was originally planned but never built, with famous old Mertonians standing in it. I never saw this painting because as soon as the terms of the gift permitted it was taken down, given to another church and never heard of again. (It’s difficult to see what the new owners could have done with something so specific to a different place). Although this was nearly a quarter of a century ago, I’m still asked whether the painting is in the Chapel; it’s going to take a long time for the College to live it down! People who saw it tell me that it was of dubious artistic merit and made the west end of the Chapel very dark.
We also had a chamber organ which was fine for accompanying small-scale pieces, provided you kept off the Cremona stop.
We sang evensong each week in term apart from one week when there was a Communion service, and one midweek service a term on a feast day. We were paid £1.25 and a meal for each service. Because of the distance between the stalls and the main organ, most of our repertoire was unaccompanied. People used to a chapel choir system such as that in many Cambridge colleges may be suprised to know that we only sang a full Canticle setting once a year – the rest of the time it was faux-bourdons or Anglican chant. On the subject of Anglican chants, the choir library may still contain one that I wrote; lots of my friends were writing them and I didn’t want to be left out!
The choir went mixed before the College did – indeed its high point was probably during that time, when Andrew Parrott was organ scholar and Emma Kirkby sang in it. My knowledge of it in recent times derives mostly from Matthew O’Donovan, who was organ scholar till 2003. News of the music society and chapel choir has only been sporadically reported in the College magazine, though in the last couple of years the new Chaplain has been putting some news of the Chapel choir in the Chapel reports. I get the impression that not a huge amount has changed since my time. Perhaps it should have done, since Oxford Colleges with mixed-voice choirs have in general been have been trying to raise their choirs’ profiles in the last few years, though there is still a huge amount of ground to make up on their Cambridge equivalents. I’ll write about that some other time.
[January 2007: I comment on the proposals to start a choral foundation at Merton]