I read in the latest Private Eye about Merton College’s plans to set up a choral foundation with scholarships under the direction of Peter Phillips, no less. I couldn’t quite believe this at first but the College’s website confirms it.
Various things lured me to leave Oxford for graduate studies in Cambridge in the late 80’s. Some disappointed; I’m not sure I really benefited as much as I thought I would from my subject’s having a faculty building in Cambridge (partly because its graduate common room opened the month after I submitted my thesis!) And the choir scene outside my own College proved to be very hard to crack. But the quality of Chapel music more than lived up to my expectations. My Cambridge College was not one of the best colleges in this respect, but even so far surpassed what had the reputation of being one of Oxford’s better mixed-voice chapel choirs. We sang canticle settings at some forty-five services a year (rather than at one service only), did much more besides singing Chapel services and perks included an invitation to the Commemoration feast and subsidised singing lessons. This seems to be typical of many Cambridge chapel choirs.
I’ve often wondered why Cambridge’s chapel choirs were so much in advance of Oxford’s. I think it was a particularly striking instance of a general difference in culture, where Colleges as institutions took more interest in – and put more money into – extra-curricular activities within the College. I gather though that Merton did offer choral exhibitions in the mid-20th century. When did this stop, and why?
After I left I had the impression that not much had changed at Merton; for example, there was little said about the chapel choir in the college magazine – even when there was news such as the introduction of sung canticles on services other than Shrove Tuesday. (Did they think no old members were interested in reading about the choir, or was it embarrassing to admit that the choir had been doing canticles so rarely?) And although the College has made various appeals to me for money recently, they didn’t mention that this was one possible use for it. But there was a change of Chaplain a few years ago, the previous one having been in post for several decades, and with it a fresh look at Chapel music.
But now I sense a general upping of the stakes in this area, which was the real point of the Eye article. So Merton sets up a choral foundation on the Cambridge model. Another instance of this is that my Cambridge College has for the first time appointed a professional Director of Music. I’m in favour, though the question remains of what you move on to when you graduate and want to carry on singing church music at a comparable level. I had the impression of a ‘career path’ in Cambridge, but it led on after graduation only to a number of churches in London; if you went anywhere else, tough!
