It is time to renew choral music — and our culture
Sing hallelujah for the Royal School of Church Music (RSCM). They have just announced the launch of a new Choir Project, in the hope of reviving popular interest in hymn singing and engaging young people again with the tradition sacred of choral music.
This is essential work. Church choirs everywhere have been in decline for decades. Step into your average parish church, and you will probably find boxes of old choral music that haven’t been touched for decades, and dusty choir robes that have munched into lacy nothingness by generations of moths.
Whilst the moths grow fat, our knowledge of our own culture grows thin. The achievement of the great corpus of English hymnary, developed for the most part since the 18th century, and which did for the English “what opera did for the Italians” in the words of music historian Andrew Gant, is fading from common memory. The vast effort of building thousands of cathedral-style church choirs across the country even in the most out of the way parishes — another grand legacy of the Victorian visionaries, which trained local farm boys and tradesmen to sing and appreciate centuries’ worth of sublime liturgical repertoire of Tallis and Gibbons down to Stainer and Stanford — is now in widespread decay. Even the cathedrals themselves are struggling to keep up their daily services of evensong, particularly with ever-rising costs for education and cathedral choir schools.