Declining music education is killing England’s choral tradition
by Jane Shilling, Telegraph:
It is increasingly tough for Oxbridge colleges such as King’s to find candidates who are sufficiently trained for its auditions.
For many of us, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge marks the beginning of Christmas – a moment of stillness and numinous beauty between the frenetic activity of the days before Christmas Eve, and the equally frenetic turkey-wrangling to come.
For years I used to listen to the Nine Lessons and Carols while decorating the Christmas tree, until my family complained of the dissonance between the angelic voices of the choristers and the bitter imprecations of my skirmish with the Christmas lights.
In quires and places where they sing (as the Book of Common Prayer has it), the distinctive sound of English choral sacred music, from the 16th-century Eton Choirbook to John Rutter and beyond, seems as sturdy and enduring a part of our history as the cathedrals and ancient seats of learning in which it is sung.
But to survive, traditions must continually renew themselves, and ahead of the Bach Choir’s carol concert last week, its musical director, David Hill, sounded the alarm for our choral traditions. Hill, a former chief conductor of the BBC Singers and principal conductor of the Yale Schola Cantorum, warned that while the elite choral tradition is thriving in the States, on its home ground it is “on the cusp of losing its pre-eminence”.
The reasons for this are various, but the decline of music education in state schools has undoubtedly played a part.
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