Cambridge choirs carry on tradition

Press, 9 January 1987, Page 22

Cambridge choirs carry on tradition

By

HELENA WISNIEWSKI

NZPA staff correspondent London

The musical directors of the two Cambridge college choirs agree ... boys’ voices are breaking far earlier than they used to. According to Mr Stephen Cleobury, music director at King’s College, it must have something to do with diet.

“A few years ago boys were singing treble until they were 17,” he says. “This year we have had two boys leaving at the age of 12.” For Mr Cleobury and Dr George Guest, St John’s College choir director, the problem is one they are learning to cope with.

Losing a well-trained chorister at the age of 12, instead of 14 as planned, is awkward logistically, Mr Cleobury said.

"It is difficult. We can’t plan things.”

But it also means the senior boys do not leave all at the same time at the end of term.

The choirs at King’s College and St John’s College have been around for centuries, and they have

learnt to adapt.

The choristers’ school holidays determine dates for tours and the boys pose wearing surplices for publicity shots and make records to help cover costs.

The modem “public face” includes the annual King’s College Chapel’s Christmas Eve service, which is broadcast to 180 radio stations around the world, and this year St John’s had a full house at its equivalent service at the beginning of December.

“But the football yobbos get all the headlines here,” Dr Guest says. “What is not known but which ought to be news is the very good tradition exemplified by King’s and St John’s. “It is the tradition we are trying to keep.”

Both choirs still boast the 16 treble voices and 14 men’s voices King Henry VI laid down in the statutes founding the choir at King’s. Both sing daily evensong services in the colleges' respective chapels, as they have done for hundreds of years.

The trebles, the boys, are trained in the same

way as their predecessors were, in the board schools attached to the famous colleges.

The shortlist for the eight-year-old chorister applicants at St John’s school are always long ones, Dr Guest says. The successful boys survive a daily regimen of singing practice, evensong, schoolwork, homework and are expected to learn two musical instruments while they are there.

St John’s school headmaster, Mr Alan Mould, describes the boys’ daily routine as hard work. “But I can’t think of a single boy who would want to change his lot as a chorister ..: Some of them are extraordinary.” Mr Cleobury disagrees. “Let’s not get too dewyeyed about this. They are perfectly ordinary little boys. They are just small cogs in the bigger wheel of the school.”

He will argue any charges of elitism. “We take more boys from private schools because those schools tend to be geared up to choral singing. I myself am quite convinced we are missing talent from the State sector.

“The choirs are public things. We would never send away for financial reasons any boy who had musical talent.”

It costs St John’s college just under £50,000 ($180,000), a year to subsidise the choristers’ education by paying twothirds of each boy’s school fees. But no-one really counts costs.

“The choirs provide a public and national service,” Mr Cleobury says. “They are not desperate to make the two sides of the accounts balance.”

Many of the choristers give up music when they leave Cambridge. Many others, says Dr Guest, return to the choir as choral scholars — men’s voices — when they become students at the university. “They often leave here with pimples and come back with beards.”

But for 12-year-old Ben, a chorister at St John’s, heavy metal music holds far more attraction at the moment.

He shows the visiting journalists the ghetto blaster beside his dormitory bed. “I like it at volume 10,” he grins.