We have Gordon Brown to thank for the CoE manager class that scraps choirs in the name of diversity.
‘How much of the meaning of the words was lost when they were produced with all the meretricious charm of melody!” declares Obadiah Slope of Mr Harding’s beloved Barchester choir. The war against church choirs is nothing new. Invariably there are people who simply don’t “get it”. Those for whom music, married to words in worship, echoing the rhythms of the past and making them live again in the present, is not beautiful but a distraction from what really matters.
Slope is the villain of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, and at the heart of his villainy is his managerial campaign to do away with music in the cathedral. A sweet conceit for a Victorian novel, you might think. Alas the spirit of Slope lives on.
Another week, another miserable story courtesy of the Church of England. Winchester – where sung worship has featured since before the days of Alfred the Great – has reportedly shown plans to its choral foundation to “increase diversity of contribution” in line with its main priorities of “reach and access” and “diversity and inclusion”. (Note the wishy-washy language, the lack of any mention of the worship of God.) According to classical music magazine Slipped Disc, in management-speak, this means replacing the cathedral choristers with a “variety of singers from other parts of the regional demographic”. Jargon becomes a cover for what is, essentially, vandalism, the destruction of centuries of beauty for no apparent reason.
All this has come to light via a leaked PowerPoint presentation which the press and the people who worship there were presumably not meant to see until the replacement of choral singers became a fait accompli; a classic case of managers being totally unaccountable to the people they purport to serve.
We must hope this plan remains confined to the PowerPoint deck, but similarly baffling decisions have become par for the course. St John’s College, Cambridge recently disbanded its wonderful mixed-voice Anglican choir St John’s Voices, which sings choral Evensong each week, in favour of “more diverse musical genres”. In 2020, Sheffield Cathedral sacked its entire choir, supposedly to reflect “the exciting future of the mixed urban community in which we live and work”.
At parish level, St Margaret’s, Westminster quietly dismissed its choir midway through the pandemic. Following a similar move, the congregation of Holy Trinity, Sloane Square managed to raise enough money to fund their singers for a few years; but what may work in affluent Chelsea won’t be a template for all.
Read it all in the Telegraph
