Music - the end of the choral tradition

Engaged in a conversation about a church choir in a place that my companion had visited, they made the observation that the choir was 'well advanced in years' and as a result the women were thin and reedy and the men obviously past 'their sell by dates'. Another person expressed the view that the 'Glee' type programmes and other 'music' shows had to be good for the choral experience and that therefore this had to be good for the English Church Choral Tradition (ECCT) too!

They seemed shocked and perhaps a little antagonistic (or just plain unbelieving) that I had considered that to be the case but I stand by my views.

The reality is that this country was shaped, musically, by the ECCT. People went to church and by so doing were exposed to singing with others and the hearing of some great (and some not so great, I'll say it before someone else does) choral and organ music. When I was a young boy I found myself in a church choir (I was eight) and dutifully turned up every Thursday evening for choir practice (if you didn't go you couldn't do weddings and weddings meant money!) where I learned to read music, to listen to other people singing and sing with them. This gave me a love of music, all music, and has served me well ever since.

Then we came to the time when decline 9and other influences) meant that we had mixed choirs. My how the purists threw up their hands at that. But the loss of the pure treble and the male alto for women wasn't all bad m'Lord, for it extended the experience and swelled the, often diminishing, ranks. A love of music is to great to be witheld of restricted and so on the ECCT went.

Then as church-going declined and the availability of so many other forms of music and the leading people away from the square ECCT took hold the choirs began to close their doors. The marketing of what music was according to shows like Britain hasn't got talent, Flop Star and many others told the kids who once would have graced a church choir that this was what music was all about.Singing through the nose, epiglotis-wobbling, musical cobblers! Even if they sing (badly) there would be redemption for them in a church choir but this is outside the experience of the parents and so the children never get taken along.

"But," (always a BUT) says one of those with whom I conversed, "If they make Glee groups or sing Gospel, this will lead them to move in to sacred (my word) as they develop!" Would that it did, for in conversation with the head of a supposedly specialist music school some time back, asking whether we could encourage the pupils who were doing grades into the local church choir to help them with their aural tests and improve their listening and musical skills, I was shocked to hear that they'd tried and found not one pupil interested. A week after this there were queues outside the school hall when they auditioned for Annie get yourGreased Lightning Oklahoma show!

The thrill of singing with others and making a sound that echoes the concord of God and touches something deep inside of us is something that we are fast losing. My girls (have a houseful) sing all the latest songs and they are musical, but if it wasn't for the stuff we play and the fact that they sing in church, they'd merely be like the rest of the one-dimensional musical experience kids that walk past our doors.

The demise of the ECCT is about more than church-going, it is also about the demise of music in a nation that has been sold a minuscule part of musical experience and told that it is the whole. Consumerism in music limiting rather than promoting it (perhaps that's because those who do so don't promote 'serious' of sacred choral stuff!)

Pax