Who would cancel a college choir
NewsYsenda Maxtone Graham in the Spectator tried unsuccessfully to engage with the Master of St John’s College Cambridge who ‘brutally’ disbanded its mixed choir.
‘(Heather) Hancock was appointed Master in 2020, having been a senior civil servant (private secretary to three home secretaries), and then a managing partner at Deloitte. She was an undergraduate at St John’s in the 1980s, graduating with a first in Land Economy. With her husband Mark she owns a grouse moor in Yorkshire. You can hear her bright, feminist-seeming voice on her new St John’s College podcast called Souvient, inspired by the college’s Tudor founder Lady Margaret Beaufort. She interviews high-achieving female alumni of the college, and both of them gush about how wonderful it was to be at St John’s as a woman. Well, it isn’t quite so wonderful now if you happen to be a woman who loves singing and longs to do so in your own college chapel.
‘I’m told that Hancock has never attended any services, concerts, events or rehearsals with St John’s Voices, so she has no personal experience of how excellent they are, and has shown little interest in informing herself about what they do. As one St John’s Voices singer said to me: ‘No one should be naive enough about their responsibilities to take on the burden of running a college without understanding how delicate, fragile and vulnerable to managerial abuse it will prove to be, and that destroyed institutions and reputations can take decades to recover.’
Read on here.
The Master is apparently about to embark on a fund raising tour to see Johnian alumni and alumnae in Singapore and Hong Kong.
No doubt former members of the College there and elsewhere will wish to know the use to which their existing and future financial support will be put.
If the director is the only one paid for a one day a week commitment, and not the singers, what then is the financial problem? If the Spectators article is even half true and fact, then nothing at St John’s adds up.
There is no financial problem. St John’s College is worth around £700 million. Money is not the issue.
A “grouse moor” ???
Does the Spectator person not know that the long-established St John’s College choir now admits women (girls and adults)?
Is music, specifically religious music, the main or most significant concern of a Cambridge College?
Is every member of the College, including the Head, required to be have an interest in religious music?
Just asking.
Of course choir members will be deeply disappointed. But it is too easy to stir up outrage. Music needs to be put into proportion, in the overall academic context..
There cannot be too much music in anyone’s life, whatever the genre.
And do have any idea of what you’re talking about? Just asking. Is every member of the College required to have, say, an interest in organic chemistry in order for the College to fund a lecturer in it?
Piston1, you do not know what you are talking about. Among the St John’s Fellows are a Professor of Music, a Lecturer in Music, a Director of Music, and a College Associate Lecturer in Music – in addition to everybody associated with the choir school. All that is being defunded is a part-time choir director and whatever support a recently (comparatively) formed choir requires.
Not every body in the College needs to have a strong interest in music, any more than every body needs to have an interest in organic chemistry.
ChrisD, I personally would agree, for my own life, but I know many good people whose main passions are not for music. Why should I inflict my enthusiasms on them, why should others fund my passion?
The Spectator article really is a juvenile level of journalism.
1) The Master regularly attends services 2) The Master is supportive of choral music as the music staff have regularly commented 3) The decision was taken by College Council
I do not agree with the decision but being critical of one person following action based on feedback from multiple sources is pathetic and wholly misrepresents the situation.
I’ve just reread the ‘Spectator’ article, and although this might not be clear on first reading, the claim is that The Master has not attended services sung by the St John’s Singers, not that she has not attended services at all.
The Master has an odd way of showing her support for choral music.
I hadn’t heard of the choir before so had a listen. Magnificent. The lady dispensing with this very talented group should maybe stick to grouse shooting.
Another issue, not really explored anywhere, is what the new-ish Cambridge Centre for Music Performance and its leadership thinks about this. The decision to divert the SJV funding to more diverse, accessible music-making seems in line with the general direction the CMP is signalling. It may even have been a joint idea. Judging by the backlash, even if this particular plan isn’t CMP-approved, the latter needs to tread very carefully and thoughtfully.
The Director of the CMP is a Fellow of St John’s College.
The basic problem is that Oxbridge colleges, originally schools of theology, then retirement villages for younger sons waiting for a living in the C of E, are now dominated by agnostics and leftish persons who see no need for chapels at all, except possibly as museums or performance spaces. Meanwhile Stanford and Parry are a long way from being Top of the Pops and choral societies are sneered at by most of the general population. So what do St John’s Singers expect? If they want a paid music director, they will have to pay for one themselves. No point in their running to Arts Council England.
Exactly. Instead of posting a petition on Change.org, they should have gone to GoFundMe.
The idea that there aren’t other choirs in Cambridge for sopranos to sing in or that the others are oversubscribed is complete nonsense. It is also years since choirs required members to be from their own college or even from the university in some cases!!
There are also numerous choirs in Cambridge with no college affiliation at all.