The rich Anglican Choral Tradition continues at New College (Oxford, UK) fortunately.

The Choir of Men and Boys of New College performed The Westminster Service by Herbert Howells for Choral Evensong for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, on 11 May 2025.  The Westminster Service was composed for the Choir and acoustics of Westminster Abbey, part of the established Church of England.  The Magnificat begins at 20.05 and the Nunc Dimittis begins at 27.42.  Robert Quinney is the Choirmaster/Organist and Hugh Rowlands is the Assistant Organist.

It’s good to see them performing something other than what’s known as Howells’s The Big Three (Collegium Regale, St Paul’s and Gloucester).  The Big Three are beautiful settings, but come on people!, one would get the impression that the man only wrote 3 canticle settings.   Howells wrote over 20 canticle settings, and the rest have mostly been neglected for decades.  The same for some of his anthems.  And the same for his symphonic choral works which nobody performs.  Why is that?  Well, because programmers think no one will come to hear them is my guess, so instead every December it’s the usual and predictable Messiah rut/silly tradition (mostly in the US), and then other times of year it’s Orff’s Carmina Burana and Beethoven’s Ninth for the umpteenth time, if orchestras decide to programme any symphonic choral works at all, mostly in the US.  In the EU, the symphonic choral programming is better.

Some of Howells’s symphonic choral works are quite difficult.  I think it was his Missa Sabrinensis (Mass of the Severn; a 1954 choral masterpiece commissioned by Sir David Willcocks for the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester) that was performed years ago at The Three Choirs Festival and it’s been said that the choristers for that are still recovering from that piece due to its difficulty.

When I think about it, I’m so impressed with the trebles/boys at New College — and other Anglican chapels and cathedrals — that they have such a high musical skill level that they can perform the music of Howells so expertly. (Of course the Men of the Choir are excellent.  That needs to be said.)  Even some adult choristers can have trouble with Howells.  Howells canticle settings are not easy particularly with his long phrases and dissonances, but these boys perform it so well, absolutely splendidly.  They are so advanced musically for their young age and will go far in music if they stay with it.  I wonder:  How many people think of what I just said when hearing these superb choristers?  Or do most people take it all for granted?

I write about this every time I see it.  It’s interesting, if not depressing:  The High Church Movement began at Oxford — which is where New College is — and today High Church has been mostly abandoned.  The Verger remains High Church, but he’s about it.  These people (the congregation) don’t even bow for the Gloria.  What is wrong with people?  All the others there look to be as Low Church as the Royal Family, and I have to say that they certainly don’t set a very good example of Anglican protocol.  One might think they would try to set an example considering it was one of their distant relatives, King Henry VIII, who started the Church of England (Anglican Church) by breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church.  At New College, there was one guy who genuflected to the reserved sacrament during the Organ Voluntary and another guy who blessed himself as he left, but that was about it.

Then there was the opposite:  My choral friend and I rehashed this again:  It’s always guys who follow Anglican protocol, if anyone is going to do so.  That’s something I don’t understand.  Why guys?  Excluding some female priests, females in general seem to think they are exempt or above following any Anglican protocol.  Why?  What is that about?  Why do they think they’re “too good?”  One wonders why they’re even Anglican!  Like the Royal Family, these females could easily be mistaken for Baptists.  And especially in Oxford, where the High Church movement began as I wrote earlier.  I noticed two females during the Apostles’ Creed who refused to turn and face East like everyone else was doing, which is customary for the reciting of the Nicene and Apostles’ creeds.  Would it have really put them out terribly to turn and face East (towards the High Altar)?  Where do these people/females come from?  And why do they think they’re elite?  And it’s not as if they didn’t know.  It’s printed on the service leaflet to please turn and face East for the Creed.  But theses two females weren’t about to do that.  It looked like they were reading the creed off the service leaflet which told me they were not Anglican, because most Anglicans memorise the creeds from saying them often.  I don’t know what their head trip is.

This particular Evensong had a group of “your typical tourists” who shouldn’t have been there.  They came in late and sat on one of the benches.  They were obviously in the wrong place, if they even knew where they were.  They were annoying me and I started to put a post-it note over that part of my screen to hide them from view.  Fortunately, they left at the beginning of the Apostles’ Creed.

Most of the people there were there because they wanted to be.  I noticed that most stayed for the Organ Voluntary, which they should.  The Organ Voluntary is part of the Liturgy and should not be talked over as is too often the case in other churches.  That was one of the annoying things for me about being Organist/Choirmaster.  The Organist prepares a nice Organ Voluntary (two of my favourites: the Widor Toccata, Jehan Alain’s Litanies, or something) and nobody hears it because they yap over it as they leave.  Sometimes when planning my music, I would think:  Well don’t play anything that’s going to take a lot of your time to learn or re-prepare because nobody is going to hear it.  At one of the parishes, I usually improvised in High Church style on the hymn for the procession or on some other piece and that worked out well.  It could be as short or as long as I wanted it to be.  Then I’d have some of the parishioners come to me during coffee hour to tell me, “The music was so joyful this morning, loved it.”  I always appreciated them saying that.  Very kind of them.