Musical Destinations
Jeremy Pound explores both the highs and the recent lows of a famous cathedral city whose relaunched arts festival looks set to inspire
Jeremy Pound is inspired by Salisbury
If you ever happen to find yourself playing Anglican Cathedral Top Trumps, Salisbury is a very useful card to have in your hand. At 123 metres tall it towers way above any of its peers, and its length – 144 metres – is none-too-shabby either. It scores well in the ‘Year founded’ and ‘Size of diocese’ categories too, though admittedly its number of bells – none – is a bit of an Achilles’ heel. If a peal appeals, Salisbury’s not the cathedral for you.
But back to those 123 metres. The cathedral’s majestic spire was completed in 1320, a century after the building’s foundation stone was laid, and is today one of England’s most instantly recognisable landmarks, visible from miles around. In the early 19th century, John Constable was inspired to depict it from a number of different angles, and it has also enjoyed its moment in the literary sun as the subject of William Golding’s gritty 1964 novel
The Spire. It is, in fact, a little too large, as the bowed pillars holding it up will attest, but thankfully some nifty architectural adjustments made by Sir Christopher Wren in the 17th century have prevented any further structural distortion.
Salisbury Cathedral’s bragging points don’t stop at the spire. In the nave, for instance, you’ll find the oldest working mechanical clock in the world. And then, on a musical front, Salisbury is proud of its status as the first cathedral in England to have introduced, in 1991, a full-time girls’ choir. This groundbreaking move did not, as some feared, spell the end of 900 years of boys singing at Salisbury, a tradition that pre-dates the building itself.
Today, the boys’ and girls’ choirs share duties for choral evensong, which takes place at 5.30pm during the week and
4.30pm on Sundays . For the next few months, however, both choirs will have to manage without the accompaniment of the cathedral’s Father Willis organ, as this magnificent 1877 beast is currently being dismantled and sent away for restoration.
2018 is not a year that Salisbury will remember fondly. In March, two Russian visitors called Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov spent a couple of days here ‘to admire the cathedral’, but bringing with them a perfume bottle filled with deadly Novichok. The tragic aftermath of their stay was well reported, and local tourism was subsequently hit very hard. And then, in October, a man armed with a hammer tried to steal one of the cathedral’s prize assets, the Magna Carta. While the document was unharmed, repair work on the case has made it temporarily unavailable to the public.
By unfortunate coincidence, 2018 also saw the Salisbury International Arts Festival shelved for the first time since 1974, as the city’s various arts organisations decided on a year’s break to focus on merging into a single new body called Wiltshire Creative. ★ere, though, the news takes a positive turn. In August, Wiltshire Creative announced its arrival with an allsinging, all-dancing Lift Off! weekend.
And in May 2019, the festival itself will return in style, with composer Jonathan Dove at the helm as guest director of the two-week event. Two major anniversaries – the 50th of man setting foot on the moon and the 30th of the fall of the Berlin Wall – will be marked with a series of concerts, talks and visual displays, while Dove himself also has a personal 30-year landmark to celebrate. ‘In 1989, I was musician in residence at the Salisbury Festival,’ he remembers. ‘I wrote a bundle of pieces for it, including an organ piece, a choral piece, a dance piece and my first piece of music theatre. I also accompanied a silent film on the piano. Today, I think of that moment as being the beginning of my profession as a full-time composer, so it’s a very significant place for me.’
In 2012, Salisbury Cathedral hosted the premiere of Dove’s The Walk from the Garden. This year, he is writing two new pieces that will be given their first outing at the festival along with some of his other compositions. But that is only a small part of his multi-faceted role as guest director. ★e is, he says, also looking forward to popping up here, there and everywhere in the festival’s various venues. ‘I love Salisbury Arts Centre which is a very intimate space, and we are also staging events in The Medieval ★all, a couple of churches, pubs and also outside. We’ve got up to 12 events a day, so if you’re in or passing Salisbury at the time, you’ll definitely find something going on.’
‘Salisbury Festival marked the start of my profession as a full-time composer’