Richard Morrison

Stephen Cleobury’s departure from King’s should initiate a revolution

What lies ahead for the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge after Stephen Cleobury?

Justifiably or not, it’s still the world’s most famous Anglican choir. So there was bound to be a flutter in the organ lofts last month when Stephen Cleobury announced he was finally stepping down as director of music at King’s College, Cambridge.

I write ‘finally’ not in any pejorative sense, but because by the time he leaves, in September 2019, he will have made music for 37 years under that magnificent fan-vaulted ceiling. Not a bad way to spend a large chunk of your life. And with typical astuteness he has extended his tenure so that his last Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols will be on the 100th anniversary of the first held at King’s, in 1918.

That should be an emotional occasion, except that emotion isn’t the first word that occurs when thinking about King’s under Cleobury. He has maintained that choir’s pristine standards impeccably. But the challenge facing his successor will be to respond to 21st-century ideas about how choirs should sound and what their function is, rather than merely perpetuating a model developed by Boris Ord and David Willcocks more than half a century ago.

Cleobury’s successor will become only the seventh person to occupy that post in 140 years. Who will it be? Furtive midnight calls to my Deep Throats in the choral world produced a veritable angelic host of possible contenders. Could the prickly but gifted Stephen Layton be tempted to move 50 yards down the road from Trinity College, or the respected Andrew Nethsingha make the scarcely longer journey from St John’s? The latter would be a sensational appointment, like Man City manager Pep Guardiola being poached by Man Utd.

Would James O’donnell jump from Westminster Abbey, where he has been outstanding? Or is he hanging on for the coronation that will surely happen sometime in the next 20 years? And what of the ambitious Daniel Hyde, a former King’s organ scholar who has been at St Thomas’s Church on Fifth Avenue, New York for only a year or so? He would surely be flattered by a call to return to his alma mater, even if the massive drop in salary proved hard to swallow.

And so the runners and riders pile up. James Vivian at Windsor, Ashley Grote

Nearly every cathedral in Britain, with a couple of glaring exceptions, has a girls’ choir too

at Norwich, Christopher Gray at Truro, Matthew Owens at Wells, Martin Baker at Westminster Cathedral: they are all reckoned to be in with a shout. Astute readers among you will have noticed one thing, however. They’re all male. ‘Well, naturally!’ you might cry. ‘The King’s choir is also all male.’ That’s true. But will it be true in the future? And if so, why? These are fundamental questions that need answering before a new appointment is thought about, let alone made.

At first the questions seem absurd. Of course King’s should stay as it always has been: boy choristers in the front row; undergraduate or graduate male altos, tenors and basses in the back.

The sound is traditional and treasured by many. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

The answer is that the male domination of the musical world certainly is broke – and about time too. Nearly every cathedral in Britain, with a couple of glaring exceptions in London, now has a girls’ choir as well as boys. And they are doubling, not diluting, the appreciation of those who love sacred music. It has always struck me as weird that King’s of all places – the first allmale college in Cambridge to admit women undergraduates (including Judith Weir, now Master of the Queen’s Music) – should have lagged so far behind in this respect.

It’s not as if any of the Oxbridge colleges running all-male choirs

– King’s and John’s at Cambridge; Magdalen, Christ Church and New College in Oxford – lack the wealth to start parallel girls’ choirs. Nor would it dilute their musical standards. No, it’s more about not wanting to ruffle the feathers of traditionalists. And that’s not a very good reason at all.

As it happens, another major church-music job has also fallen vacant: director of the Royal School of Church Music, which predominantly represents parish church choirs. Fifty years ago, most of them were all male too, but there has been near-universal recognition among parish music leaders that it would be madness for the Church to deprive itself of the musical talents of half the population.

If that’s true at the grass-roots level, it’s doubly true at the exalted heights of places like King’s and Westminster Abbey, which should serve as exemplars of best practice. Time for a small but exquisitely tuned revolution, I think. Richard Morrison is chief music critic and a columnist of The Times