Doing Wells

As the lovely Platypus appears to be valiantly working her way through my meanderings, here’s a new one about last weekend.

I sing in a “depping” choir – one that deputises for various cathedral choirs when the choir school is on holiday. Last weekend it was Wells.

It’s hard to describe why, exactly, it’s such a brilliant experience. Anything you say to describe it makes it sound frightful: you drive miles and miles to a cathedral city, you stay in (and pay for) a succession of dubious hotels, you rehearse endlessly, you finish the weekend exhausted, the singing is always terrifying because it’s never more than four on a part (it was two or three this weekend), the music is difficult, the congregation for evensong is often tiny…..

But, but, but…. You get to see behind the scenes. On Friday we rehearsed in a timber-vaulted room in Vicars’ Close, built in 1348, just (I think) as the Black Death was sweeping across England. On Saturday we were in the tiny Great Hall of the choir school. Between services we were in the Undercroft, a glorious junk room behind the robing room, full of antique sewing machines, obsolete tea urns, boxes marked DIRTY RUFFS and all the paraphernalia of the Church of England.

And we sang a LOT of music. A complete set of Bairstow for one evensong (slushy, but lovely). A Howells Te Deum (fiendishly difficult, a lot of it in the Lydian mode so sounding more like a muezzin than anything Western) and the lovely bouncy Britten Jubilate for Mattins. The Richard Lloyd Hereford service for the other evensong and a Campra mass setting, along with reams of psalms and some jolly good hymns (the last one of Sunday was “Abide with me” which we all enjoyed camping up.

The only thing that was missing was the usual genteel disagreement between our (spectacularly camp) organist and the director over organ registration. This was because, much to Jonathan-the-organist’s disgust, Wells does not have a 32-foot pipe (the one that makes the loudest, deepest, roariest noise) and so he was unable to make his usual efforts to destroy the building with sound.

One of the nicest experiences in my life is an autumn Cathedral evensong, warm and lit in the choir stalls with the chilly, dark bulk of the cathedral all around you, and the Prayer Book words:

Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, o Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night…..

And the Nunc Dimittus:

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word.
For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles, and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

I’ve given up praying for the peace of Jerusalem, though. It hasn’t happened yet, and clearly all that praying hasn’t made a blind bit of difference.