Articles

The articles below deal with some of the issues affecting the traditional cathedral choir. It is planned to add to them on a regular basis. They are published in in an easy-to-print format and you can continue from one article straight to the next.

A History of the Campaign
This article falls into two parts. In the first part, there is an overview of the choral tradition and of the place of music in worship. Mention is made of controversies, difficulties and developments throughout the centuries. In the second part, we are given the particular reasons which led to the foundation of CTCC and a brief account of its subsequent history.

A Position Paper
This article, by the Campaign's distinguished first president, Dr Bernarr Rainbow, and others, appeared in the August issue of Choir and Organ in 1997. It sets out the case for sticking to ancient custom and examines both sides of the 'argument' with regards to girls' cathedral choirs.

Change in Society, The Church and Cathedral Music
The world is all too often beset by a passion for novelty and a conviction that change – almost any change – is for the better. Bernard Haunch reflects on this thinking and examines some of the many transformations which have taken place within the Church. The change for change sake, which the Church sometimes seems to embrace, has had some very unfortunate consequences. Nowhere has this been more true than in the tinkering with the choral tradition which we have seen in recent years.

In Defence of a Great Tradition

Doing Their Own Thing
In this article, Dr Bernarr Rainbow provides fascinating and very positive suggestions of how girls' choirs could find a different but genuinely exciting new role in cathedral music. The repertoire he proposes would be specific to them, so that there would be no sense of competition or clash with the traditional consort of men and boys.

The Wider Issues
Dr Richard Walden examines several issues which are having an impact, however indirect, on the future of the traditional cathedral choir.

A Chorister At War
Grayston Burgess, the Campaign's treasurer, has had a distinguished career in music. He was a Chorister at Canterbury Cathedral as a boy, and it was while he was there that he met the great counter-tenor, Alfred Deller. At the tender age of 17, he became the youngest ever choral scholar to be appointed to King's College Choir, Cambridge, under Boris Ord, and later on, he joined the choir of Westminster Abbey. The rest, as they say, is history, but it all began for him as a boy in the choirstalls at Canterbury.

The Jewish Tradition
Maxine Handy, the author of Triple-Portrait of a Countertenor, a biography of the distinguished Countertenor, James Bowman, contributes a fascinating article on The Jewish Tradition. In it, she outlines the practice and rationale of a choral tradition within Orthodox Judaism which have long been echoed in Christian worship.