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Breakfast time, for a lot of us, is the wrong time of day for chatter. In the morning, most of us don’t want to hear what anyone else is thinking, let alone feeling. We’ve not yet switched on the appropriate filters, protecting us from the slings and arrows. The problem with the new touchy-feely Radio 3, criticised elsewhere in this magazine in the past few weeks, is it’s just too personal. Do we really need to know when or where Mr or Mrs Blog from Bognor first heard their favourite piece of classical music?
The latest Rajar figures (detailing how many of us are still listening to the radio, and to which stations) have revealed yet another increase in the numbers of us tuning in to radio, and this includes Radio 3, up by 0.2 per cent, or 0.1 per cent, depending on whether you compare the figures with last quarter or this time last year. The audience is gradually returning to the BBC’s loftiest station in spite of its very noticeable change of tone. But for how long? And have the changes brought in any new listeners? That’s what we really need to know.
After noon on Radio 3 is still a safe zone, even at the weekend, with the right kind of chat, informative, explanatory, sometimes even revelatory. On Saturday, Catherine Bott took us to Lincoln Cathedral for The Early Music Show (produced by Barnaby Gordon). Music wafts through the cloister, high trebles blending perfectly with bass, alto and tenor. A bell tolls the hour. Masons are chipping away at the stone, smoothing, polishing, repairing the building that has been a work in progress since 1072. ‘It’s very inspiring,’ declares Bott, as she sets about finding out what cathedral life is like for the singers who help to keep that life going. ‘There’s a continuity to the life here.’ It’s a spiritual continuity, but also a practical continuity, maintaining the building and keeping it alive.
Working as a chorister, a lay clerk or vicar choral in one of Britain’s cathedrals has changed very little in the last half-millennium. ‘It must be one of very few jobs of which you can say this,’ Bott suggests, setting off all sorts of thoughts and imaginings. We live among such change, so rapid too, that it’s odd to think there are still places where you can be involved in a life not so very different from what went on when the first Elizabeth was on the throne. The singers do the same job, and work almost the same hours, wearing the same kind of clothes (at least on top) without needing any of the devices of the contemporary world. The only differences are that girls now share that work, and that in the 1560s the music sung by the choristers under the baton of William Byrd would have all been absolutely fresh off the page, written for that moment, and totally contemporary. Nothing composed before his time could be sung as it was set to the Latin Catholic rite, no longer in use in post-Reformation Britain. Now of course the repertoire veers from 1560 to 2011, from Gibbons and Byrd to Tavener and Dove.
We heard about all this in between excerpts of the most exquisite music, perfectly timed, carefully interwoven. Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices, an anthem from Tallis, Thomas Tomkins’s Lighten our darkness, oh Lord. Conversation, yes, but just enough, at the right time, with enough practised authority, and above all pertinent.
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