gradus :: westminster 1959 to 1961

I expected it to be a terminus. I was mistaken. It was only a wayside halt.

My two years at Westminster Cathedral were not the happiest of my life. I made mistakes. And that was only partly because I was such a tender new Catholic.

My most crashingly awful mistake was to forget how good I was. I’d been appointed because of my demonstrable ability and experience. When I was asked – ‘commanded’ would be a better word - to conform to my predecessor’s methods I was too overawed to do anything but try my best to obey. It was a pretty hopeless task. My predecessor insisted his way with boys’ voices was set out in the standard textbooks. It wasn’t. So I struggled by trial and error until I discovered his method was the very opposite of traditional English practice. Nevertheless I persisted. Foolishly.

And then there were times when I sat in my office and lamented. ‘Bricks without straw.’ There was money to pay for the interior walls to be lined with marble up to gallery level. When the engines of the west end Grand Organ blew up, a cheque was ready to pay for repairs almost before the contract was signed. Money to pay for desperately needed additional choirmen? No way. The best that could be done was to allow for ad hoc hirings only when absolutely necessary. More practice time for the boys? Can’t be done. Their timetable is already full. I tried to work within those limits. I should have remonstrated. Resigned. Walked out and left them to it. I didn’t even think of it.

Those were musical matters. But the very nature of Catholicism countermanded my better judgement. I was on the verge of sacking a member of my staff for gross misconduct. Then at the morning mass I heard the words of the gospel for the day. It was the story of the disciple who asked how many times he should forgive his brother. Seven times? And the response came. Yea. And seventy times seven. How then could I sack the man? Perhaps that sowed a tiny seed of doubt in my mind. Were the teachings in the books of instruction compatible with real life in the outside world? In real life was it really possible to live by the precepts?

But it wasn’t all like that. We did make some glorious music together. Christopher Tye and Thomas Tallis and William Byrd as well as the obligatory Lassus and Palestrina. And I sang two complete annual cycles of the Gradualia and the Vesperale and few laymen outside the choristers of Westminster can claim that.

Old Self smiles indulgently. Little did Young Self know about the preChristian kalendar with its fixed point of the birth of the god at the Winter Solstice and the ever-moveable days and nights of the dance of the Equinoctial Sun with the Lady of the brilliant Full Moon. The Mystery of Reincarnation in the Springtime of the Year.

Finally. And it needs to be said kindly and generously. My time at Westminster was a catalyst. The cathedral didn’t change. It changed me. And my future.

And on the morning when the notice of my appointment appeared in The Times, the Principal of the Royal Academy of Music invited me to go and see him. Why should Sir Thomas Armstrong do that? Because I had been in his classes at Oxford University’s Faculty of Music.

/* Oh, alright, inner voices. Yes. I’ll write it down. Something about wheels grinding slowly. */

francis cameron, oxford, 05 april 2012

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