Christopher Gray on Lament and Liberation

Christopher Gray took over from Andrew Nethsingha in early 2023 as Music Director of St John's College Cambridge, inheriting one of the world's foremost and best-known collegiate choirs, with a recording pedigree stretching back three quarters of a century. It was inevitable that he would continue this strand of the choir's musical life (alongside the service music itself), but as he explains, that long and illustrious history is a two-edged sword - what do you record with the choir that has recorded everything?

For his recorded début with St John's, Christopher has chosen a programme of big, challenging works that are contemporary both in their dates of composition and in their engagement with concerns that are uppermost in many early twenty-first century minds: refugee crises, climate change, authoritarianism and more. I spoke to Christopher about how this album took shape, his focus on championing rising young composers, and how the choir's singing of regular services feeds into putting together conceptual albums like this one. 

Where did the initial idea come from to put together an album of this kind - with such contemporary resonances, and something of a narrative direction to it, rather than just a more vaguely themed collection?

Well, this is a choir that's singing seven services a week - they need to be turning up to sing music that they like. That's important - music that's good, and engaging, for a student community like this. And there will be certain subject matter that particularly captures their imagination, and certain styles of writing, and just the sheer variety of it.

So that's a starting-point - you can't be completely driven by the market! But then you also can't be blind or deaf to it, either. This choir alone has recorded over a hundred albums since the 1950s - when I was growing up in Northern Ireland, St John's College Choir were among the small number of groups whose recordings you might get in a normal Belfast record shop in the 1990s. So from George Guest's days onwards the choir has been a recording choir. And that's great, because it's in the DNA, and the culture of doing two sets of sessions a year is all there. And the focus, and the desire to create something special, is all hardwired into them.

But on the downside... what hasn't been recorded over the course of a hundred albums of Anglican choral music? The obvious things have been done. It doesn't necessarily mean they can't be done again and refreshed for a new generation, but a bit of a balance has to be struck between that and commissioning new music. And then you have to think about the audience; for some people that's where the interest is, but for others, they prefer a bit of new music to a whole album of stuff they don't know. They need some comfort and familiarity in there - so I'm hoping to strike a balance on those things, as my predecessors have done very successfully. We'll aim to refresh some of the classic repertoire and also seek to give variety, but for my first album I did particularly want to lean into the idea of championing contemporary music and working with composers - that's something I think the choir does especially well.

I wouldn't want to overplay the ‘narrative direction’ on this first album, because they're all separate pieces that I've chosen to put beside each other. I know this isn't very fashionable - people want to consume music in slightly more bitesize chunks - but I still think there are people who will want to listen to an album. And you can do both, of course - but if you do choose to listen to it from beginning to end, there will be a journey there that's quite honest about the challenges we encounter along the way, while also offering comfort.

Was this in fact something you'd been chewing over even before taking up the post at St John's?

I was appointed in November 2022, and didn't take up the post until April 2023, so in those months I was thinking about what to do. I didn't want to record in my first year with the choir, but I thought I'd better do so soon after that; and therefore if we were going to do a big album of contemporary music that would all be new to the group, we could take a long time to get to know it.

And I think actually that's one of the things this choir brings - there are groups that draw together professionals and have a quick rehearsal and then record, but we live with the music much more than that, and I think it gets into the blood a bit more. We've taken a bit of time to get to know these pieces.

Thinking particularly of the MacMillan - are they all things that you would perform liturgically?

The last movement of the MacMillan, Sun stone, we actually used as part of our Lent meditation - it formed a very powerful climax to that service, because it's got the imagery of the death of Jesus woven into it. I've known that piece for a long time and I've always found it very gripping and immediate; it's making a story from two thousand years ago utterly relevant to our times - the death of this innocent man in South America, a political prisoner being shot, is something that God through the crucifixion of Jesus can fully relate to. I think that divine empathy is the message that's there in that piece, and I was keen that when students come to our services (like the Lent meditation, or our Advent carol service, where we used Joanna Marsh's setting of the Malcolm Guite poem about the Holy Family as refugees) they encounter that.

Joanna also wrote a very powerful Epiphany piece for us called Refugee, which is also on the album, and there's a line in that about dictators - you can think of dictators around the world today and how it's so easy to tip further into that. The poem starts off 'We think of Him as safe beneath the steeple, or cosy in a crib beside the font' and so on - the usual manger setting for a Christmas card - but the closing lines are 'But every Herod dies, and comes alone to stand before the Lamb upon the throne'. That vulnerable baby will be judging this despotic king; there will be justice.

In Marsh’s Echoes in Time and MacMillan’s Cantos Sagrados those contemporary political and environmental concerns are very apparent. Do you ever get pushback from people who would prefer choirs like yours to ‘stay in their lane’ and just sing comfortable, unchallenging evensongs?

I've never had that feedback, but I do understand the sentiment. Maybe people think it and don't say it. For me, we are first and foremost a church choir - in our case a chapel choir - and it depends whether you want church to be something you just pop along to on a Sunday and it stays in its little box, or whether it needs to actually inform the rest of your week, month and year. I personally think the latter, and the choir has to play its part in a bigger mission than just comfortable services.

What we have to be careful of, though, is gravitating towards causes just because they will push an emotional button. We must engage with these things meaningfully and sincerely. One thing I discussed with Joanna Marsh when we were thinking about who we might work with - ultimately it ended up being Malcolm Guite - and what we might want to do with this triptych of pieces, was the question of what it was appropriate for us to say. Both for her as a composer and for us as a choir based in Cambridge of the kind we are. There are certain issues that it's more legitimate for us to say something about than others, I think - on some things you would get a reaction of 'who are you to be making any comment on that?' We wanted to stay in the right lane in terms of things that were relevant to our community and that we could relate to in some way.

A rising star of choral composition is Helena Paish, whose The Annunciation (commissioned by the College last year) is featured here. How did you come into contact with her music and end up commissioning this work?

My previous job was as Director of Music at Truro Cathedral, and Helena was one of our first intake of girl choristers in 2015. She did five years there before coming to Trinity College here in Cambridge, and when she was in sixth form she won the BBC Proms Inspire competition - so I've known her composition from its earliest days. She's always had something original to say, and really engages with text well and understands it. And then she has a particular ear for harmony and melody that she uses to craft a response to those texts.

You mention that the commissions are to an extent tailored to the specific circumstances of the College chapel - its acoustic and its organ, not to mention the choir itself. How much do these shape the eventual form the works take?

Yes, the music we commission can be performed by any choir of our kind, but it’s often tailored to our specific circumstances. In the same way that Bach works on the sort of period instruments he had in mind, but also on modern instruments or in transcription. The powerful Trompeta Real stop that we have on the organ here is a particular feature, and it's good to deploy it from time to time, but most decent-sized organs have a Tuba stop which would do a version of the same job. It's particularly apocalyptic when it comes in on this recording, though! We're actually having a new organ put in at the moment but we're keeping the Trompeta Real - we can't really get rid of it, because of the history, and people like Michael Tippett writing the St John's Service for us - we can't be without the stop to play that on.

You’ve made it clear both in the booklet and in the choice of music itself that you’re very much intending to carry on that tradition of commissioning new works, to keep the choral tradition alive and in motion. Are you able to tell us anything about projects that are in the works, or give us any hints?

We have some exciting stuff coming - with commissions, we're aiming to do two things: to work with the very best established composers, and also to champion talented early-career composers. We recently premiered a new set of canticles by Anna Semple, and last term we premiered a set by Sarah Henderson, who is an undergraduate at the university with a very distinctive voice. So we'll be recording both of those.

We haven't announced this yet but I think it's probably OK to mention it - Errollyn Wallen is writing a piece for us for our Advent carol service in December. We've got plans for the two years beyond that, but those aren't quite signed and sealed just yet. I think this is a place that needs to have that 'tinsel factor' of having new pieces coming up reasonably regularly.

I often like to ask this question of English choral conductors - we have such a fabulously rich choral tradition in this country’s cathedrals and collegiate choirs that it’s fair to call it a pretty crowded market. So, briefly, what would you say it is that makes St John’s College Choir unique and sets it apart?

Engagement with the text. I think that's where it all starts. St John's is well known for its sound, but that comes from the text, and really getting a communal vision of what we're trying to express. Then you get that depth of tone and the richness of sound. It opens up a greater palette of response.

And the crucible in which that's forged is the singing of psalms. We spend a lot of time discussing, line by line, what a particular psalm is saying. I've taken to doing them unconducted most of the time, and the reason for that is not just to encourage their listening skills and their ensemble singing, but also to give them emotional autonomy. For each line they're about to sing, they're not looking to me to give them a facial gesture that will tell them what emotion it is - they have to sort it out for themselves, and take the right breath for that sentiment. And the hope is that that emotional autonomy then gets translated into the repertoire. There's something about singing a sentence together that isn't in 4/4 but is just a sequence of words. It's much harder; you do really have to know how you're envisaging that and get on the same wavelength. It's a very special thing.