New College Choir in the American Midwest

“Something Old, Something New”

In the late 14th century, William of Wykeham wanted to found a college at Oxford that would be a suitable destination for students at his other foundation at Winchester. The Black Death had left an empty site within the Oxford city walls and a dearth of professionals in government and in the church. William would fill both spaces with his Oxford foundation, which he wanted to call the College of St Mary. Trouble was Oxford already had a College of St Mary. Even though the first College of St Mary was, by William’s time, referring to itself as Oriel College, the need was felt to call William’s foundation of 1379 the new College of St Mary. And ‘New College’ has stuck (so far).

In the late 19th century, John Wesley Hughes, an itinerant Methodist preacher, pledged to begin a college that would combine the conservative evangelical principles of early Methodism with the goals of a “liberal culture of mind and soul.” The result was Asbury College founded in 1890 and set in the gently rolling countryside of Daniel Boone and the Kentucky River. To this day, Asbury College combines a commitment to a liberal education (that includes a Department of Music) with a theology from the oldest form of Methodism that asserts the literal and incontestable truth of the Bible.

The old New and the new Old came together last Thursday 7 April in the form of a concert by the New College Choir under the direction of Edward Higginbottom in the Hughes Auditorium of Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky.

Records of the early years of the New College Choir are sparse, but it is assumed, since the charter mandated it, that the choir began when the college began, so it has had six and a quarter centuries to hone its musical skills. In the twentieth century, a series of brilliant directors has made the choir a significant musical force. The present director, Dr Edward Higginbottom, who will soon complete his third decade with the choir, decided on a powerful program of very new music and very old music that would likely be new to his American audiences in this, the choir’s first tour of the States in thirty years. The choir is touring with two separate concert programs. At Asbury we heard the scond program which seems, if anything, the more esoteric and difficult to ‘sell’. No Panis angelicus or Pie Jesu here. About the only thing close to a crowd pleaser might be Gibbons’s O clap your hands or Rossini’s O salutaris hostia, neither of which was a sure thing. I was apprehensive about how such a program would be received in a world that might invite such a clash of religious cultures. Would anyone even go to such a concert in Wilmore, Kentucky? My wife, Susan, called ahead to arrange tickets and was informed that there would be no charge, that such activities were part of the college’s mission and were paid for, in part, by the activity fees that students were assessed. Eventually, I confirmed this unlikely news on the college’s web site—the concert was indeed free and open to the public.

The auditorium was large and beautifully appointed, but with the restraint I recognized from Methodist churches I had known in the past. Dark wood ceiling, cream-colored plaster walls with a balcony on three sides. Nothing that might be called ‘rich’, but carefully done right down to the stained glass exit signs. The hall filled quickly, and it was heartening to see so many college students (required to attend, Susan observes), and their teachers (are they required to attend?), approximately a thousand, in a town with a population of less than 6,000.

Hughes Auditorium, Asbury College  (photo Lynn Schoch)

The concert opened with an invocation from the President of the college. The choir entered in red cassocks, the trebles with wide, pleated collars (probably heavily starched to make sure they keep their chins up, my wife proposes). The first piece of the evening was completely unfamiliar to me. It built a series of complex harmonies which embody the awe in the text, ‘Honor, power, might and dominion be to the Trinity in Unity, to the Unity in Trinity, throughout the everlasting ages’. The textual repetition provided opportunities for sectional responses, and that gave us a chance to hear each part of the choir work through it own set of harmonic challenges (some great work in the trebles). The piece built momentum through fleeting sonorities. When finished the choir seemed pleased that it had opened with such strength and conviction. This piece is at the top of my list to hear again; I trust that New College will release a performance on CD soon. This impressive beginning, this Hymn to the Trinity: Honor, Virtus et Potestas was written by Gabriel Jackson in 2000.

The second offering of the evening was another musical effort that would perk up a musician’s ear. Something about a double canon on the ninth, the Gesistliches Lied of Johannes Brahms, like the Jackson piece, let the choir demonstrate beauty in complexity. And that beauty, when delivered with the precision and power that were clearly at this choir’s command, is not lost even on those of us who cannot keep the dueling canons at bay.

The choir then retreated a couple of centuries to Orlando Gibbons’s O clap your hands. This piece demonstrated well the role the choristers felt they had in the group. Fourteen of them formed a single line at the front of the choir, with the men of the choir in a single line behind. While there was the usual variety of height, the choristers seem all to share the same intensity about the music and its performance. There was very little smiling, very little movement of any kind, precise training in stage presence, and profound commitment to the job at hand. I have seen the same look in little league pitchers or young runners waiting for the starting gun. I know there are those of you who will roll your eyes at this sports analogy, and I don’t mean by it that athletics and music are somehow the same. Rather, by seeing the same intensity, the same kind of responses to a challenge, in those two arenas, one understands that the delivery of the highest professional standards is not something unnaturally pounded into these boys, but rather a potential that is awakened by the right kind of expectations. Ask in the right way, and you get a commitment to the task that is too rarely found in the adult world.

These choristers knew their business, knew what it would take to master the task at hand, knew that despite too much food, exhaustion and circadian rhythms (two in the morning back home), the standards were not to be compromised. The choir seemed to have lost its way in the first part of O clap your hands. I’m not sure what was wrong, but I don’t think the problem was in the treble line. In any case, the choir gets a quick break in the middle of the piece, and then the trebles come in with ‘God is gone up’. The force of assertion with which the trebles brought the effort back on track was visible and audible. That back line might come collectively with several centuries of training, but the front line had no trouble taking charge to assure a proper conclusion. And the clouds that troubled the first half of the piece dissipated with the energy and grit that the text demands.

Both halves of the concert were further divided by an organ interlude, a very satisfactory approach to programming that lets the organ scholars show not only what they can do, but what they can get out of the instrument at hand. For this concert, we had Bach’s Praeludiums in B, BWV 544, and in E flat, BWV 552. If anyone had any doubt that the organ scholarship of New College could not match its choral scholarship, these interludes dispelled that.

The audience had been asked at the beginning to refrain from applause until the end of each half, and Dr Higginbottom moved quickly from one piece to the next. I am certain that with the difficulty of the program, the choir needed the organ interlude, but in this concert, while they had a brief rest from singing, they had no escape from the audience, no chance to crash; they sat at the spots where they sang, across the front of the stage in full visibility. Yawns were stifled professionally, stares were into a spot at the back of the hall, smiles and visual and verbal exchanges not in evidence anywhere. Truly a professionally tuned instrument, this choir.

The rest of the concert led us through a fine choral repertoire that must have been largely unfamiliar to much of the audience. Rossini’s lyrical O salutaris hostia, Finzi’s big For, lo, the full final sacrifice, Parry’s brooding late work, Lord, let me know mine end, Guerrero’s Duo seraphim, Jonathan Harvey’s I love the Lord (which provided a rare opportunity for solo and small ensemble work), Bainton’s And I saw a new heaven, and I will sing and raise a psalm by the American Libby Larsen. There was no piece on the program that I had heard previously other than on CD, and I do think it takes a live performance to begin to understand what this music is doing. Besides the sacred and the new, a common element was the ambitiousness of the effort. I am certain that were Director Higginbottom to play video games, he would only use the ‘maximum difficulty’ setting, for that seems to be the common thread in his choice of music.

The concluding piece brought an almost instant standing ovation. Any worry I might have had about a clash of religious cultures was certainly not evident at the concert. Listening was more respectful and attentive than many concerts I have attended of late. The audience did not shrink after intermission, and the genuine appreciation at the end meant a probably exhausted choir could not get away without an encore—in this case, a complete turnabout from the sacred concert, with the American folk song, Shenandoah. This is a piece that everyone knew; its haunting tune could green up a petrified forest. And in typical New College fashion, they were not content with melting their audience’s hearts with the unison treble line on the melody, they had to turn it into a polyphonic exercise. I think this was the arrangement they sing on their Early One Morning CD.

Asbury College continued its role as generous and gracious host by inviting the entire audience to what turned out to be an ice cream social afterwards. My wife and I would not normally have undertaken such an event, but as soon as I had a program in hand at the beginning of the concert I searched out a certain name. A student we had known locally had defected for a career at New College, and we did not expect he would still be with them. But indeed, there was his name among the tenors. We could not resist seeking him out afterwards and accosted him as he tried to eat his ice cream sundae. He tolerated my grilling him for quite some time about his experience with this awesome group, and I learned much. Yes, Dr Higginbottom works closely with the choristers, whose musicianship is “amazing”. The choristers “sight read better than many of us”, this doctoral student admitted. He did not know why the choir had come to Wilmore, but they were hopping around all over the East and South, sometimes by plane and sometimes by bus. The choir’s cultural education was accelerated by home stays with some extraordinary individuals, and the visit to Kentucky was perhaps their first encounter with a dry county, a fact that was, I assume, more significant for the back line. The front line had visited a horse farm that day but seemed revived by the ice cream while their back-line colleagues pined for something a bit stronger.

When we mentioned that we would be taking in a concert by another Oxford choir, the choir of Christ Church Cathedral, he had a slightly chagrined look and blurted out, “Gee, I hope they are not better than us!” When a few minutes later, another young tenor joined the conversation, he said exactly the same thing. I was startled, not just by their concern about being bested, but also in the thought that they would think a member of the musically unwashed like myself would be able to tell. I had compartmentalized competitiveness to other walks of life and to hear the urgency of it here made me realize even more that maintaining this level of quality was a matter of constant work and concern.

Ten minutes. That’s all it takes to walk from the chapel of New College to Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford. I wonder if Oxonians know how lucky they are. For a brief shining moment, my wife and I felt equally fortunate, for the fates made it possible on successive nights to hear the resident choirs of these venerable institutions in the American Midwest. All it took was a six-hour drive due west on Interstate I-64 from Wilmore, Kentucky, to St Louis, Missouri. But which was the better choir? The venues made the sound of the two choirs completely different. The full hall at Asbury College absorbed any extra sound that the building might have lent; New College had to work for every legato. The Cathedral Basilica of St Louis, Missouri could flatter a Mac truck changing gears. Both choirs knew how to work these halls, but the differences in acoustics made it hard to compare. The selection of music was very different as well. I could retreat to the answer I gave when asked to compare King’s and St John’s: I figured I would have to spend six months or so alternating evensongs with the two choirs before I would have enough evidence to conclude. But I know at the end of that six months, I would be much happier, but no closer to an answer.

I would like to conclude that ‘best’ hardly matters when performance standards are as high as these, when you come to expect perfection on each piece and are not disappointed. And I do believe finally that what counts is that Oxford has more than one choir that can reach these heights. But after giving considerable thought to our New College friend’s remark, I need to concede as well that wanting to be the best may play an essential part in achieving the heights these singers do. So, my friend, keep worrying that the other choir is better; I like what it does to the quality of your performance.

Lynn Schoch, Indiana University

A longer version of this article may be found at www.cathedralmusiclinks.org.uk/ (link will open in a new window)