Choral Services > Webcasts
New
College Choir is the first in Oxford
to launch regular webcasts of choral services. Each week one service is
selected for webcasting, and is prepared for webcast just a few days later. You will find
regular services of choral evensong, as well as major
festivals and the Choir’s carol services. At the beginning of each term the list is replaced with the first new service and will build up as the term progresses. Some recordings are selected for the Webcast Archive.
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About the WebcastsAs you listen you will be taking part in a ‘live’ service: this isn’t a studio recording of a concert, but the daily liturgy offered as part of the chapel’s tradition of Christian worship. You may imagine the choir gathering shortly after 5pm each day, the choristers from their school, the clerks from their university studies and places of work, to prepare the evening office. At 6pm the chapel is opened for the congregation, and fifteen minutes later the choir processes to its stalls to sing the music you will now be able to hear on your flashplayer. We hope you will enjoy your experience, and be able to enter a little into the life and work of New College, its chapel and its choir.
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The Story of Webcasting at New College
New College Cloisters and ante-chapel
The process of fitting 21st century technology into
a 14th century chapel hasn’t been without its challenges, since medieval buildings
weren’t quite designed for microphones and cables. The project became viable with the
development of a microphone system with the capability of being suspended from
the roof and lowered to recording height above the choir. Metres of cabling have had to be laid externally
along the chapel roof, to connect the microphones to the recording equipment
and computer in the organ loft – some distance from the choir stalls in the
chapel below!
There have been moments of excitement and anxiety, standing on the chapel roof (and enjoying the view of Oxford spread out below), to watch the College maintenance team fit the cabling, and see the microphones descend for the first time from their nest high up in the roof to hover almost invisibly above the choir stalls. Traditional ways have adapted to the new: the organ loft has a recording desk and laptop nestling next to the volumes of Bach and organists’ shoes, and the readers at evensong have had to learn how to negotiate microphone switches as well as the prose of the Old Testament.
The most exciting challenge has been to perfect an authentic New College sound, recognisable to everyone who knows and loves the choir’s ‘live’ evensong. The organists double as recording engineers: when the choir is singing full tilt they are able to raise the microphones higher within the roof space, to descend again for the more intimate polyphonic repertoire. An Oxford music graduate now acts as the post-production editor for each service, so that the listener is presented not only with the appropriate sound, but the details of the music and readings for each service.
Webcasts are now a regular feature of the life of the chapel, and we value the growing body of our regular online listeners as much as those in the pews. It keeps the choir in touch with former members of the college and brings its work to the attention of musicians the world over. Webcasts of evensong are now being heard by patients in the Oxford hospitals, and we hope to make this facility more widely available.
The webcast installation was designed and installed by Matthew Dilley of About Sound.
There have been moments of excitement and anxiety, standing on the chapel roof (and enjoying the view of Oxford spread out below), to watch the College maintenance team fit the cabling, and see the microphones descend for the first time from their nest high up in the roof to hover almost invisibly above the choir stalls. Traditional ways have adapted to the new: the organ loft has a recording desk and laptop nestling next to the volumes of Bach and organists’ shoes, and the readers at evensong have had to learn how to negotiate microphone switches as well as the prose of the Old Testament.
The most exciting challenge has been to perfect an authentic New College sound, recognisable to everyone who knows and loves the choir’s ‘live’ evensong. The organists double as recording engineers: when the choir is singing full tilt they are able to raise the microphones higher within the roof space, to descend again for the more intimate polyphonic repertoire. An Oxford music graduate now acts as the post-production editor for each service, so that the listener is presented not only with the appropriate sound, but the details of the music and readings for each service.
Webcasts are now a regular feature of the life of the chapel, and we value the growing body of our regular online listeners as much as those in the pews. It keeps the choir in touch with former members of the college and brings its work to the attention of musicians the world over. Webcasts of evensong are now being heard by patients in the Oxford hospitals, and we hope to make this facility more widely available.
The webcast installation was designed and installed by Matthew Dilley of About Sound.
| Evensong Order of Service (PDF) |
