Logging on for E-vensong

Looking for liturgy online? Andrew Mellor on the chapels and churches which stream their services

New College - hear their Evensong online (photo: Phil Sayer)

St Thomas: New York, new technology

On the one hand, the growing practise of broadcasting choral services on the internet feels like a quantum leap – an unlikely marriage of technology and tradition. On the other, it can look like a return to basics, a short-circuiting of the 20th-century recording phenomenon: cathedral and collegiate choirs were never designed to make edited records – they were designed to sing services.

Which renders the recent flurry of activity at New College Oxford particularly interesting. Weeks after launching its own CD label, this month the college’s chapel choir became the latest of its kind to begin web-casting choral services. ‘Concerts and recording are vital, but our work in the chapel is the nexus of what we do’, says Director of Music Edward Higginbottom. ‘We want to offer those who can’t get to the chapel the possibility of being with us. If you live in America, it’s a long way to come for Evensong.’

Following a pilot project and the installation of equipment in the summer – funded appropriately enough by the American Friends of New College – the process of recording every chapel service began at the start of this academic year. Once a week a service is loaded onto the college website where it’s available for on-request streaming. ‘We’ll choose the service that gives the best listening experience. At any given time we might have two or three up on our site,’ Higginbottom explains.

On offer is an unusually wide repertoire, a chance to hear the choir’s distinctive way of singing the psalms and plenty of contributions from the building’s equally idiosyncratic organ. The ‘chaptered’ appearance of the on-screen player means listeners can skip straight to chosen ‘tracks’ if they want to, which raises a question or two about the validity of the liturgy. ‘Well, if you come to a service here you can sleep your way through a lesson, can’t you?’ Higginbottom counters. ‘People will receive this as they receive it. There will be those who want to sit down and listen attentively – maybe even lighting a candle – and others who’ll just have it on in the background.’

If both musicians and listeners exercise a degree of selectivity at New College, the opposite is true at St Thomas’s Fifth Avenue in New York, the worldwide pioneers of service web-casting. Every choral service at St Thomas’s – five-per-week during term time – is broadcast live on the web and available for at least two weeks afterwards as one continuous, non-chaptered stream. As at New College, there’s a discreet infrastructure of recording equipment fixed in position. Such is the permanence of those dangling microphones at St Thomas’s that its choir has largely forgotten they’re there. That’s the intention – a technological refraction of the Anglican choral tradition’s emphasis on quality, no matter what the day or occasion. God is always listening, so what difference a few thousand extra mortals?

Such exposure can, however, be ruthless. While some of the services currently online at the St Thomas’s website project a choir with genuine character on magnificent form, the start of the new term hasn’t been easy. ‘Circumstances mean we’re working with a very young choir at the moment – effectively next year’s choir’, says Director of Music John Scott. ‘There have been some carve-ups and I see no reason why I shouldn’t be honest about that. We’re trying to present what we do in a liturgical context. Of course there are imperfections – this is worship, after all. If you tuned in a year ago it would have sounded much more secure and I hope in a year’s time it will also.’