Brief encounters
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Pies to Penderecki: the King's Singers
Choral Scholars in drag
Brian Kay
Friday April 25, 2008
The Guardian
It is said that if you can remember the swinging 60s, then you weren't there. But I can clearly recall the three memorable years I spent studying for a degree in music and singing as a Choral Scholar in the choir of King's College, Cambridge, four decades ago. It was a wonderful time and place to be developing a passionate interest in music: my fellow students included would-be conductors John Eliot Gardiner, Andrew Davis and David Atherton, early-music pioneers David Munrow and Christopher Hogwood, a young man already making waves as a composer called John Rutter, and six of us who went on to become the King's Singers.
The Choral Scholars at King's had inherited from previous generations a flourishing library of close harmony arrangements: light-hearted cover versions of well-known pop songs, folk and show songs, glees and madrigals. We used these as an escape from the serious business of daily services in the college chapel, and were in demand as performers at university rag days, dinners and at "smoker" concerts for the Footlights Club. My generation, having indulged ourselves in this field perhaps more than some, put together enough material for a long-playing gramophone record, and decided that we should spend some of our vacations visiting our old schools and performing concerts.
Trading under the eye-catching name Schola Cantorum pro Musica Profana in Cantabridgiense, we put the best sacred music from our experience in the chapel choir together with the more "fun" items from our somewhat scurrilous extra-curricular musical activities. It went down a storm. By the time of our London debut - on May 1 1968, when we shared the platform of the Queen Elizabeth Hall with Neville Marriner's Academy of St Martin in the Fields - we had, thankfully, become known as the King's Singers.
Music clubs, festivals and broadcasters began to take an interest. Steve Race fell for our "new sound" and played us on his BBC radio show. There had been plenty of male-voice groups before, made up of tenors and basses, but our addition of two countertenors gave the King's Singers a unique colour. There's little doubt, too, that our mixed programme format appealed, bringing together sacred works from the 14th to the 16th centuries, Romantic part-songs, Victorian parlour songs, and an increasing wealth of contemporary music - both serious and light - which began to pour in from composers and arrangers keen to exploit our new sound.
The variety shows that punctuated early 70s TV schedules were the perfect place for six unaccompanied voices to make a mark. (We appeared with the likes of Nana Mouskouri, Shirley Bassey and Val Doonican.) We gave up our day jobs, and the King's Singers become a full-time organisation.
As the television work increased, so our concerts became more populist, and we found ourselves charged with dumbing down instead of capitalising on our privileged choral background. As the then broadsheet critic Nicholas Kenyon commented: "The King's Singers have the unique ability to reduce everything they sing to the lowest common denominator." The sight of six former King's Choral Scholars dressed as the six wives to Harry Secombe's Henry VIII must have ruffled a few feathers. As did another moment when we appeared, stripped and freezing, in baths, to sing In the Bath by Flanders and Swann.
Not that the TV work was all so glamorous. I remember an appearance on the Spike Milligan show, when, as we straightened up after our final bow, Spike and five others rushed at us with custard pies. It was very unpleasant - I can still taste the zinc ointment. But ultimately, our feeling was that if this kind of stunt brought large audiences into the concert hall, where they would then hear such things as madrigals, motets and serious contemporary works, then it made sense.
What our critics forget is that at the core of the group there was, and still is, an enormous repertoire that includes many large-scale works composed specifically for the group. Luminaries such as Penderecki and Berio were commissioned by us for our morning concerts at the Edinburgh international festival; Takemitsu, Rodney Bennett, Maxwell Davies, Menotti and Tavener also wrote for us. One brilliantly crafted piece of musical entertainment by Paul Patterson, called Time Piece, remains to this day an all-time favourite with singers and audiences alike.
I often think of an evening on our first trip abroad, in 1972. We were in New Zealand, performing a mixed programme that began with motets and madrigals but ended with some jolly folk songs. This was to an audience of staunch chamber-music lovers. As they filed out, we heard one of them grudgingly admit: "I'm rather afraid I enjoyed that!" We knew we were on our way.
· Brian Kay sang with the King's Singers from 1968 to 1982. King's Singers 40th Anniversary Celebration concerts are at Cadogan Hall, London, on April 30 and May 4, and at King's College, Cambridge, on May 1. Details: kingssingers.com.
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