The English Chorister: A History

Description

Boy choristers have sung the daily liturgy in English cathedrals and collegiate churches for fourteen hundred years. They are treasured as a unique part of our religious and cultural heritage, unmatched anywhere else in the world. Yet their history, in cathedrals and monasteries, in royal and collegiate chapels, from the middle ages, through the upheavals of the Reformation, in Georgian neglect and Victorian revival, to their CD-celebrated triumphs of today and the introduction of girls, has never before been told. The English Chorister, with its vivid, sometimes bizarre, sometimes hilarious detail, will interest musicologists, church historians and a wide general readership.

Alan Mould is an ex-headmaster of St John's College choir school, Cambridge. His other publications include Choirs and Spaces Where They Cling.

"...this timely history, going back to medieval times, helps explain the enduring appeal and mechanics of choirs." Unite Magazine, November 06 -- Mavis Campion Title mentioned in Church Times, 2008. "This book is certainly a jewel and the best on the market." Reviewed by Andrew Palmer in Cathedral Music "This is a book which both delights and engrosses. It is handsomely produced and is excellent value for money." Reviewed by Karen Sell in Singing, Winter 2007 "This is an important book. The long pilgrimage from the Georgian nadir to the modern high standards of singing, music and education, is thoughtfully chronicled with a mass of useful insights and lessons from the past." Journal of Ecclesiastical History. "Alan Mould has written a landmark book about the chorister within the English cathedral tradition, and garnered a huge range of detail to colour and inform his broader narrative, which is always clear in its purpose and expression, never dull. His wider contribution to writing on music in the English Church as a continuity from Bede to the present day should not be underestimated." Early Music, November 2009