Memories of the Proms: on Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

For me it’s still summertime. That’s nothing to do with the weather, even if meteorologists’ autumn began on 1 September. Nor is it to do with the nights drawing in - astronomers’ autumn arrives with the equinox in three weeks’ time. No, I define summer by the Proms. For as long as there are nightly concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, broadcast on Radio 3, as far as I’m concerned it’s summer. The last night of the Proms this year is on 14 September. So my autumn begins the next day. 

I started going to the Promenade Concerts when I was a teenager living in London. I’d learned to love live music through the Robert Mayer Children’s Concerts that used to take place on Saturday mornings at the Festival Hall in the 1950s and 60s. The programmes included a good deal of twentieth century music that was new to this young audience. An electrifying performance of Walton’s Portsmouth Point Overture stands out in my memory, I can also remember being awed by Ralph Vaughan Williams, who must have been in the last year of his life, coming on to the stage to be applauded after a performance of one of his works - maybe his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis or The Lark Ascending.

My memories of the Proms are many. At the Albert Hall I heard for the first time so much of the music that’s stayed with me all my life. It was an irreplaceable introduction to the canon of the greatest baroque, classical and romantic orchestral works, and the choral repertoire too, for my piano teacher sang with the BBC Choral Society and used to distribute free Proms tickets to her lucky  pupils. 

Not all my Proms memories are musical. As I look back to the 1960s, it’s a heady concoction of teenage recollections that come into my mind. There was the frisson of taking girls to the concerts (will I ever hear Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony without the mental image of...well, it would be indiscreet to say any more). Then there was my coming to a conscious Christian faith during those years, which gave the sacred music I heard at the Proms particular significance: Haydn’s Creation, for example, and Bach’s Mass in B Minor. And one evening, queuing with my friends outside the Albert Hall, suffering an attack of tachycardia and wondering if my wildly beating heart would ever return to normal, or whether I was destined to die on a pavement in South Kensington. If only I could remember what music was performed that evening. I wonder why I’ve forgotten.

There’s one piece of music that I overwhelmingly associate with the Proms, and which I used to  return to year after year. This was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Choral. In those days, this mighty work was always performed on the penultimate night of the season, the final Friday evening. Some of the other music I heard at the Proms I’d already got to know through listening to my parents’ LP collection at home. But the Ninth was not to be found there. Of the Beethoven symphonies, they had only the Third (Eroica) and the Eighth, whose opening theme had been adopted by them as their personal “call sign”. All the others I discovered in the Royal Albert Hall. Including the immortal Ninth.

The symphony made an extraordinary impression on me. It felt like a miraculous achievement, music that seemed to transcend the ordinary world by speaking from another realm entirely. Even today, I don’t know of any other work that has such an arresting opening as the Ninth. It begins with a shimmering whisper that initiates one of the greatest crescendos in all of music culminating in the dramatic statement of the opening theme. You know, if the performance is up to it (which it always was at the Proms), that this is going to be a uniquely powerful experience. It never failed to move me then. It never fails to move me now.

The final, choral, movement is, of course, Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy. In those days, the words and music had not yet acquired the European associations they now have: it was only in 1972 that the Council of Europe, in an inspired decision, adopted it as the anthem of Europe. But you could hardly listen to it without catching the optimistic spirit of Enlightenment internationalism. Alle Menschen werden Brüder wrote Schiller in a text clearly endorsed with enthusiasm by Beethoven in his ecstatic music, “all humanity will be brothers and sisters”. It was a powerful message in the era of the Cold War when we were living with the recent memory of the Cuba Missile Crisis in 1962.

I think I glimpsed on those Friday nights at the Proms the capacity of great music to forge people together in a community that, for a while, can transcend us. Beethoven’s Ninth seemed to epitomise a global vision of peace, freedom and happiness that we could all endorse. In a recent book, the renowned pianist Stephen Hough describes the Proms as “the greatest music festival in the world”. In Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More, he says: “the Proms has an important social function. We should not take for granted music’s extraordinary power to unite, that spell of solidarity when over six thousand people are moved as if by one heart.” Yes, I thought as I read those words, I recognise that experience. 

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is still performed every year at the Proms. But sadly, no longer on that last Friday night of the season. That evening always felt to me like a summing up of all the glorious music we had enjoyed over the summer, a final spiritual statement of human aspiration and joy before the more playful fun and games of the last night. When the Ninth made its annual appearance and heralded the end of another Proms season, the Albert Hall seemed like a holy place. Can’t we have that Friday evening ceremony back, please?

No matter if not. The Ninth will always be one of those universal works of art that are emblematic of our human longings and hopes. It touches our souls at the most profound of levels. It holds out a vision of life together as one human family. It inspires us to go on praying and working for a world in which we are at peace with one another. It urges us and encourages us never to give up in the pursuit of that joyful vision. Joy, it says, transforms everything. And joy will have the last word.  

Which is why, when you phone me, what I’ll hear on my mobile is the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy. If I don’t answer straight away, don’t hang up. I’m simply enjoying the music. 

Mozart in Mono: on rediscovering a childhood LP

In my last blog I wrote about the loss of hearing in my left ear following a Christmas virus. I wish I could tell you it’s been restored. It hasn’t - it feels as lifeless as a withered arm. The doctor is reasonably sure that it’s just a matter of time. So I’m trying to get used to life in mono. Maybe it’s a bit like black-and-white photography. You sacrifice the colour in order to discover other riches in greyscale. I’m listening to music in a different kind of way. It’s more intentional, as they say, perhaps more aware of the shapes and textures than before.

I’m also aware that I’m cherishing what hearing I still have in my right ear. It makes every piece of music that much more precious, something I tried to put into words last time. And with a good set of headphones that give a full rich sound, my mind can even begin to imagine that all is as it used to be. By chance, since writing my last blog, I’ve found in a charity shop Oliver Sacks’ remarkable book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. In it he describes the experiences of people who have lost their hearing function in one ear. One person, a composer, found that what he could hear with his ‘bad’ ear was out of tune with his ‘good’ one, as I found myself when this all began. Sacks talks about how the human brain has the extraordinary ability to make up for the loss of function in one ear (or eye). It can’t heal it. But it can, so to speak, begin to reconstruct your sound (or sight) world, restore some sense of spatial awareness so that in time, the loss is partially compensated for.  

It’s funny how the right book falls into your lap just when you need it. And in another strange way, as I browsed classical music recordings on the web, I came across an album cover that was so familiar that I exclaimed out loud, even though I hadn’t set eyes on it for fifty or more years. It’s Joseph Keilberth’s recording of two Mozart symphonies with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. Actually I’m cheating slightly. The image I found on ebay (above) is of the 1960 stereo recording. Ours at home was the 1956 mono disc, but the scarlet Telefunken covers were identical. I think it may have been the first LP my parents owned. If it wasn’t that, then it was Beethoven’s Eroica or Schubert’s Winterreise. 

At the age of six or seven, I fell in love with the Mozart disc, especially the 39th. It’s still my favourite Mozart symphony. I think it was the slow introduction that seduced me. Those few portentous bars, full of rich brass and woodwind, seemed to presage something miraculous. E flat was a key that brought forth some of Mozart’s most wondrous music - think of The Magic Flute or the Gran Partita whose slow movement Salieri so envied according to the film Amadeus. The solemn rising violin scales of the symphony’s introduction, together with one of the sharpest and most sustained discords in all of 18th century music captivated me. And when the clouds finally parted and the sun broke through in some of the happiest music in the classical repertoire, it was a revelation. 

Today I’ve found the stereo version online, thanks to the ever-obliging Spotify. Listening to it for the first time in decades, I’m aware that it’s probably not among the greatest of Mozart recordings. The Bamberg play with tremendous conviction, but tuned as we are to the delicacy of authentic performances on period instruments, it now sounds a bit rough in places. Joseph Keilberth (1908-1968) was the Bamberg’s chief conductor at the time, but he was best known for his opera interpretations, especially Wagner. His Wagner performances were famous; poignantly he died in the middle of conducting Tristan und Isolde. I doubt if you can be a truly great Mozartian and a Wagnerian conductor, though in modern times many conductors have made a convincing showing of both. Some might say you can’t really love Wagner’s music if you love Mozart’s, but that’s a different question. It would be some years before I came to Wagner but when I did, the revelation was as unforgettable as my childhood discovery of Mozart.

But now that I’ve rediscovered it, I shall treasure this recording till I die. It represents so much that was joyous in my childhood: parents who loved me and encouraged me in everything that fascinated me, whether it was riding my tricycle and not long afterwards, my 18 inch pavement bike, my first Brownie camera, my Hornby ‘0’ gauge model railway (which would be worth a fortune nowadays), reading Alice, Pooh, the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales (I always preferred them to Andersen’s - they were darker and more complex and didn’t always have happy endings) and - I admit it - Enid Blyton. 

But before all these, my parents wanted me to love music as they did. My grandmother would sit me down at the piano and we would pick out Schubert melodies like Heidenröslein. It was probably thanks to her that Winterreise found its way into our home because it was she who told me about Schubert’s unhappy wanderer as we sat and listened. Piano lessons must have begun about then, though I was too lazy to practise very much (and regret it even today). I was not too young to have a go at Bach’s Notebook for Anna Magdalena, my introduction to the other great musical passion of my life. 

So many musical memories to be thankful for. I’ve written about some of them before on this blog. But today they have been rekindled afresh as a result of seeing that LP sleeve on the web and hearing once again that much-loved disc. I suppose that when we grow old, such glowing memories become all the more precious, of remembered childhood days and the people who loved us and our awakening to God’s wonderful world as it seemed to blossom all around us. 

And maybe too, early inklings of pain and mortality in the music I was learning to love? I don’t know. I hear them now clearly enough in the introduction to Mozart’s 39th. And in adulthood, it does make me feel for the many whose memories of childhood are far from happy, whose upbringing has been occluded by pain, abandonment, cruelty or illness. How innocent and protected, how secure and happy my early childhood was, and I never knew it at the time. There is so much to learn about the world and our own selves as we grow up. What matters is that we don’t unlearn what was important to us in childhood, that we don’t, as a psychoanalytic writer once put it, lose the capacity for flowering and instead find we are unripening, shrivelling to a bud. With my one good ear, I’m trying to reflect on that for a while too.

Losing an Ear: a Winter's Tale

Last week I lost an ear. Not severed like Van Gogh, I'd better add. Yet in a sense, that is what it feels like. Thanks to the virus that so many of us have had at Christmas time, this one has left me unable to hear anything very much in my left ear. The doctor is pretty sure it's labyrinthitis, an infection of the inner ear. Partial hearing loss is only one of a number of symptoms...but I'll spare you too much information about those. He says it will almost certainly go away with time and I'll have my hearing back. But that's not yet.

On the first day, I could still hear in that ear. By which I mean that the volume was properly "turned up". But the sound itself was alarming. Not only was my tinnitus louder than I've never known, there was also a continuous roar as if I were standing by a waterfall in spate, or a motorway in rush hour. Worst of all was that the sound itself had broken up, "pixelated" you might say. The music playing on the radio sounded jumbled, confused. Even the tuning had gone awry, my left ear sounding half a semitone flatter than my right.

We were listening, as we usually do over our coffee, to Essential Classics on Radio 3. They were playing a Bach cantata, the magical motet-cantata 118, O Jesu Christ, Mein's Leben Licht (O Jesu Christ, the Light of my Life). It was heartbreaking to hear this wonderful music broken into pieces like this. I imagined Michelangelo's Pietà shattered into fragments never to be put back together again, or Rembrandt's Presentation in the Temple criss-crossed with angry knife wounds too deep to repair. I ran to the radio player, turned it off with a vehemence that took me by surprise, and burst into tears. I remember crying "What if I can never hear the music of Bach again, ever? Rather than that, I think I'd want to die".

That day felt like a bereavement. Loss isn't just to do with the people we love whom we no longer see. We can experience it just as powerfully when we move away from a place where we've been happy (leaving Durham Cathedral is still a recent enough event for me to feel a sharp pang from time to time, especially when Choral Evensong is on the radio). Or when we lose something precious to us, like a childhood toy or a wedding ring that has carried the symbolism of a cherished relationship for a lifetime. And we feel it when we lose a bodily function that's vital to our wellbeing. This is my first experience of that. I've been reading Robert McCrum's fine memoir about suffering a catastrophic stroke in his 40s (the book is called A Year Off). He speaks about losing all sensation in his left leg and arm in just this way, as a major bereavement he needed to work through.

It's made me think about disability in a new way. On the spectrum of impairment, what I'm experiencing is as nothing to those who have lost all their hearing. This happened once to a senior priest-colleague of mine called George. One day, without warning, his world fell silent. I can't begin to imagine the shock. Yet as far as possible, he wanted life to continue as it always had. His commitment to worship never faltered. I never saw him frustrated, angry or desperate. In time, he learned how to communicate with the help of some very smart gadgetry. And this wonderful man said to me: "Yes, Michael, to lose your hearing is a terrible thing, especially when you love conversation, music, theatre and all the ordinary little sounds, often unnoticed, that give colour to our daily lives. But I have the memory of them. I can still replay people's voices and my favourite music in my head. And for a lifetime's enjoyment of the gift of hearing, I shall always be thankful."

Last week, there suddenly came into my head a conversation I'd had with my mother when I must have been about five or six. She asked me, out of the blue: "If you had to lose either your hearing or your sight, which would you want to keep?" Some question for a little boy, like one of those dark choices that recur in fairy tales. I remember answering: "my sight, of course. It must be incredibly hard to live without it". She said: "But what about talking to one another? What about music? And what about the ways our hearing helps us find our way around, keeps our balance, protects us from dangers like road traffic that we can't always see but can definitely hear?" If I learned anything from that exchange, it was to try to cherish all the senses I was lucky enough to have been given. Among our close family friends at that time were a woman who had lost her sight as a child, and a man who'd been born without hearing. I'd admired how they had come to terms with such profound disability and had learned to live with it, without bitterness, as people who were as alive as I was. Just like George. Just like so many others.

Last summer we cruised up the Rhine. At Bonn, we visited the Beethoven House. My mother had been brought up in that part of Germany, and perhaps because of it, Beethoven had been her favourite composer. She told me about how the loss of his hearing, how it drove him to near-despair, how he wrecked his beautiful pianos as he tried to hear the sound of his playing. She told me about the late quartets he composed entirely out of his head. I was moved to be in this house where these tragic personal dramas had been played out. I've been thinking of him too, these last few days, and wondering how, if music were my metier, I would cope. Yet some of the greatest music in the world came out of the silence into which he was progressively and irreversibly immersed. That's true heroism in the face of adversity.

Today I listened to a marvellous broadcast in the Soul Music series on Radio 4. The chosen piece was Bach's seasonal Cantata 82, Ich Habe Genug ("I have enough"). It was, I think, the very first cd I ever bought in the incomparable recording made by Dame Janet Baker. Its theme is the Presentation of Christ soon after his birth, when the infant Jesus is brought into the Temple to be offered to God. The aged Simeon has been waiting for this moment all his life; now he sees the promised Deliverer for himself, takes him in his arms and blesses him. "Now Lord, you can let your servant depart in peace; for my eyes have seen your salvation." Contributors reflected on how this music had touched their lives. I loved the thought of infancy and age encountering each other, of living long enough to see what has been the focus of your hopes and longings all your life. My mother experienced it in hospital a few days before she died, when she met her tiny great-granddaughter for the first, and final, time. It was a radiant moment, a real epiphany.

I want to keep this in proportion. What I'm going through is a very light affliction compared to the health ordeals so many others are facing this winter. But as I listened to the programme in my personal mono, I experienced a little Nunc Dimittis of my own. It was this. If I lost all my hearing irreversibly, I'd still have my memories of that luminous Bach cantata, of the hundreds of times I've played it, and of the comfort and reassurance it has brought over the years. It would always be there, among the music I've found to be both life-changing and life-giving. I hope with all my heart that I'll be given back my lost ear. But whatever happened, I'd try to be thankful for what had enriched me so much in my lifetime. It would be a big loss, certainly, but I'd try not to see it as an inconsolable one.

I'm not saying I'd succeed. I know myself too well. But I would try to cultivate the gift to be thankful, what the New Testament calls eucharistia. Gratitude, says Christianity, is the only foundation of the good life, our prime duty as human beings, because of the great love with which God loves us and gives himself to us. So I'd try. And I'd also try to find new ways of being attentive to this wonderful world, and the people whom God has given me to love, and the voices of need that cry out for us to listen, and to whom our ears must always be turned in compassion.

What's Happening to Radio 3?

If you don't listen to Radio 3, you can skip this blog. But if you do, read on.

I owe BBC Radio 3 a huge debt. It helped to form me as a child. At home in the 1950s and 60s, the radio would always be playing classical music wherever it could be found. Radio 3's predecessors Network Three and the Third Programme were the station of choice (unless it was time for The Archers). When it was silent, as it was for much of the time in those days, European stations closest to the UK would stand in. Hilversum had the honour of being picked out with a sticky label on the tuning dial. The hums, wheezes and whistles of short wave and AM were the unforgettable noise behind of my first experiences of music, as were the skips and scratches of the 78s I would play on my wind-up gramophone.

How vivid those early memories are of the music that emanated from that big brown valve radio in the corner of the sitting room! Mozart symphonies and piano concerti, and Schubert Lieder laid down the foundation, I recall. Next came Beethoven symphonies and Bach's keyboard music. Opera was represented by Bizet's Carmen and Wagner's Flying Dutchman. My mother listened keenly to chamber music and my father to the big romantic symphonies and concerti, though it wasn't till I was a teenager that I began to pay attention. By then I'd become a chorister, so I began to devour choral music on the radio, beginning with Bach's St John Passion, Mendelssohn's Elijah and Brahms' Requiem. Choral Evensong, radio's oldest outside broadcast now 90 years old, became a weekly staple - when I was home from school early enough on a Wednesday afternoon to catch it. Like many people, I could tell my life story through the music I've come to love and which I've found to be not just inspiring but life-changing. Much of that is thanks to Radio 3. It has to be one of the most inventive and rewarding music stations in the world.

Now that I'm retired, we have Radio 3 on in the house most of the day (in different rooms that each has its own interpretation of "real time" when it comes to picking up the same digital signal). It's an immeasurable gift to have great music playing all day long. But I've noticed a shift in the style and content recently. There seems to be more and more of what I call pot-pourri programming these days. That's to say, the kind of talk-show scheduling that fills large parts of the day by giving presenters a studio, a CD player and sometimes guests to talk to and live performers to listen to.

Tomorrow, for instance, we shall have Petroc Trelawny on Breakfast duty from 0630 to 0900. Rob Cowan takes over with Essential Classics until noon. In Tune with Katie Derham runs from 1700 to 1900, and for half an hour after that, a new feature called In Tune Mixtape in which assorted tracks are played back to back without being interrupted by speech. This latest baffling invention, just a few weeks old, partly replaces the daily evening repeat of Donald Macleod's admirable Composer of the Week, once required listening at the supper table here in Burswell House. In total, that makes up a full eight hours of free-flowing (I almost said stream of consciousness) programming during the daytime.

I don't want to be misunderstood here. Radio 3 presenters are a splendid group of people: interesting, personable, articulate, urbane, amusing, skilled and musically intelligent. I've interacted with many of them on social media and had many a thoughtful or witty reply that has made me feel that we Radio 3 listeners belong to one of the best clubs in the country. And apart from a few exceptions, it's not a case of "dumbing down" the high art for which Radio 3 is justly renowned. I think we may be hearing more of Bizet's Pearl Fishers duet, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (first movement only) and Pachelbel's Canon than we used to, but on the whole, the musical range is as extensive and stimulating as ever. You only have to listen to Classic FM for a day to realise that the stations are very different from each other in that respect.

But pot-pourri programming inevitably falls back on the well-tried formulae of popular radio. This means above all having an easy conversational style ("as if they were sitting in my own kitchen"), a relentlessly upbeat tone, and maintaining as much musical variety as possible by playing single movements or excerpts from longer works. These days you don't often hear a complete symphony, chamber work or song cycle outside the official "concert slots" in the afternoons or evenings. Is it unkind to hint at "easy-listening" here, easy in the sense of not demanding too much of the listener whose attention spans are presumed not to exceed a few minutes? Or does cost come into it? It's not that there isn't a place for this kind of broadcasting. But there's too much of it. We still need the properly constructed programmes whose shape and grammar are dictated by more serious aims and content than entertaining an audience and keeping it going cheerfully through the day.

"Retirement is making him grumpy" I hear you say. I hope not. I'm not giving up on Radio 3. It's one of my oldest friends. But I do admit to turning aside from it more than I used to (how horrified my late mother would be!), switching the tuner to AUX and finding other means of playing serious music. This morning, when I got back from taking the early service in church, I played four Bach cantatas one after another on YouTube where I've learned you can find almost anything you want musically speaking. I'm not suggesting Radio 3 could or should have done that (though to broadcast the day's Bach cantata on the morning of every Sunday of the year might be an idea to run with....).

I'm simply saying that I looked for something a bit more intentional than the Sunday Morning offer from 0900 to midday ("music ranging from Gluck to Debussy by way of Schubert" announced the website). But as I gratefully streamed from the ever obliging internet, I also realised that making my own choices is not the same as live radio. When I choose to play music, I tend to stay within my own musical experience, my comfort zone if you like. Radio's gift is to take me beyond my well-honed musical preferences and prejudices, and challenge me to discover the new, the different, the surprising, the hard and even the alien. It invites me into a community of listeners, and there's something about enjoying music in the company of a worldwide audience that strikes me as precious and important, and a necessary antidote to individualism, so much a tendency of our age.

If someone in the BBC picks this up, maybe there could be a good conversation about the aims and style of Radio 3's scheduling. The world has moved on since my childhood. It's right that Radio 3 responds to change. In particular, widening access to great music and art must always be among its priorities. And yes, pleasing an audience involves compromises. It's not a case of elitism - God forbid! But maybe - maybe - there's scope for looking again at the daily schedules and asking whether the balance is quite right any more, whether there's been a decline of seriousness, or a loss of confidence in the well-tested mission of this wonderful radio station. I'm saying: don't weaken a strong brand. Please. "Discuss."

I hope it's clear that this blog is written out of affection and gratitude. I really don't want to be grumpy. Better to say it openly and see what happens.

Evensong

It isn't quite the BBC's longest running show - which is The Week's Good Cause. But it is the Beeb's longest running outside broadcast. 90 years ago on 7 October 1926, the BBC broadcast Choral Evensong for the first time. By the time I was old enough to be vaguely aware of ethereal singing mysteriously seeping out of the big valve radio in the corner of the living room, it had been going for more than 30 years. At the age of 90 it's more popular than ever.

Last week the national cathedral attendance statistics for 2015 were published. They showed a striking increase in weekday attendances, up by 18% over the past decade. This includes weekday celebrations of the eucharist and the daily office, including of course choral evensong. (Sunday attendance remains "stable".) In some choral foundations you have to turn up in very good time to be sure of a seat in the quire. 

What is it about evensong that continues to draw people to cathedrals, greater churches and college chapels? I can't put it better than the writer of a letter to The Times, quoted by one of the producers of BBC Choral Evensong, Canon Stephen Shipley:*

I turned on Choral Evensong by accident one afternoon a year or so ago and I’ve been listening ever since. The music is beautiful, but the special quality of Evensong lies in other places too, in the paradoxical contrast between the sinewy intricacy of 16th century language, and the simplicity of the thoughts it expresses: prayers for courage, for grace, for protection from the dark, for a good death. These are things to which our minds have particularly lately turned in the aftermath of recent terrible events, but they were there all the time in the psalms and collects of Evensong. For almost 500 years the same words have been repeated by people in times of trouble or of triumph. The presence of that cloud of unseen witnesses lends an intangible quality to Choral Evensong. You could call it calm or spirituality. You could call it holiness. But it’s very precious.

In retirement, I'm often asked what I miss most from my working life. It's a question that can be answered on many levels. There's so much that I miss, however rich life is also becoming in new ways. But in terms of the way time and prayer have been shaped and ordered day by day and week by week, I unhesitatingly say that what I miss most of all is daily choral evensong. After almost 30 years of full-time cathedral ministry, with six years before that living and working in a cathedral close, it's been fundamental to my praying. Days still feel oddly empty without it.  The incomparable blend of finely wrought words, music and architecture somehow touches the human soul in a very deep place - well, it touches mine anyway. Which is why the weekly broadcast of evensong on Wednesday afternoons on BBC Radio 3 has become such an important part of the spiritual life in retirement, as are our midweek journeys to Hexham Abbey to attend evensong there. 

I was first drawn into its powerful and redemptive magic as a boy chorister in the early 1960s. Once enticed, I never looked back. Even in my most fervent evangelical Christian Union days when I sat a lot looser to formal liturgy and relished the spontaneity of the prayer meeting, I never lost the sense that evensong was a wonderful gift of the English Church to her people. My farewell service in Durham Cathedral a year ago took the form of choral evensong with music by those quintessentially English church composers Herbert Howells and Edward Bairstow among others. Nunc Dimittis sung to the Gloucester Service felt extraordinarily poignant. A lifetime of evensongs seemed somehow to be gathered up that afternoon. Looking back, I wonder how I got through it.

There is something very Benedictine about Anglican choral evensong. In cathedrals and on the radio, you feel you are tuning in to the Opus Dei, the "work of God" that is the whole church's continuous offering of praise and prayer day by day and hour by hour. All its parts are in a beautiful and delicate balance with one another: music and words, praise and prayer, scripture, psalmody and silence. And let's scotch a myth about evensong straight away. People sometimes say that it's liturgy you don't join in. How wrong that is! You do join in. But in a contemplative way, by listening, paying attention, allowing yourself to be transported into another place by what you are hearing and experiencing. 

And when the Prayer Book psalms for each of the thirty days of the month are chanted in full, you catch Benedict's vision of daily prayer that is organised around the songs of the Israelite community that are collected up in the Psalter. Celebration, lament, despair, thankfulness, comfort, anger, trustfulness, bewilderment, joy, hope and love are all there in the Psalms. They gather up all the quotidian experience of life - as it was in ancient times and as it now. I used to say to choristers in the cathedrals where I served: make the Psalms your special joy. They are like Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, the 48 Preludes and Fugues. If you can play those, you can play anything. And if you love them, immerse yourselves in them, learn some of them off by heart, they will nourish you for a lifetime. 

The surprising thing is this. I've found that choral evensong can be a powerful tool for evangelism. I've met many people over the years who have found faith through coming to this service. Maybe they came tentatively at first, not quite sure what they would find, relieved perhaps that they didn't have to open their mouths and sing or say very much. Gradually they found themselves drawn into the inward logic of prayer which is that it takes us to places beyond our immediate experience, and by doing so, helps us to see things in a new and life-changing way. For some, this has come as nothing less than a fresh expression of lived Christianity. Looking back, I think the seeds of faith were sown in me at evensong too. 

Among those who became committed Christians have been the parents and families of choristers themselves. They came at first simply to enjoy the music and support their children. As a former chorister parent myself, I can entirely understand that. Gradually, they began to see that there was more to this strange world of prayer and worship than they had imagined. Perhaps the growth in attendance at evensong is precisely because cathedrals offer the possibility of "liminality" - finding your own way of approaching the thresholds of faith and making the journey from being a member of an audience towards being a participant and a pilgrim. 

Late in life, I am still on that journey. I'm profoundly thankful for this lifetime of choral evensongs. Thank you to the cathedrals, greater churches, college chapels and other places of worship - not just in the UK but across the world - that guard our precious "English choral tradition" so lovingly and so well, and contribute so much to the rich spirituality of Anglicanism. And thank you to the BBC for its continued commitment to broadcasting the service week by week. Happy 90th birthday!

*http://www.choralevensong.org/90_years_BBC_Evensong.php