Buckingham Palace at night — a sign that it’s calm out at night.
The choir of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church in New Haven is in England until Aug. 22, singing for church services at Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle, and Gloucester Cathedral. Mark Branch is keeping a journal of the trip for the Independent.
We have been planning this trip to England for two years, but days of rioting in London and other cities were not part of the plan. We were less than a week from departure when images of fires and looting started appearing in the media. Sure, it made us and our loved ones a little uneasy, but the best intelligence was that even if the rioting wasn’t over by the time we got there, it was unlikely to spread into the Westminster area where we are staying, and singing.
Mark Branch Photos
A convoy of police vans on an unknown errand, one of the few signs of anything remotely unusual in the wake of the riots.
True enough, the rioting ended in London just before most of us got here on Thursday. In the areas where we’ve been rehearsing and sightseeing for the past two days, the only signs of anything unusual have been a few more policemen on the street (Scotland Yard tripled the number of officers on duty) and, once, a convoy of police vans. We’ve walked the streets at night, and the historic core of the city has been nothing but beautiful.
Westminster Abbey. The two guys in the foreground are part of our group. Indians = North Haven.
We’ve mostly had time to play up to now, but tomorrow we get serious: we will sing the first of four services at Westminster Abbey — the place where William and Kate got married this summer. (It also happens to be the place where 38 English monarchs from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II have been crowned, but judging from the wedding hype still attracting tourists here three months after the event, it seems best to lead with Will and Kate.) Westminster Abbey’s own choir takes the summer off (as do we), and the Abbey fills in with visiting choirs. We were invited to sing here after we sent a copy of our most recent CD to the Abbey.
As an Episcopal church we sing and worship in the Anglican tradition — that of the Church of England that was founded by Henry VIII after he broke from the Catholic Church in 1534. (Yeah, it was mostly about the divorce.) English composers have written a whole body of music for Anglican worship, and a few peculiar traditions have emerged: Anglican chant, a way of singing psalms in harmony, is one, and another is Evensong, an evening prayer service in which nearly all of the liturgy is sung rather than spoken.
This long tradition of Anglican choral music is carried on in many American Episcopal churches, ours included. Just as when choirs sing in foreign languages they must learn proper pronunciation, we are trained to sing in the King’s English. We lose the “r” on “Father” and roll the “r” on “spirit’ and use BBC vowels. (Our director, David Jernigan, sometimes tells us to imagine how Julia Child would say it. Sure, she was from California, but it usually works.)
So singing at Westminster Abbey is a big deal for us — it’s like the mother ship for Anglicans. And it is not lost on us that it’s vacation season and the Abbey is a huge tourist attraction. One website we saw listed the abbey’s Evensong services as one of the top ten free things to do in London. Tomorrow, the 20 of us will sing Evensong.