Mark Branch Photo
Fans of the Harry Potter movies may recognize this cloister at Gloucester as a hallway at the Hogwarts School.
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 left London Tuesday morning for Gloucester, a city in western England that is just about the same size as New Haven (but without the Elm City’s large suburban population). It has other similarities to New Haven: It is a port city, thanks to a canal that connects it to the Bristol Channel. It is a planned city, built by the Romans in their fashion with a main north-south street and east-west street crossing at what is still the center of town. And it is a former industrial city that is still trying to find its way in a post-industrial world.
We are at Gloucester Cathedral for six days, singing Evensong every day, so we have gotten into a kind of rhythm here, enjoying a slower pace than we had in London and Windsor but still trying to make the most of our time here. Among us, we have tried to discover everything one can do in this corner of the country before 3:30 p.m. — our daily rehearsal time.
At 225 feet, the tower of Gloucester Cathedral dominates the city’s skyline, which makes it easy for us to find our way to Evensong no matter how lost we get.
Gloucester Cathedral is also a change of pace. Our previous venues, Westminster Abbey and St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, were Gothic churches. Gloucester Cathedral was built as part of a monastery just after the Norman invasion, so its architecture is the weightier, sparer Romanesque, with enormous chunky columns and round arches instead of the pointy ones of the Gothic. There were later Gothic additions, but the overall feeling in the church’s nave is a relative simplicity.
Acoustically, the cathedral is terrific — sound reverberates against its stone walls for five seconds, about twice as long as in our church back home, so we hear our own voices whenever we reach the end of a song or a prayer response. We’ve all gotten a little goose-bumpy when we sing the word “joyful” at full volume at the end of one of our responses (in a setting composed by our director, David Jernigan) and hear the word ring around the room for what feels like a week and a half.
The cathedral’s nave is nearly empty, except for a temporary labyrinth for people to walk. Our music really bounces off those Romanesque stone walls and columns.
But I have totally buried the lead. What got many of our younger (and not-so-younger) members excited when we arrived at Gloucester was discovering that the hallways of the cathedral’s cloister were used for filming scenes at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies. (If you want to know which ones, there’s a fairly exhaustive description here.)
Being in Gloucester for a week has also given us time to get to know some people: the American priest on the staff who says getting a job at the cathedral was like “falling into a vat of chocolate” for her; the Kenyan couple who are trying to get an African restaurant off the ground; the caped woman who led a “ghost tour” of Gloucester for some of our group, and was moved to tears in the when the choristers sang one of our introits in the pub afterward.
Friday was farmer’s market day in Gloucester. This is right at the crossing of the city’s two main streets, first laid out by the ancient Romans.
The daily prayers at Evensong offered by The Reverend Canon Neil Heavisides, the cathedral’s Canon Precentor, have also helped us to know the community better. Heavisides offers profound and eloquent prayers that weave larger themes with the prayer requests that cathedral visitors write on slips of paper throughout the day: a 15-year-old whose cancer has returned, a couple who are praying for “more time together,” a woman expecting twins, a man for whom we pray simply that he “find peace.” Our singing and prayer are so much more resonant when we feel this kind of connection.
On our first day in Gloucester, Heavisides read, as part of his prayer, some words written in 1914 by a young Oxford graduate who would soon be killed in the war. Given the remarkable experiences we’ve had on our trip, the words were like a benediction of sorts for many of us:
“To have given me self-consciousness but for an hour in a world so breathless with beauty would have been enough. But thou hast preserved it within me for twenty years now and more, and hast crowned it with the joy of this summer of summers. And so come what may, whether life or death, and, if death, whether bliss unimaginable or nothingness, I thank thee and bless thy name.”
Previous installments:
• Evensong At Westminster Abbey
• A Connecticut Choir In Elizabeth’s Court
• The Dungeon Was No Joke