The choir, liturgy and inspiration of Westminster Cathedral

Great buildings, like great music, can exert an extraordinarily powerful transcendental influence, even upon people who regard themselves as immune to such influences. Westminster Cathedral is such a building; its monumental scale and its improbable oriental architectural engender a sense of awe, even before the visitor has set a foot inside. It seems likely that Lennox Berkeley first encountered it during his time at Oxford in the twenties, and we know that a visit with his mother in 1925 was probably his introduction to plainsong (or Gregorian chant as it is better known today) in its Catholic context.

Leaving the hurly-burly of Victoria Street, one enters a very different world; a world of silence, but not emptiness. People are constantly entering or leaving, but they disappear in the vast space of the domed nave. At the time of my father’s first visit the only adornment of the austere brick columns towering each side, to support a succession of dark domes, would have been the fourteen recently-completed (and, then, highly controversial) panels of gleaming Hoptonwood limestone which make up Eric Gill’s Stations of the Cross.

Lennox’s birth in 1903 coincided with the official opening of Westminster Cathedral – and, by chance, with the publication of the Moto Proprio on church music, in which Pope Pius X stated that Gregorian chant had always been regarded as the supreme model for sacred music, and must be restored to the functions of public worship.

The intention of Cardinal Vaughan in founding the Cathedral was that the full Divine Office, a cycle of canonical hours throughout the day and the night, should be sung daily in public in the capital city. To carry out this plan he had hoped to recreate what had existed down the road at the Abbey, in pre-Reformation times – a Benedictine foundation. His dream was not to be fulfilled, but even the non-monastic choir did, and still does, sing High Mass and Vespers each day, occasionally with the addition of Compline and Benediction on Sundays and major feast days (and of course Tenebrae in Holy Week).

Chant and polyphony have remained a staple of the Cathedral music in spite of the move to the vernacular and subsequent secularisation which followed in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The present Master of Music at the Cathedral, Martin Baker, says that the acoustics of the building are a major factor in deciding repertoire. ‘Everyone loves Mozart, but its complex rhythms and short notes do not communicate well in a large space – it comes across as a big blur – so our core repertoire is the treasury of Renaissance polyphony. Its long, legato lines and slow declamation of text ideally complement Gregorian chant and communicate clearly throughout the building.’ ¹

Although chant and Renaissance polyphony remain the bedrock of the repertoire, Westminster Cathedral has, at the same time, fostered contemporary sacred music. The first Master of Music, Sir Richard Terry, who pioneered the revival of pre-Reformation church music in England, also directed the first liturgical performance of the magnificent double-choir Mass in G Minor by Vaughan Williams.

By the time Lennox came to live just ten minutes’ walk away from the Cathedral, in Warwick Square, in 1947, he had been a Catholic for eighteen years and would have been familiar with the daily liturgical routine there and with the musical repertoire. After the war the Cathedral had to find a new Master of Music and interestingly the boys played an important role in the appointment. Colin Mawby, who was to hold the post years later, describes how, as a chorister, he and the other boys were ‘greatly excited at the prospect of singing at the auditions. There were four candidates … We choristers had no doubt as to who was the best; our vote soundly reflected this and George Malcolm was offered the position’. ² Under the new Master of Music the choir took a dramatically different direction in terms of sound quality. Malcolm believed that boys should be encouraged to sing naturally and that individual vocal characteristics should, on the whole, be cultivated, rather than modified to a homogenised template. This approach produces a much more intense and powerful sound which lends itself to a voluminous space and a reverberant acoustic.

Taste in contemporary music was at the same time moving away from conventional harmonic patterns to more astringent tonalities, and composers were excited by the prospect of writing for what was perceived to be a new choral sound. Britten’s Missa Brevis was written specifically for George Malcolm, with the sound of the boys’ voices of Westminster Cathedral in mind, and, as a chorister there myself, I remember singing Edmund Rubbra’s setting of the Mass at this time.

Malcolm’s method has since been emulated by many other choirs, most notably perhaps, that of St John’s College, Cambridge. Listeners more accustomed to the romantic sound of Anglican cathedral choirs have sometimes criticised his choir training for what they consider to be a lack of tonal refinement, but there is no question that the results were well suited to both the repertoire and the acoustic of the building. For the choristers, his unconventional approach was exciting and somewhat frightening. He would not tolerate incompetence and he could be extremely fierce, but he also communicated a sense of urgency and purposefulness in achieving the sound he wanted. When not actually rehearsing or singing, George would from time to time take a small group of choristers on tours through hidden passages in the masonry to the bell chamber and on up narrow staircases to vertiginous little balconies in the domes, or onto the roof and sometimes up the tower to view the magnificent panorama of central London below.

After twelve years at Westminster Cathedral, George resumed an international career as a harpsichordist and conductor. His playing was as idiosyncratic as his choir training. For him the use of the harpsichord did not mean a slavish adherence to authenticity, and he did not hesitate to use the instruments of his time, by Thomas Goff and by Robert Goble, to achieve a miraculous degree of dynamic control, including crescendo and diminuendo wherever he felt them to be justified by the sense of the music. George disagreed profoundly with the view that the performer was the ‘humble servant of the composer’. As he said in a memorable interval talk on Radio Three, ‘I think that the performer’s role is one of continuing creation with the composer. As a performer myself, I feel rather violently that – unlimited though my admiration is for Bach – I don’t feel like his humble servant when I am playing his music: I feel like a collaborator in the job.’ ³

We kept in touch during my time at the Royal College of Music and he sent me a stream of postcards when he was giving concerts abroad. George was a very loyal friend and, when in London, he generously gave up time to help with advice on keyboard technique and accompaniment. I greatly admired his ability to switch from playing to directing and even to composing. In addition to the legacy of his many recordings we are fortunate to have the music he himself wrote for the choir during his time at Westminster Cathedral: music for Matins of Christmas, as well as a Christmas Mass setting and various motets, some of which are now finding their way to commercial recordings. ⁴ Apart from their beauty these insufficiently well known works are perfectly crafted both for the choir and for the Catholic liturgy.

It’s always been something of a puzzle to me that, in spite of Lennox’s close and long association with Westminster Cathedral, and his friendship with George Malcolm, his music for the Cathedral choir did not actually come about till after George’s departure. It all dates from the sixties and seventies; the Missa Brevis (Op. 57) for four voices and organ was written during Cardinal Godfrey’s time and first performed in March 1960; the unaccompanied Mass for Five Voices (Op. 64), dedicated to one of Malcolm’s successors, Colin Mawby, was commissioned by Godfrey’s successor, Cardinal Heenan, and first performed in March 1964; and the Three Latin Motets (Op. 83), written during Cardinal Hume’s period as Archbishop of Westminster, were first performed in June 1977. But, as we can see from Adrian Yardley’s fascinating article, and the letter he quotes from Lennox to Edmund Rubbra way back in 1950, ‘I’ve for a long time wanted to write an unaccompanied Mass, but shrink from it as being so difficult – however some day I should try.’