A choral tradition without equal

British Choral Singing: A History from Medieval Times to the Present Day, Peter Ward Jones, Boydell Press, £115

A performance of Handel’s Messiah at the BBC Proms’ ‘Choral Day’ in 2024 encapsulated the richness of the British choral-singing landscape. This vast, quasi-Victorian undertaking drew on hundreds of voices, conducted by John Butt (an expert in Baroque repertoire, known for one-to-a-part performances of the piece with his Dunedin Consort). The forces were composed of the Philharmonia Chorus (my own choir, and one of the leading symphony choruses in Europe), the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers (an elite gospel choir), the Fourth Choir (an inclusive LGBT+ chorus), and young voices from the London Youth Choir and Gateshead’s Voices of the River’s Edge. Even the audience were coached on joining in the Hallelujah Chorus by Butt. It was a performance both rich in tradition and accommodating of the new.

It’s a heterogeneity encapsulated in British Choral Singing: A History from Medieval Times to the Present Day by the late Peter Ward Jones, who passed away in March 2026. Ward Jones was Music Librarian at the Bodleian for 40 years and conductor of the Oxford Harmonic Society, as well as a sage contributor to the Oxford History of Music and the author of numerous articles; he was also an Organ Scholar at Balliol College. The critic Norman Lebrecht called him ‘the choirmaster’s choirmaster’. From this experience, and extensive work on primary and secondary sources, he weaves a vast story spanning centuries of sacred, secular, professional, and amateur spaces, from medieval parish church to Chapel Royal to Victorian town hall and major international concert platforms.

Ward Jones describes the rich emergence of a distinctively English vocal tradition in the 16th and 17th centuries, with Henry Purcell, Thomas Tallis, and William Byrd as pioneers of a new style that made both Latin- and English-language texts sound clearly and eloquently, emerging from the tangles of polyphony that came before. He also describes the fragility of singing traditions, on which havoc was wrought in turn by the Reformation and then the English Civil War, and whose rebuilding was the frustrating work of decades. There is remarkably thorough attention paid to parish, court and urban centres, looking where possible into the choral histories of Scotland and Wales where archival and secondary sources permit.

Viewers tuning in to Nine Lessons and Carols each Christmas Eve might imagine it represents some vast unbroken tradition stretching back into the mists of time; the service, as plenty of scholars have shown, was in fact a modern invention. The choral excellence that it represents is also a relatively recent phenomenon, as Ward Jones’ book makes clear. The fortunes of the British choral tradition have waxed and waned over time. Singers, mostly, have remained the same, often behaving and singing quite badly indeed. In the 16th century Thomas Morley complained that all choristers wanted to do was be louder than their neighbours, instead of ‘studying how to vowel and sing clean’. A Norwich organist made the same complaint in the 18th century; likewise a Wiltshire parson in 1828.

Absenteeism and drunkenness are recurring leitmotifs of choral life. One of Thomas Weelkes’ colleagues complained that the composer ‘very often comes so disguised from the tavern or the alehouse into the choir as is much to be lamented’. Generations later the writer John Earle would describe choirs as ‘a bad Society… that roare deep in the quire, deeper in the Taverne… Their gowns are lac’d commonly with steamings of ale’. Some things never change. I recall a similar story about a tenor in a London-based symphony chorus who was so drunk during an important world premiere that he had to step outside to throw up.

It was a German – Georg Friedrich Handel – who provided the charge that jump-started English oratorio, the alpha and omega of the mass singing tradition in Britain. In one respect it catered to an increasingly nationalist public tired of the apparent effeminacy and complexity of Italian opera seria, with its ludicrous plots and foreign fripperies; Handel’s bassoonist, John Frederick Lampe, would lampoon its conventions in The Dragon of Wantley, which concludes with the lusty Yorkshire chorus singing a ‘roaratorio’, as if to usher in this new age.

Oratorio drew on many of the musical conventions of Italian opera but took (mostly) Biblical subjects, so could be mounted in Lent when the theatres were closed, generating a new income stream for Handel and his colleagues. Sung in English and stripped of costumes and set, the form was box-office gold, and no one has gone broke mounting Messiah ever since. Just as Georg became George when naturalised by Act of Parliament in 1727, so, too, was oratorio a hybrid form. Even though nothing could be more quintessentially English than Messiah in a chilly country church, it premiered in Dublin and its numerous versions had alternate arias inserted for Handel’s favourite visiting international singers. Later exponents of oratorios would also be foreigners. Joseph Haydn composed The Creation and The Seasons as bilingual works, given the composer’s enormous popularity in England; the former was inspired by Haydn’s experience of hearing Handel sung in Westminster Abbey. Another key figure was Felix Mendelssohn, whose Elijah was commissioned by the Birmingham Festival and premiered in the city’s Town Hall in 1846.

After Handel, the choral landscape changed forever – 1,000-strong gala performances of Messiah were semi-regular occurrences from the late 18th century onwards; ‘the effect is horrible: And everybody declares it sublime’, said George Bernard Shaw of such spectacles. One performance at the Crystal Palace in 1857 saw 2,000 singers join an orchestra of 400, with the Hallelujah chorus audible beyond Norwood. Upon these pillars of the repertoire the choral societies and festivals were built in the 18th and 19th centuries, expressions of new urban and industrial communities. These choirs would become world-leading. Giacomo Meyerbeer, a leading opera composer of the 1820s and 1830s, felt that the Israel in Egypt he heard ‘was the most wondrous display of choral power he had, even with his vast experience, ever witnessed’; later in the century German conductor Felix Weingartner remarked that the Germans would have to send their musicians to England for a proper choral training.

These standards were thanks to colourful characters like Henry Coward, whose rigorous musicianship included the remarkably forward-looking practice of auditioning potential choristers behind a screen and placing considerable emphasis on sight-reading ability; his work at choirs across Lancashire and Yorkshire would be celebrated for qualities prized in choruses today – attack, vigour, quality of tone and articulation, and precision of ensemble. He boasted of making choirs that knew ‘no social distinctions… A manufacturer will stand side by side with one of his workmen; [his] daughter next to one of her father’s work-girls; a lady of high degree beside a dressmaker’.

It’s a history of infrastructure as much as it is individuals, though. Ward Jones is attuned to the way the modern history of British choral singing is one tied up with technological transformation. The railways saw special services put on for choral festivals, creating new audiences and cottage industries around the Three Choirs, Birmingham and Sheffield; they also allowed choirs themselves to travel and establish new professional and artistic networks, and test themselves against their peers.

Publishers like Novello also transformed the singing world, making cheap octavo editions of important choral works for the mass market, created with the new printing technique of stereotyping. Novello in particular was the first to publish vocal scores that contained all four vocal parts printed in one system, with a piano reduction underneath – before singers would be issued with only their own part, counting the rests between entries. These scores meant a revolution in musicianship – being able to see the other parts allowed singers to correctly pitch their own entries and find their way through the complex fugues in Handel, Bach, or Beethoven. This didn’t just make rehearsal more efficient but also fostered new skills in ear-training and score-reading. To this day, British choristers are widely renowned for their formidable sight-reading skills.

The world domination of Boris Ord’s choir at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was succeeded by David Willcocks and later Stephen Cleobury, was something of a mixed blessing. The era of broadcasts and commercial recordings meant that they established hegemonic standards and aesthetic norms for choral singing that have been hard to shake off. The sense of what a true choral sound was and could be narrowed: restraint in dynamics, an emphasis on blending that sanded away the grains of individual voices, a prissy precision over diction and text, and a purity of sound that could be pallid and unemotional. These can be fine things, on their own terms, but shouldn’t be the only game in town. Ward Jones notes that a similar homogeneity afflicted many of the historically informed choirs that emerged from Oxbridge in the 1970s, such as the Monteverdi Choir and Tallis Scholars.

A new generation of singers and conductors are thinking differently. Listen to the briny intensity of Dunedin Consort in their dramatic intimate revelation of Bach’s Johannes-Passion. There are other dramaturgical innovations. In spring 2026, Manchester-based vocal collective KANTOS presented ‘Helios’ in Manchester’s Victoria Baths beneath a glowing sculpture by Luke Jerram. They present thoughtful thematic programmes based around works like Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands, a cantata about the refugee crisis based in turn on Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri.

Ward Jones’ book ends just after the pandemic. It made the importance of singing clearer than ever, as a social and mental salve. English National Opera launched their ENO Breathe programme during the pandemic, which used vocal technique to tackle chronic symptoms of Covid – a programme that has now been rolled out nationally. Streetwise Opera has been using singing for years to rebuild the lives of people who have experienced homelessness.

These are not new ideas. Early in the book Ward Jones quotes William Byrd’s preface to his Psalmes, Sonets, and Songs of Sadnes and Pietie (1588): ‘The exercise of singing is delightfull to Nature, and good to preserve the health of Man… It doth strengthen all parts of the brest, and doth open the pipes’. One of the great things about singing is that it is cheap – you have your own instrument with you everywhere you go, and need very little specialised equipment; as Byrd noted, ‘it is easily taught and quickly learned’.

Ward Jones was optimistic about the future of singing in the UK, pointing to audience and chorister participation in the arts bouncing back after just a couple of years. The Coronation of Charles III demonstrated the world-beating talents of British singers and composers on the global stage. It is more of a mixed picture out there. Institutions are under threat. The BBC Singers – Britain’s only full-time professional chamber choir – nearly got the chop in 2023, saved only by the intervention of luminaries like Simon Rattle and a concerted industry campaign (Germany, in case you were wondering, has seven radio choirs). The choruses of English and Welsh National Opera have been cut to within an inch of their lives, and their funding shows no sign of returning.

Elsewhere, cathedral and church choirs struggle for funding for their scholars, music directors, and organists; specialist education in comprehensive schools in singing is as bad as it is for instrumental tuition, and the risks of choral music becoming a pursuit for only the most privileged children are quite real. That said, The Guardian reported recently on the extraordinary choral programme at St. John the Divine in Kennington, London, a comprehensive school that has had singing at the centre of its work for over a decade; we could also look to Paul McCreesh’s exceptionally ambitious Gabrieli ROAR programme, which inspires thousands of young singers every year, from a host of backgrounds.

Ward Jones’ book shows again and again that the choral edifice has been and can be rebuilt. Choirmaster Gareth Malone’s most recent TV outing saw him mounting Bach’s Johannes-Passion with a group of untrained voices from south Wales. To bring this piece to fruition, these novice voices were aided by the BBC Singers. In the churning opening chorus, the newbies stood side by side with the seasoned pros. When the first declamatory ‘Herr!’ struck, one of the amateurs burst into tears. It was the sheer power of those united, unamplified voices, she said after. If singing continues to move and shock us like that, its future is guaranteed.