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I Saw Eternity the Other Night - King's College Choir, the Nine Lessons and Carols, and an English Singing Style (Paperback)
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I Saw Eternity the Other Night - King's College Choir, the Nine Lessons and Carols, and an English Singing Style (Paperback)
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List price R408
Loot Price R333
Discovery Miles 3 330
You Save R75 (18%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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'Erudite, original and surprisingly moving ... This Christmas, as
at every Christmas, millions of listeners will have relished the
ethereal King's choir ... Day's meticulous history of a special
choral sound investigates the creation of a style, and the
evolution of a tradition, that now feels as anciently English as
the stonework of King's chapel itself' Boyd Tonkin The sound of the
choir of King's College, Cambridge - its voices perfectly blended,
its emotions restrained, its impact sublime - has become famous all
over the world, and for many, the distillation of a particular kind
of Englishness. This is especially so at Christmas time, with the
broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, whose
centenary is celebrated this year. How did this small band of men
and boys in a famous fenland town in England come to sing in the
extraordinary way they did in the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries? It has been widely assumed that the King's style
essentially continues an English choral tradition inherited
directly from the Middle Ages. In this original and illuminating
book, Timothy Day shows that this could hardly be further from the
truth. Until the 1930s, the singing at King's was full of high
Victorian emotionalism, like that at many other English choral
foundations well into the twentieth century. The choir's modern
sound was brought about by two intertwined revolutions, one social
and one musical. From 1928, singing with the trebles in place of
the old lay clerks, the choir was fully made up of choral scholars
- college men, reading for a degree. Under two exceptional
directors of music - Boris Ord from 1929 and David Willcocks from
1958 - the style was transformed and the choir broadcast and
recorded until it became the epitome of English choral singing,
setting the benchmark for all other choral foundations either to
imitate or to react against. Its style has now been taken over and
adapted by classical performers who sing both sacred and secular
music in secular settings all over the world with a precision
inspired by the King's tradition. I Saw Eternity the Other Night
investigates the timbres of voices, the enunciation of words, the
use of vibrato. But the singing of all human beings, in whatever
style, always reflects in profound and subtle ways their
preoccupations and attitudes to life. These are the underlying
themes explored by this book.
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