First published in The Herald on 29 April, 2015
Mandatory singing for all university students: now there’s a neat thought. In the earliest years of the University of St Andrews — founded in 1413, the world’s third oldest English-speaking university — all students were obliged to sing in the chapel choir. The songsters were known collectively as the Choristi Sanctiandree, and their musical efforts not only aided worship at the vaulted St Salvator’s Chapel but went part and parcel with a holistic medieval education. We could learn a thing or two from our pedagogical forefathers.
“The fate of the choir has gone up and down over the centuries,” admits Tom Wilkinson, 29-year-old university organist and director of today’s St Salvator’s Chapel Choir. “We are one of the oldest university choirs in the world, no question, but there have been periods when not much singing went on at all.” The music department at St Andrews went through similar peaks and troughs. Founded in 1947, a peak was the acquisition of composer Gerald Finzi’s music library in the 1960s, about which more later. A definite trough was the axing of the music department almost entirely in the late 1980s.