Views from the Choir Loft

“Boys Like A Challenge!” • Charles Cole Interviewed

Corpus Christi Watershed · July 20, 2019

HARLES COLE recently granted an interview to EWTN. The entire thing can be viewed courtesy of YouTube. Readers will be interested in this excerpt:

CHARLES COLE began his musical training as a chorister at Westminster Cathedral. He went on to win a major music scholarship to Ampleforth and organ scholarships at Exeter College, Oxford and Westminster Cathedral. He is Assistant Director of Music at the London’s Brompton Oratory where he directs the London Oratory Junior Choir. Since 2012 he has been the Director of the Schola Cantorum of the London Oratory School, a world-famous boys’ choir which sings the Vigil Mass at the London Oratory every Saturday. Recent concerts include Bach’s Saint John Passion, Monteverdi’s Vespers, and a joint performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass In B Minor with the Choir of Westminster Cathedral.

Maestro Charles Cole says: “If you set the bar low, a boy will crawl underneath it—but if you set the bar high, he will leap over it.”

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

PDF Download • Vespers for the Dead

Mr. Albert Bloomfield kindly sent me “Vespers for the Dead”—which does not fulfill a priest’s obligation to pray the Divine Office, yet is often prayed when a loved one dies. Here is formatting A, and here it is again with formatting B.

—Jeff Ostrowski

20 October 2020 • “What we can’t share”

Almighty God has given to us the example of the Jesuit Martyrs of North America, whose feast day we celebrated yesterday. Of course, along with those eight martyrs we honor their associates, e.g Father François Bressani. I can’t share with you the torments Father Bressani underwent at the hands of Iroquois: it is too brutal. It would tear your heart out. But I will share what Bressani’s Superior said, after receiving a letter from him: “The letter is soiled and ill-written; because the writer has only one finger left on his right hand, and cannot prevent the blood from his wounds—which are still open—from staining the paper. His ink is gunpowder mixed with water, and his table is the earth.” If you have the stomach for it, read what Father Bressani (d. 1672) underwent for Jesus Christ. Let his example help us never fall into sins of impurity, avarice, ingratitude, or envy.

—Jeff Ostrowski

13 October 2020 • Chopin talks Bach

My “pianist pedigree” goes from my teacher through Wiktor Łabuński through Felix Blumenfeld, who studied with Anton Rubinstein. I always considered myself part of the “Bach-Mozart-Chopin school” as opposed to the “Handel-Beethoven-Liszt school.” (Needless to say, there’s great overlap between these schools.) Before giving a concert, Frédéric Chopin would always shut himself up in a room and play through Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. The year Chopin died, he spent considerable time with the painter, Eugène Delacroix (d. 1863), who recounts hearing Chopin launch into a monologue on the transcendence of J.S. Bach, insisting that “the fugue is like pure logic in music,” and that “to know fugue deeply is to be acquainted with the element of all reason and all consistency in music.”

—Jeff Ostrowski