Saint Thomas Choir of Men & Boys
Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2024 4:32 pm
I wanted to start a thread dedicated to this choir in no small part because I think this is a real gem of the Anglican choral tradition, but in the United States. As someone who has personally attended concerts and services numerous times at this beautiful church, I can attest that the musical quality is top notch, and only the more selective choirs in England (who have a far more talented pool of applicants to pull from due to that country's choir tradition which is mostly absent in the US) can really rival it – because otherwise the choir is on par with similar liturgical choirs. It should come as no surprise that a certain member of this forum whose username may or may not start with the letter "Y" told me about them years ago 
.
As someone for whom working out at the gym is a regular discipline and hobby, I often found myself listening to evensong live while doing my evening routines at the gym….making it a gymensong
as Citlec is aware from prior correspondence
The church building itself is really quite something, located on 5th Avenue in New York, and built in the gothic style, the services are definitely high church and Anglo-Catholic with colorful processions of clergy in copes, incense, and a lot of intentionality put into the combination of worship and music. The church is a parish in the Episcopal Church, which is a part of the larger Anglican Communion and affiliated with the Church of England.
For those not acquainted with the choir here are a few musical highlight links to give you an idea of their high standards. Please keep in mind that these are not professional recordings but are actually recorded live during services as their services are video livestreamed. To be sure these are probably some of the highest quality church service webcasts of a traditional service (as opposed to a megachurch type service) with multiple cameras and multiple camera angles operated by operators on a soundboard and computer setup in the upper organ loft. There are at least 6 high quality cameras which are hard-mounted to various stone pillars in the church and which are able to pivot the camera's position and angle and zoom remotely by an operator.
The first piece of music needs no introduction, but the second is one that I expect is unfamiliar to most: it’s the “Salvator Mundi 2†by Tallis. Most are familiar with Tallis’ “Salvator Mundi 1â€, and rarely is a distinction made in the title on an album, but there is a second version.
For those unfamiliar, the church runs its own choir school – a boarding school that is a few blocks away from the church. The school teaches only the choristers of the choir and as such the education is very expensive seeing as there are only 30 or so boys being educated there, but all of different ages. With that come different grade levels and academic, as well as musical, needs. Not to mention the expense of boarding itself. The church heavily subsidizes the choir school, and the choir school runs at an effective loss despite charging tuition to the parents; though the school states that tuition is charged based on financial need and that most families receive a steep discount on the tuition.
So, aside from just bringing to everyone's attention this really cool church and choir, it also is with sadness that I bring up that the choir school will likely be closing or perhaps modifying how it has done business for something like 100 years.
You can all guess the reasons why: money. With the huge decline in church attendance and therefore of church donations the model has become even more unsustainable than it was in the past. According to the church the choir school was a financial burden on its endowment even decades ago, but now it has come to a critical juncture.
At the moment the church has convened a task force to try and decide how to proceed going forward. The choir school will open in its traditional format for the 2024-25 school year, but afterwards there will be some kind of change.
Here are a few articles about this as well as the task force’s initial report.
https://anglican.ink/2024/03/16/st-thom ... ir-school/
https://www.saintthomaschurch.org/wp-co ... -Force.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20240402115 ... chool.html (the link uses web archive to bypass the paywall).
So it looks like unless they partner with this local school for the boy's academic education, but maintain chorister boarding and musical instruction at their own facility, I don't see how they can maintain the high level of musicianship that they have heretofore been able to produce.
More likely is that they will do what many English cathedrals have done and that is to form two choir lines: a boy’s and a girl’s. Though in this case the choir would be an after-school activity Which means that there will be far less rehearsal and far less musical training provided for both of the two choir lines, let alone just for one (fewer services sung, fewer hours of rehearsal, less music theory instruction, fewer 1-on-1 voice lessons).
There is room for optimism, but we shall certainly have to see how this all plays out.
Oh....and here's a photo of Libera posed outside that church during their 2023 visit to New York!
.As someone for whom working out at the gym is a regular discipline and hobby, I often found myself listening to evensong live while doing my evening routines at the gym….making it a gymensong
as Citlec is aware from prior correspondence The church building itself is really quite something, located on 5th Avenue in New York, and built in the gothic style, the services are definitely high church and Anglo-Catholic with colorful processions of clergy in copes, incense, and a lot of intentionality put into the combination of worship and music. The church is a parish in the Episcopal Church, which is a part of the larger Anglican Communion and affiliated with the Church of England.
For those not acquainted with the choir here are a few musical highlight links to give you an idea of their high standards. Please keep in mind that these are not professional recordings but are actually recorded live during services as their services are video livestreamed. To be sure these are probably some of the highest quality church service webcasts of a traditional service (as opposed to a megachurch type service) with multiple cameras and multiple camera angles operated by operators on a soundboard and computer setup in the upper organ loft. There are at least 6 high quality cameras which are hard-mounted to various stone pillars in the church and which are able to pivot the camera's position and angle and zoom remotely by an operator.
The first piece of music needs no introduction, but the second is one that I expect is unfamiliar to most: it’s the “Salvator Mundi 2†by Tallis. Most are familiar with Tallis’ “Salvator Mundi 1â€, and rarely is a distinction made in the title on an album, but there is a second version.
For those unfamiliar, the church runs its own choir school – a boarding school that is a few blocks away from the church. The school teaches only the choristers of the choir and as such the education is very expensive seeing as there are only 30 or so boys being educated there, but all of different ages. With that come different grade levels and academic, as well as musical, needs. Not to mention the expense of boarding itself. The church heavily subsidizes the choir school, and the choir school runs at an effective loss despite charging tuition to the parents; though the school states that tuition is charged based on financial need and that most families receive a steep discount on the tuition.
So, aside from just bringing to everyone's attention this really cool church and choir, it also is with sadness that I bring up that the choir school will likely be closing or perhaps modifying how it has done business for something like 100 years.
You can all guess the reasons why: money. With the huge decline in church attendance and therefore of church donations the model has become even more unsustainable than it was in the past. According to the church the choir school was a financial burden on its endowment even decades ago, but now it has come to a critical juncture.
At the moment the church has convened a task force to try and decide how to proceed going forward. The choir school will open in its traditional format for the 2024-25 school year, but afterwards there will be some kind of change.
Here are a few articles about this as well as the task force’s initial report.
https://anglican.ink/2024/03/16/st-thom ... ir-school/
https://www.saintthomaschurch.org/wp-co ... -Force.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20240402115 ... chool.html (the link uses web archive to bypass the paywall).
So it looks like unless they partner with this local school for the boy's academic education, but maintain chorister boarding and musical instruction at their own facility, I don't see how they can maintain the high level of musicianship that they have heretofore been able to produce.
More likely is that they will do what many English cathedrals have done and that is to form two choir lines: a boy’s and a girl’s. Though in this case the choir would be an after-school activity Which means that there will be far less rehearsal and far less musical training provided for both of the two choir lines, let alone just for one (fewer services sung, fewer hours of rehearsal, less music theory instruction, fewer 1-on-1 voice lessons).
There is room for optimism, but we shall certainly have to see how this all plays out.
Oh....and here's a photo of Libera posed outside that church during their 2023 visit to New York!
but if you zoom in on the screenshot of the article, you can definitely read it just with some annoyance