I write fresh from a local event with historical roots far into the past — a concert, part of a year’s-worth of events celebrating Cambridge’s first eight centuries, devoted to exploring the university’s long past and rich present of choral singing.
I write fresh from a local event with historical roots far into the past — a concert, part of a year’s-worth of events celebrating Cambridge’s first eight centuries, devoted to exploring the university’s long past and rich present of choral singing.
The programme had a suitable touch of the academic. Its first half consisted of some mid-16th-century music; either submitted for the degree of Bachelor (Cambridge being the earliest university anywhere to offer such, its first certain date being 1464, way back in the century before); or written by composers who received it; or ‘simply’ some exceedingly complex little pieces demonstrating the kind of brain-twisting puzzle in which the era delighted, more particularly when, accompanied by arcane instructions, such riddling was the best evidence of a composer’s erudition, the chief requirement for an academic reward.
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