Death of a choir

Always make your redundancy announcement when the people at the receiving end of it are on a high. This seems to be the favoured method of today’s managing executives, who perhaps imagine that adrenalin will somehow anaesthetise the blow of getting the sack.

For the Cambridge student choir St John’s Voices, the news of its imminent disbanding and the redundancy of its director Graham Walker came just two minutes after the light was switched off at the end of a three-day recording session of Russian choral masterpieces last week.

In a two-paragraph round-robin email to the choir that evening, the Master of St John’s College, Heather Hancock, explained that, in the light of findings by an ad-hoc committee (plus a report on the contribution of the chapel to the wider life of the college), the ‘council has decided to adopt a broader approach to the provision of co-curricular opportunities in music for our students, including in different genres’, and that as a consequence, the college’s funding would be redirected and ‘St John’s Voices will be disbanded at the end of Easter term 2024’.