Twenty-two and a half years ago, Christopher Gray graduated from Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he had been organ scholar, and after a further scholarship at Guildford Cathedral, took up the post of assistant director of music at Truro Cathedral. This month he returns to Cambridge as director of music at St John’s College.

He admits that it will be a wrench, and not just because he’s leaving the warmth of Cornwall, in the far south-west of England, where local daffodils were already on sale in the farmers’ market when I visited in January, for the bitter cold of East Anglia. Strong friendships have been forged during his time in Truro; and being part of the huge institution that is the University of Cambridge, leading one of several world-famous choral foundations, will be a very different experience from running one of the few centres of professional music-making in a very large area.

The three spires of Truro Cathedral dominate the compact city, looking as though they have soared over the narrow Georgian streets and converted warehouses that sit at the head of the Truro River estuary for centuries. In fact, Truro is a relatively new diocese, created in 1876 – Cornwall had previously come under the jurisdiction of Exeter. The cathedral was cleverly designed in Gothic Revival style by John Loughborough Pearson, on the small city-centre site of the medieval parish church, part of which was incorporated into the new building. The foundation ceremony took place in 1880 and what Pearsons biographer Anthony Quiney describes as ‘a qualified masterpiece’ was completed in 1910.

It was for Truro that Edward Benson, the first bishop, devised the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols that inspired the famous Christmas Eve festivals at King’s College, Cambridge and so many others around the world. Benson’s main aim was to encourage the wider community to feel a connection with their new cathedral.

Christopher Gray is only the tenth organist; the first was William Mitchell, organist of the parish church, whose choir of boys and men formed the nucleus of the cathedral choir. Mitchell’s successor was George Robertson Sinclair, who served for nine years before moving to Hereford, where he was close friends with Elgar.

Holders of the Truro post in the early 20th century included John Dykes Bower, who ended up at St Paul’s Cathedral. It was surely on his recommendation that the London choir was evacuated to Truro for several years during the second world war. That link is still valued, fondly remembered by former choristers of St Paul’s even if they are too young to have been evacuated themselves. Andrew Carwood, the current director of music at St Paul’s, is very aware of it, says Gray, to the extent that the girl choristers from Truro have had the rare privilege of singing Evensong at St Paul’s with the cathedrals Vicars Choral several times.

Dykes Bower’s successor, Guillaume Ormond – nephew of the artist John Singer Sargent – served for 42 years, from 1929 until his death at the age of 75 in 1971. He was followed by his assistant John Charles Winter, who became organist emeritus on his retirement in 1989.

The recent line of succession is distinguished, with David Briggs taking over from Winter, followed by Andrew Nethsingha from 1994 to 2002, when he moved to Gloucester Cathedral and then to St John’s, Cambridge, and Robert Sharpe, who was appointed to York Minster in 2008. Briggs introduced the organ scholarship programme, graduates of which include Luke Bond, who returned as assistant director of music from 2008-17 and now holds a similar post at St George’s Windsor; Sachin Gunga, now sub-organist at Portsmouth Cathedral; and Rachel Mahon, currently director of music at Coventry Cathedral. Nethsingha introduced choral scholarships and increased the number of choral services per week.

Christopher Gray is a native of County Down, Northern Ireland, who was brought up in the Presbyterian church but encountered the Anglican choral tradition through the inspiring influence of Ian Hunter, his music master at Bangor Grammar School. He arrived at Truro as assistant to Nethsingha in 2000 and was promoted to director of music when Robert Sharpe left for York. While colleagues will cherish the memory of his fine musicianship, his warm personality and his willingness to enter into community life, Gray’s primary legacy in the history of the cathedral will be recruiting its first girl choristers, in 2015.

The Gothic Revival-style Truro Cathedral © LEE MORRISS

The full choir currently consists of up to 18 boy choristers and 18 girl choristers, who usually take it in turn to sing with the seven lay vicars and five choral scholars who make up the back rows of altos, tenors and basses. The girls are aged 13-18 and sing at the Eucharist and Evensong every other Sunday, plus Evensong on Tuesday and Thursday one week and on Thursday the next. The boys, aged eight to 13, also sing two services every other Sunday, but their fortnightly regime involves four Evensongs one week and three the next.

The boys need to sing more because they are younger, they need that routine of frequent activity,’ says Gray, admitting that the main drawback of having two teams of choristers is that none of them gets through as much repertoire as a single cohort did in the past. But he feels the commitment for the girls is about right. ‘When they arrive with us their musical development is usually much further on, they’ve probably got good instrumental skills and have taken some theory exams, and we have to balance fulfilling their musical potential with making sure their GCSE and A-level results are enhanced and not compromised by their choral duties.’

Christopher Gray rehearses the choristers © LLE PHOTOGRAPHY

The Choir's back rows have seven lay vicars and five choral scholars © LLE PHOTOGRAPHY

The choristers are all educated at Truro School, where they receive 25 percent scholarships, with the possibility of supplementary bursaries of up to 100 percent in cases of need. They rehearse with the cathedral’s music staff every weekday morning.

Does Gray have to adapt his approach depending on whether he’s working with boy or girl choristers? He says that the different dynamic of each group probably arises more from the difference in age range than the difference in gender. More importantly, perhaps, he is very conscious that every child or young adult is an individual who may need to be nurtured in a different way, and that among each cohort there will be choristers with varying skills, learning styles and temperaments. ‘That’s where the joy of the job is for me, in seeing the potential and stewarding the development of each person.’

The same applies to recruitment, with children finding their way to the cathedral through a variety of different routes. ‘I think you have to cast out a lot of different lines, making sure that the opportunity is made known as widely as we can in the community. We also have to acknowledge that what we do is now very counter-cultural. We are in an age when church attendance is in decline and it’s quite clear that the teaching of classical music is not being resourced by the government and there isn’t much music going on in schools of a kind that is remotely similar to cathedral repertoire. Only a small number of people will be interested in choristerships for their children.’

Gray was very involved in Truro’s outreach programme that was used as a model for one strand of the UK government’s 2007 Sing Up campaign to encourage singing in English primary schools. More recently, he worked with choir parent Esme Page on two more specific community projects, in which the Truro choristers recorded specially commissioned songs and invited other schools and choirs to perform them, using downloadable resources. One song by poet Andrew Longfield and composer Philip Stopford was in aid of the charity Cornwall Hugs Grenfell, which offers respite care to families affected by the fire in a west London tower block; the other, Sing2G7, was written by Tim Rice and Peter Hobbs to mark the G7 climate summit that took place in Cornwall in 2021. The latter culminated in a massive Zoom performance involving 1,400 people from all over the world, and has inspired another recent initiative, ‘Chorister Zoom Assemblies’, open to all Cornish schools.

The G7 song was entirely secular, but these are Christian assemblies, albeit with a light touch,’ says Gray. ‘We send the materials out in advance, I do a video to teach the participants one of the songs, and then we have a short rehearsal at 9 o’clock on the day, followed by the assembly. We use the cathedral’s live streaming equipment installed for broadcasting services during the pandemic, so it looks and sounds good and there’s an option to stay online and chat to each other. We tried it for the first time in May last year and had 800 participants, then 1,300 for the second one in November.’

Performing, commissioning and recording new music has been a hallmark of Gray’s tenure; the cathedral choirs discography on the Regent label includes two albums of music by Philip Stopford, one of music by Gabriel Jackson featuring both a Mass setting and an evening service written for Truro; a mixed album that features works by composers such as James MacMillan, Graham Fitkin and Francis Pott; and a recording with the BBC Concert Orchestra of works by Dobrinka Tabakova, with whom the cathedral set up a very fruitful partnership to mark the arrival of the girl choristers. ‘I thought it would be nice for them to have a female role model,’ explains Gray. ‘I didn’t know her but I’d been impressed by her music so I contacted her and it was obvious from our first conversation that I’d gone to the right person.’ Most recently mezzo-soprano Catherine Wyn-Rogers, baritone Julien van Mellaerts and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales travelled to Truro to join the choir in recording the Secular Requiem and other works by local composer Russell Pascoe (reviewed in C&O March 2023).

Outreach in Be a Chorister for a Day in 2021 © LLE PHOTOGRAPHY

The Girls’ Choir rehearses © LLE PHOTOGRAPHY

Gray says he will look back in ten years’ time and think, ‘How on earth did we do that? ’, reflecting that these and other projects are important for adding ‘colour’ to the choir’s schedule. ‘One danger of being so far away at the bottom end of a train line is that we could get a bit sleepy. Recruitment is everything for a choir, not just when it comes to the boys and girls, but the back row too. People make huge sacrifices to be in this choir, and you have to keep it interesting for them, and indeed for the congregation, and have a really rewarding programme of music that complements the worship and general life of the cathedral.

Somehow Truro is a place where you can make things happen,’ he concludes. ‘The financial resources are not huge, but there is a great spirit and ambition in the community.’

As Gray packs his bags for the move to Cambridge, that sounds like a pretty encouraging message to pass on to his successor.