Music – The Cambridge Placebook

The focus of this blog is Cambridge, but Cambridge is of course embedded in a larger landscape. We’re in the county of Cambridgeshire, which is part of East Anglia, which is an area within the East of England, an official region of England, which is part of Great Britain, which is part of the United Kingdom (which is no longer part of the European Union). Learning these nested names reminds me of being a kid in the United States before I had a solid sense of what was higher in the geographical hierarchy, a state or a country. East Anglia is more of a historical geography than an administrative one. It’s the easternmost knob of England sticking out into the North Sea, including the counties of Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk, and is known for its flatness. Let me take you across the flat fenland to the big open spaces of Suffolk, all the way to the seaside.

Last Sunday, I watched the sun set through the West Window of King’s College Chapel. I saw the massive arc of flaming primary colors cool into sultry shades, then disintegrate into dim fragments and black bars, then shadowed chaos, until finally only the hulking dark-veiled window was left, and the cavernous stone.

When my friend asked me if I could step in last minute on the cello for a weekend concert gig for the King’s College Music Society, rehearsal and performance in the chapel, I wasn’t going to say no. I’d been inside the famous chapel to attend a few other performances, giving me a chance to stare at the fan-vaulted ceiling from the audience, but the opportunity to play in there, even just to claim the right to spend more than an hour or two in there, was one of those Cambridge pinch-myself phenomena. Tourists travel hundreds of miles (and pay £9 on top of that) for a few minutes craning their necks in the chapel, and here I have a nonchalant invitation to spend hours under that 500-year-old ceiling, participating in its soundscape.