King’s College Chapel

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.

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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.

That nonchalance about proximity to history is a classic Cambridge paradox. Cambridge is ancient, shrouded in prestige and mystique to outsiders, and yet it’s still an operating university. King’s College, as one of the older and most magnificently architectured (and endowed) colleges, is the epitome of this paradox. It knocks tourists off their feet; meanwhile students live their ordinary uni lives behind the walls. (And it’s hard to get a good picture of the front of the college without bike racks in the foreground.) It took me a couple of visits to figure out that the imposing wooden door sealing off the walled inner court, one usually manned by a ticket taker and tourist rebuffer before five PM but emphatically closed after that, is not actually locked. In fact, there’s a normal-sized door cut into the oversized one that you can simply push open—a porous membrane for those in the know, those for whom the place is daily life, those who have managed to belong there.

That paradox was also a theme of the night of the first rehearsal. I stepped through the hidden door and made my way around the forbidden grass quadrangle, walking the length of the chapel to the entrance at the far end, glancing up deferentially at the towering spires; meanwhile the girl walking just ahead of me was absorbed in a chatty phone conversation. The rehearsal, though our semi circle of chairs had as a backdrop the intensely elaborate, richly dark wooden choir screen (aka rood screen, chancel screen) commissioned by Henry VIII, was like any other rehearsal, except with an absurd echo (the acoustics, designed for choir, are actually not ideal for orchestral music; also, avoid pushing your chair across the stone in that chapel at all costs or be prepared for a horrid screech). I focused on counting and getting notes right; I couldn’t keep 15^th-century stone in my head. Once, the conductor paused long enough for us to listen to a live orchestral chord fan out along the ceiling—for a full two seconds at least. It surely would have been longer if people had allowed it, keeping their eyes pointed up, staying cupped within the waves, instead of starting to chuckle off handedly—good old King’s College Chapel and its reverb—and stirring up the mud again.

When I left the rehearsal later that night, disco lights blared in the windows of the college bar across the court, where undergrads were partying.

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Sunday, dress rehearsal and concert day, turns out to be slightly different. I come an hour early to attend Evensong, an Anglican choral service that is the bread and butter of college chapel choirs and early music lovers in Cambridge—it happens almost every day at King’s, and at least once a week in other colleges. Normally it’s in the evening, but on Sundays at King’s it’s mid-afternoon, which is important: it means I finally get to see the inside of the chapel during the day, when the stained glass is awake with sunlight. I come for that—for an hour saturated with colored light, stone, and ethereal voices before I’m required to focus on my own output into the space.

While I listen to the choir reply to the minister’s chanted prompts with swirls and lilts of resonance, I ponder the possibility that what I am looking at isn’t real. From where I sit near the altar, the chapel is all verticality and repetition in pale stone, as if I’m sitting between huge infinity mirrors. The light from the windows substantiates the hugeness of the space, which could be seen as empty air, running up along the ribs and opening between ceiling and distant floor, but which seems more like a distinct dimension, one a human can’t fully perceive. The only comparable sensation I can recall is in nature—standing in a redwood grove or under a redrock arch, dwarfed and enclosed by structures that speak an entirely different language. The ribs of the fan vault are not unlike trees, spreading roots or branches into the ceiling—upside down mangroves, perhaps, petrified into limestone. Both cave and forest.

Closer to the vanishing point of the chapel lines, colors dapple the fringes of the foreshortened window frames, melting into the air like transparent butterflies. Across from me, the windows are all medieval drama. Rounded, expressive figures crowd the panes, gazes direct and hands meaningful, bodies draped in deep ocean blue and crimson and emerald. Their concerns seem far removed from the psalms and prayers surging through the chapel, but I suppose the recipient is the same.

The voices—once the chapel has hold of them, whether sung or spoken, the voices become something independent from their source. They roll out into their own body. The minister’s chanting becomes a tangible bed of sound on which he and his words are suspended; the choir sends out harmonies which splice in the air and magnify. The men’s voices are dark and chocolatey, like the wood framing them, while the boys’ voices rise silvery and light, like the windows. The organ is something else entirely. It commands the upper realm of the chapel, crowning the dark woodwork, both its sound and its golden pipes echoing the vertical. The organ’s metallic wringing of the space, of your cells, absolutely permeates you. Like the fullest choral swells and, as I discovered in the orchestra, the pure call of a French horn, the organ in King’s College Chapel tells you how small you are.

What makes this swelling of sound, let alone space and color, so sacred? Whether or not you’re religious, whether or not you have any inkling of the content of the liturgy and the songs, I would be surprised if being engulfed in those waves of resonance doesn’t do something to you, doesn’t turn on shivers of reverence for something beyond your comprehension. It does to me. Maybe I’m biased by my attunement to music. Or maybe it’s the same thing the chapel does: dwarf you, and physically rearrange your priorities for a few still, vibrating minutes.

The light coming through the windows isn’t consistent; outside the wind is dialing the sun up and down and pushing audibly around the chapel. But I can see the distant West Window peeking around the chapel screen, more vibrant than the southern one facing me no matter what the sun does, and I vow to get a good look at it as soon as I moved back into the nave for rehearsal. When the time comes, I make sure to take a few steps into the periphery, out of the flow of exiting tourists, so that I can shed attention to surroundings and just gaze. Thanks to my rule-following tendencies I also honor the injunction against photography inside the chapel (whether that’s tied to the service or not, I’m not sure), so I’m freed to try and memorize the window instead. Not the images—I can hardly tell what I’m looking at, all those bodies and symbols—but the blaze of color and the repeating curves of the pointed arches almost obscured by the glory.

Then the choir boys, changed from their white and red robes into prep school uniforms, start coming out of the dressing room door next to me, all glasses and scruffy hair and pudgy cheeks, to meet their parents. And then it’s time to set up the orchestra.

I don’t forget the West Window; in fact I miss at least one entrance during rehearsal thanks to its insistence. I am catching that progression in the glass from day to night, from flame to shadow, in snatches, during rests.

The chapel in full night becomes truly cave-like, with the ceiling and ribbed walls draped in gloom. My eyes are now drawn to the larger-than-life kingly symbology carved into the walls. At periodic intervals, a crown big enough for four human heads, dramatically lit from the inside, hovers over the Tudor coat of arms (fleur-de-lis and lions passant), which is in turn flanked by a straining greyhound and dragon, and beside them are splayed Tudor roses and portcullises bristling with chains, also crowned. All of this embedded in arch after arch, circles and quatrefoils. The choir screen is still looming behind us and is carved in even more detail than the walls, but I don’t look enough to do it justice—I mostly feel the gravity of its dark grain, and sometimes glance up at the golden pipes, the life-size trumpeting wooden angels above them, and finally the vaulted drama of the ceiling.

Meanwhile, the temperature has been dropping. When I reach down to pick up a pencil I realize the stone is warm, heated from beneath—but it doesn’t reach far enough for me to feel warm on my chair. I’m not surprised; how can you effectively heat a cavern? It makes our fingers stiff, but we manage. Later, during the performance, violin bridges collapse three times. My suspicion: the cold over-tightened the metal strings.

In between rehearsal and performance, we’re directed to take our instrument cases behind the scenes via the room which I saw the choir boys exiting earlier. This opens an entirely different view of the chapel: behind the door labelled “Private” is a chain of narrow rooms made of the same stone as everywhere else, but layered with the everyday. Cupboards, tables, bookshelves, closets of white-and-red choir robes and embroidered priest robes, a well-used kitchen with water-stained notes stuck to the coffee maker and a half-finished tray of biscuits on the table. I eat my dinner alone at that table, shivering slightly, but fascinated, again, by the surreal juxtaposition. On my way out, I take a moment to place a hand on the stone wall, to remind myself.

Then, we play. The concert audience is smaller than desired—intimate, they say, if that’s possible in this chapel. The program is an unusual mix of contemporary and classical. An angry, dissonant Russian portrayal of an iron foundry (so titled, by Mosolov) churns the chapel—a bigger contrast between music and venue probably impossible. Then an eerie tone poem written by a King’s student, followed by a Mozart violin concerto, especially dancelike in the echo; placing the clean, cheerful notes precisely into the resonance is a challenge but still pleasant. The crowning piece is an energetic collection of psalm settings by David Willcocks with the King’s Voices, a mixed choir, and is the best suited to the space. We fill the chapel to the ceiling with well-tuned cymbals and rejoicing. When my heart thrills, I can’t tell the difference between emotion and the physical waves of sound passing through it.

After the echo and the applause and chatting with friends all end, I go back through the narrow rooms to the dim choir stalls on the other side of the screen to pack up my cello. For a prolonged minute I’m alone in this half of the chapel. Alone, that is, except for the voices rolling and spilling over the screen, and the dark windows, and the stone trees holding up a stone heaven.