Cam Music
Watch and listen to Cambridge choirs without a ticket
A great deal of Cambridge music reaches people who never set foot in the city. The college choirs broadcast, webcast and record more than almost any other choirs of their kind, and one Christmas Eve service from King's has been on the radio for nearly a century. This page collects the main ways to watch and listen from home: the regular broadcasts, the webcasts of chapel services, the colleges' own record labels and the archives that keep older performances available.
None of it replaces the sound of a chapel in person, but it is the best preparation for a visit, and for anyone who lives far away it is the next best thing.
A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols
The single most famous piece of Cambridge broadcasting is the Christmas Eve service from King's College Chapel. A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols was introduced at King's by the dean, Eric Milner-White, in 1918, and it was first broadcast in 1928. Today it goes out live on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service at 3pm on 24 December and is repeated on Radio 3 on Christmas Day. Each year it opens the same way, with a solo treble singing the first verse of Once in Royal David's City, and each year it includes a newly commissioned carol.
The television programme Carols from King's is a different service. It is recorded in advance for BBC television and shown on Christmas Eve, so it is possible to hear both on the same day. Attending the live service itself now depends on an annual online ballot; the college explains the arrangements on its Nine Lessons and Carols page.
Choral Evensong on BBC Radio 3
For the rest of the year, the steadiest broadcast source is the BBC's own Choral Evensong. The programme began on 7 October 1926 with a service from Westminster Abbey and is described as the BBC's longest-running outside broadcast. It now airs on BBC Radio 3 on Wednesday afternoons, with a repeat on Sunday afternoons, and moves between cathedrals, college chapels and parish churches across Britain. The Cambridge choirs appear regularly, and the St John's choir, for example, usually has broadcasts of its services each year. Past programmes stay available on BBC Sounds for a period after broadcast.
Webcasts of chapel services
Some colleges stream their own services. The Choir of St John's College has run weekly webcasts for years from its own site, sjcchoir.co.uk, which lets listeners around the world hear the choir in term time. Trinity College webcasts its chapel services live and archives them, so a missed evensong can be heard later. Other chapels experiment with streams on special occasions. The pattern changes with each term, so the choir's own website is the place to look, and the services themselves are always the live original; nothing is filmed for the sake of the camera.
Because services are acts of worship, the colleges set the rules for what is streamed. Visitors in the chapel cannot record or photograph services themselves, which is one reason the official webcasts and broadcasts matter: they are the only recordings of most services that exist.
Recordings: the college labels
Two of the leading choirs now publish on labels of their own. King's College launched its recording label in 2012, starting with a release of Nine Lessons and Carols, to capture the choir and the chapel organ. Its catalogue, from Christmas music to Fauré and Mozart, is sold through the King's College Choir website and the main streaming services. St John's College followed in May 2016 with a label run in partnership with Signum Records, which releases recordings by the choir and by students and alumni of the college. Among its titles are live evensong recordings such as Eastertide Evensong, which captures a whole service as it was sung. Earlier recordings by both choirs, for Decca, EMI, Hyperion and others, remain widely available.
| Source | What it is | When |
|---|---|---|
| A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols | Live service from King's College Chapel on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service | 24 December, 3pm; repeated on Radio 3 on Christmas Day |
| Carols from King's | Separate carol service, recorded in advance for BBC television | Christmas Eve |
| Choral Evensong, BBC Radio 3 | Weekly service from a cathedral, college or church, Cambridge choirs among them | Wednesday afternoons, repeated on Sundays |
| St John's webcasts | Live and recorded services from St John's College Chapel | Weekly in Full Term |
| Trinity webcasts | Chapel services streamed live and archived | In Full Term |
| College record labels | King's College Recordings (from 2012) and the St John's label with Signum (from 2016) | Any time, on CD and streaming |
A century on air
The story of Cambridge choirs in the media runs from a carol service first held weeks after the end of the First World War to studio-quality spatial audio. The King's label was among the first to release a classical album in Dolby Atmos, in 2015, and the regular broadcasts mean that the sound of the college chapels is familiar to listeners who have never been near the River Cam.
Archives and older recordings
Older performances survive in several places. The BBC's programme pages keep information on past broadcasts, the college labels reissue archive material alongside new recordings, and the British Library's sound archive holds broadcast and commercial recordings for research use, church music among them. For anyone following a particular piece, the colleges' published music lists show what was sung on any given day, which makes it easier to track down a recording later.