The Early Music Legend

     Brian Kay The Guardian, Friday 25 April 2008 Article history It is said that if you can remember the swinging 60s, then you weren't there. But I can clearly recall the three memorable years I spent studying for a degree in music and singing as a Choral Scholar in the choir of King's College, Cambridge, four decades ago. It was a wonderful time and place to be developing a passionate interest in music: my fellow students included would-be conductors John Eliot Gardiner, Andrew Davis and David Atherton, early-music pioneers David Munrow and Christopher Hogwood, a young man already making waves as a composer called John Rutter, and six of us who went on to become the King's Singers. The Choral Scholars at King's had inherited from previous generations a flourishing library of close harmony arrangements: light-hearted cover versions of well-known pop songs, folk and show songs, glees and madrigals. We used these as an escape from the serious business of dail...