The Recovering Choir Director

Tallis Scholars director Peter Phillips calls attention to Vox Zambezi, a Zambian chamber choir which decided to perform sacred polyphony of the English Renaissance.

He recalls a conversation in which Dr. Paul Kelly, Vox Zambezi’s founder, reveals an episode that helped lead to the choir’s formation:

When I asked what gave him the idea of starting the group in the first place, he quoted something I have heard several times before in differing contexts: years ago the Registrar of Societies in Zambia declared that classical Western music was not for the common people, it was an irrelevance. The poshest version of this kind of high-handed, inverted paternalism that I ever encountered was when the Secretary of Chamber Music New Zealand stood up in front of an Australian audience and declared, ‘New Zealand people do not like early music.’ Out of such irritations good things can come.