Truro Cathedral choristers score a worldwide hit with webcast

CORNWALL, UK — A Westcountry cathedral is so proud of its
choral work that it has begun broadcasting to the entire planet.

The choir at Truro has recorded and uploaded its first live
Evensong – making the Cornish cathedral the first in the UK to
broadcast on the World Wide Web.

The service, which was recorded last week, complete with rich
and haunting choral music, is free to download for anyone in need
of religious inspiration or who simply enjoys divine works like
William Walton’s dazzling anthem The Twelve.

And a lot of people do – in the few days since Truro Cathedral
Choir’s Evensong went live last week the webcast has been
downloaded more than 4,000 times.

“We’re absolutely thrilled,” said director of music Christopher
Gray.

“We’ve had 3,102 logging on from the UK, 504 from the USA, 96
from Canada, 29 from New Zealand and 28 from Spain. A total of 21
countries have accessed the webcast.”

Creating a webcast of the service and its music is certainly a
cost-effective way for the cathedral to reach out to the rest of
the world.

The webcast cost “just a few hundred pounds”, according to Mr
Gray, who said: “The cathedral has to watch its pennies very
carefully indeed, and so a great deal of goodwill has been called
in. We are particularly grateful to our Cornwall-based sound
engineer, Mike Davey, of ICON.

“Mike had to set up microphones and create a kind of ‘recording
studio’ to achieve the high quality recorded sound.”