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The Choir of St. John's College Cambridge is webcasting one evensong each week from their new, freestanding website. The inaugural webcast debuts today.

Their audio player makes it ridiculously easy to skip the sermon.

One can hope that King's and other English collegiate chapels are not far behind in this endeavor.

Now, a non-musical web tangent:

The arrangements of the webcast do make one wonder a little bit about the politics behind the St. John's enterprise. The choir has recently launched this new website which is separate from the college's domain. It is also a bit heavy in the self-promotion department, but that's another story.

Perhaps one of the primary reasons for the creation of this site is the choir's desire webcast evensong services. This initiative does seem to have the blessing of the college (see this press release) but I think it loses some of its prestige by not being hosted by the college.

Now, maybe there's some technical or theological reason that ac.uk addresses cannot stream audio, but I'm not privy to that kind of "Bob's your uncle" or "Heath Robinson" or whatever you want to call it.

And this separation of a music program from its umbrella institution is not an isolated incident. I run across this from time to time in parish churches and cathedrals on this side of the Atlantic. It seems to me that in the interest of the web presence of both parties this kind of separation should be discouraged and regarded as insubordination on the part of the musicians. Of course this is only valid if the umbrella institution has a responsive site and adequate technical support.

Labels: Evensong, St John's (Cambridge), web