The Abbey has quietly begun a regular series of live video webcasts of various services.
The series began on September 8, 2024, with a Sung (Choral) Eucharist, and continued with a service of Choral Evensong on Holy Cross Day. Each of the service they have broadcast has stayed up on their YouTube channel for about a month.
The most recent service was a Service of Lessons and Carols for Christmas.
Today, the Feast of Epiphany, the Abbey will webcast a Sung Eucharist.
The Abbey began indexing these services on their “Streamed Services” page, which is now called “Watch Services”.
This kind of endeavor is of great interest to us at Sinden.org, as we suspect it is of all students of church music. The value in these kinds of regular, live webcasts is immeasureable. They allow us to hear a wide variety of liturgical music—sung at a very high standard—fully within a specific, contemporary liturgical context. Though any electronically mediated liturgical experience is, by definition, something other than being truly present, there is value in seeing and hearing liturgy and music as it is conducted in a place like this.
It is not lost on us that as the webcasts at St. John's College, Cambridge have sadly decreased in frequency (only four services were webcast in 2023/24), they have begun at Westminster Abbey. The common denominator here, we must speculate, is Andrew Nethsingha. Webcasts sprung up when he was directing the St. John's Choir, and now they seem to have done the same toward the beginning of his tenure at the Abbey.
Labels: Andrew Nethsingha, Epiphany, St John's (Cambridge), webcasting, Westminster Abbey
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