King's College Chapel 1515-2015. Art, Music and Religion in Cambridge, Jean Michel Massing and Nicolette Zeeman (eds), Harvey Miller Publishers, 2014, hardback, 416 pp, ISBN 9781909400214

King's College Chapel, Cambridge, world famous today for its celebrated Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, now broadcast annually around the world as a prelude to Christmas, this year celebrates the five-hundredth anniversary of its foundation. From its inception it was ‘considered a building of national importance', though the precise date of its completion remains uncertain. It is presumed, not unreasonably, that since college payments to the stone masons ceased in 1515 and a contract was also signed with a glazier during the same calendar year that the chapel, whose foundation stone had been laid by Henry VI in 1441, may be deemed to have been completed in 1515. This beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated commemorative volume, with over 240 illustrations, mostly in colour, from prints, watercolours, oil paintings, photographs, maps, architectural drawings and plans is based upon extensive archival research and provides illuminating insights into the intervening five hundred years of the chapel's fascinating history.

Structured in three sub-sections entitled ‘Fabric and Furnishings', ‘Life and Visiting' and ‘Music and Performance' the volume assembles seventeen eminent scholars from a range of disciplines to explore ‘the religious, cultural and artistic history' of this spectacular building over half a millennium. It encompasses many varied aspects of the chapel's history ranging from the architectural engineering of its magnificent vaulting to its glorious stained glass windows and its celebrated altar-pieces including Rubens' Adoration of the Magi. It surveys the chapel's musical culture from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries focusing upon the ‘evolution of the present-day fame of King's College Choir and the vibrant musical life of the chapel' assessing the impact of the changing theological and ritual practice in the Reformation and post-Reformation Church, the impact of secularism during the Edwardian era and the two global conflicts of the twentieth century, and finally dispelling the myth that stained glass from the chapel was stored in Welsh slate mines during the Second World War.

The publication also includes lively cameo portraits of some of those who have shaped the chapel's role in the life of the college such as the influential Georgian evangelical Charles Simeon (1759-1836) who was buried in the chapel despite his scruples about some of its historic features; the feisty long-serving organist and choir master Arthur Henry Mann, affectionately known as ‘Daddy' Mann whose tenure extended from 1876 to 1929 and whose ‘lush Victorian sound' was eventually supplanted by his successor Boris Ord, during another devoted period of service from 1929 to 1957. Ord's tenure was characterised by the emergence of a ‘very distinctive, precise and restrained mid-twentieth century sound' facilitated by the reconstructed organ installed by Arthur Harrison in 1933-34, whose distinctive dulciana pipes produced that ‘range of bell-like "tinkle" sounds' which became so familiar in so many Christmas carol arrangements inaugurating an innovatory period in performing, recording, broadcasting and commissioning new music.

Topically, the introduction of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols established by Dean Eric Milner-White in 1918 is attributed in large measure in the volume to ‘the aftermath of national and collegiate losses in the First World War', where Milner-White had served on the western front and the first BBC radio broadcast of the Festival occurred on its tenth anniversary in 1928, two years after the first BBC radio broadcast of the King's College choir.