Also from the Herald – revitalizing music in an English parish:

A mass of bouncy children appeared at my feet in the main hall of St Wulstan’s in Wolstanton, Staffordshire. They had run down from their choir practice in the organ loft, where they had been rehearsing the plainchant Orbis Factor Mass and a couple of Renaissance motets.

Were they enjoying it, I asked? “Yes!” they screamed.

And what was their favourite piece to sing?

“Agnus Dei and the Sanctus from the Orbis Factor,” said a couple of the nine-year-olds, quick as a flash.

“Victoria is my favourite,” chipped in Olivia Turner (nine and a half), and she was not referring to Mrs V Beckham. She had meant the 16th-century Spanish priest-composer Tomas Luis de Victoria, the great polyphonist. She would sing his Ave Maria in the bath, she said.

She was not the only one. Richard Keane (10 and a half) admitted enjoying the Orbis Factor and claimed he intoned it while walking down. Tiny Joseph Daniels (seven) had learned how to sing plainsong before he could read.

To hear children this young talk about early music in this way – music that few of my peers would have even heard of – was simply astonishing.

And yet I was not in London or Winchester; I wasn’t visiting one of the great cathedral schools with their vast resources and venerable traditions. I was in a small Midlands town, a modest place with a middling parish. All the kids were local, Catholic boys and girls, all attendees of the Catholic school next door, St Wulstan’s Primary.

What had transformed the musical life of this ordinary parish was the initiative and belief of the husband-and-wife musical team, David and April West.

The couple converted from the Anglican faith in 1993 and had no sooner entered their new Catholic community than they had begun to reorganise its musical foundations.

They were trained musicians and were sick of hearing people say there was no decent music in the Catholic Church. “It was crazy to think people actually believed this. I mean, think of all those great Catholic composers,” says David.

So, instead of grumbling, they decided to do something about it.