On Voice

From cathedral choirs, football chanting, and birdsong, to castrati, protest songs and artificial intelligence, On Voice explores the world of the voice that exists between the mouth and the ear. This is a book about the sound that journeys from the lips to the heart; how we speak it, how we hear it and how we embody it as people made in the image of the God whose voice created the heavens and the earth.

Victoria Johnson, the new Dean of St John’s College, Cambridge, was previously Precentor of York Minster, the first woman to inhabit that role in a history which reaches back over a thousand years. A Precentor is someone who orchestrates worship and ‘sings first’, hers is the voice which invokes God to open our lips, so that our mouth can show forth praise. When a new voice inhabits such an ancient role does anything change? Do the stones resound in a different way? This book aims to explore the sonics of voice - human and divine – expressed through speech, song and silence.

Through the lens of Christian worship, theology and culture, the voice is explored as a spoken, sung and heard phenomenon. As an animateur of worship and working towards a theology of voice, Victoria reflects on the power of the church’s musical and liturgical heritage to cut through the clamour of our modern-day echo chambers and the roar of populism, empower those who are seldom heard, and speak into the challenges of contemporary life.