Who precisely can find time within the overbearing Cambridge routine for some daily Anglican liturgy? On the basis of my visit last Friday evening, the congregation is ragtag: equal parts tourists, university members, and the public. The particular spiritual loyalties of the crowd are not so easy to discern and the mood is one of respectful curiosity rather than browbeating reverence. Most people only follow the carefully structured service thanks to prep sheets provided by the chapel. Despite the grandiosity of the surroundings, this is far from an intimidating experience.

The question remains. Why would students choose to extract themselves to this archaic ritual without clear religious motivation? A simple response is obvious: the lucid beauty of the music. Through a series of preces (calls and responses between minister and choir), the scene is set for the daily psalm and the standard canticles ‘Magnificat’ and ‘Nunc dimittis.’  The former is more intricate, stretching into crystal clear high registers; the latter is a briefer, calmer interlude with simpler cadences. Under Stephen Cleobury, the choir may have turned away from the gentle tones of twentieth-century masters such as David Willcocks, but the chapel’s remarkable acoustics compensate for any stridency. It will be fascinating to see how the choir develops with Cleobury to step down shortly.

The psalm of the evening veers between anxiety and triumph, invoking enemies both threatening and defeated. The choir worked the repetition of chords inherent to this style of prose setting to great effect, striking the right balance between tentative and insistent. The literal intent of the wordsmay have been lost on the crowd. Skimming the lyrics to the psalm and fidgeting through to the lessons, one got the sense that the majority of the audience were taking this in with a healthy sense of detachment, enjoying the novelty of unabashed religious sentiment like the tourists we mostly were. Clearly the Old Testament is a lesser universal language than music.

If you ask people why they occasionally feel the urge to wander over to evensong, the answers are often the same: to reflect, to enjoy the music, to add some theological clout to a hangover cure. In a town where so many quotidian rituals are spruced up and hung out for tourists, it seems odd to question one above others. Somehow or other we’ve all chosen to live in this odd fenland police state, where commercialised ‘tradition’ and ‘history’ taint everything with the same absurdity. Evensong at least offers an unusually high quality product. Why not take a little something back?