{"id":193932,"date":"2026-06-18T09:31:51","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T17:31:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193932"},"modified":"2026-06-18T09:35:26","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T17:35:26","slug":"a-hero-system-essay-on-st-andrews-cathedral-music-director-ross-cobb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193932","title":{"rendered":"A Hero System Essay on St. Andrews Cathedral Music Director Ross Cobb"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the autumn of 2020 the <A HREF=\"https:\/\/sydneycathedral.com\/\">cathedral on George Street<\/a> stood empty and <A HREF=\"https:\/\/sydneycathedral.com\/staff\">Ross Cobb<\/a> kept playing. The choristers could not gather under one roof. The law forbade it. So they sang into phones and laptops in scattered homes across Sydney, and the parts came back to be stitched into one sound, and the sound went out on YouTube to people who sat alone in their kitchens. A man at a great organ, in a sandstone room built to hold a thousand, playing to no one in the room.<\/p>\n<p><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/umVG7P12QzY?si=Uaimb0ePnKiBMPGM\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Set that scene against the tradition Cobb came from and you have the whole question. In the high English cathedral world that trained him, the empty room is the tragedy. Beauty with no witness is beauty wasted. The point of the King&#8217;s College sound, of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Herbert_Howells\">Herbert Howells<\/a> (1892-1983) writing his <i>Collegium Regale<\/i>, of the stones piled up over centuries, is that men touch the eternal through what they hear, in that room, together. Take away the room and the gathered hearers and you have taken away the thing.<\/p>\n<p>Cobb played anyway, and the playing changed nothing for him, because by his own account the music was never for the room. That is the argument of this essay, and it runs through <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ernest_Becker\">Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974).<\/p>\n<p>Becker&#8217;s book <i>The Denial of Death<\/i> (1973) makes one claim and worries it from every side. A man knows he will die. He cannot live with that knowledge, so he builds, or inherits, a hero system: a scheme of cosmic significance that lets him feel he is more than meat, that his short life counts on some stage that outlasts his body. Every culture is one of these schemes. Each tells a man how to be a hero, how to earn a place that death cannot cancel. Self-worth is the private sense that you are succeeding inside your own scheme. The schemes compete. When one runs into another, each unsettles the other&#8217;s defense against the grave, and that collision is where Becker locates a good deal of human cruelty.<\/p>\n<p>Apply this to a church musician and the first move undoes the obvious reading. The obvious reading says music is Cobb&#8217;s hero system. He is an organist of the front rank. He has given recitals at <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Notre-Dame_de_Paris\">Notre Dame de Paris<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Royal_Albert_Hall\">Royal Albert Hall<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/St_Paul%27s_Cathedral\">St Paul&#8217;s<\/a> in London. He trained at the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Royal_Academy_of_Music\">Royal Academy of Music<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/King%27s_College_London\">King&#8217;s College London<\/a>. He chairs the New South Wales branch of the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Royal_School_of_Church_Music\">Royal School of Church Music<\/a> and presides over its Australian body. In 2017 the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Archbishop_of_Canterbury\">Archbishop of Canterbury<\/a> honored him for service to church music. In 2020 the RSCM gave him an award for promoting the highest musical standards. By the measure of the cathedral-music hero system, a measure that runs from the Tudor composers through the Victorian organ lofts to the Cambridge chapels, Cobb is a hero. He has the equipment and the honors. The name goes on the program.<\/p>\n<p>But that is not the scheme he serves, and the gap between the two is the man.<\/p>\n<p>Cobb serves in the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Anglican_Diocese_of_Sydney\">Anglican Diocese of Sydney<\/a>, which holds, with a force matched almost nowhere in the Anglican world, that the gospel ranks above everything, including the church, including beauty. The diocese descends from the Reformation and the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Thirty-nine_Articles\">Thirty-Nine Articles<\/a> and the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Book_of_Common_Prayer_(1662)\">1662 prayer book<\/a>. It reads the Bible as God&#8217;s Word written. Its college, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Moore_Theological_College\">Moore<\/a>, has trained generations of men in expository preaching and biblical theology. Its temper traces to the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Billy_Graham\">Billy Graham<\/a> (1918-2018) crusade of 1959, after which a wave of young converts went to Moore and then into the parishes, carrying with them the conviction that the central act of a church is to preach Christ crucified and call men to repentance and faith. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Stott\">John Stott<\/a> (1921-2011) taught Sydney to work through the text verse by verse and resist the topical and the merely moving. The hero, in this scheme, is the man who reaches another man with the news that Jesus died and rose, and so wins him eternal life. The immortality is not symbolic. It is the thing itself.<\/p>\n<p>Cobb arrived in November 2005, hired by the then Dean, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Phillip_Jensen\">Phillip Jensen<\/a> (b. 1945), brother of the then Archbishop, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Peter_Jensen\">Peter Jensen<\/a> (b. 1943). Phillip Jensen carried a reputation as a Calvinist iconoclast who distrusted the old sacred music and the vestments and the smells and bells, who had replaced Sunday evensong with a contemporary gathering, and under whom the previous music director had left after the choir&#8217;s chances to perform were cut back. Into that came an Englishman with a Cambridge-chapel pedigree, the exact pedigree the diocese eyed with suspicion. The hire looks strange until you read what Cobb said when he took the post. He loved the best of traditional church music where it &#8220;sheds light on the written Word of God,&#8221; and the best of contemporary church music where it did the same, and he held that the two were not opposed. There is the line, and there is why he could thrive where his predecessor could not. He had already subordinated his art before he walked in the door.<\/p>\n<p>That subordination is his heroism in the Sydney scheme, and it asks of him the hardest thing an artist of his rank can be asked. He must make the music point past the notes to Christ, and at the moment the beauty starts to draw the ear to the beauty, to the performer, to the soaring vault and the held chord as ends worth having on their own, he must check it, because at that moment the music has set up as a rival scheme. The Reformed evangelical fear is exact and old. A man comes to the cathedral for the Bach and the architecture and the hush, mistakes the feeling for God, and walks out unconverted, his soul lost down a beautiful road. So the music gets demoted on purpose. Cobb is the man who can build the cathedral sound at the top of the craft and who has, by confession and by daily practice, bound it to a master. He turned what looked like an artist&#8217;s defeat into the highest service. He instigated the liturgical performance of Bach cantatas with orchestra inside the Sunday services, and he ran them not as concerts but as the Word sounded.<\/p>\n<p>Now watch the central word do its work in other lives, because the same word changes its whole meaning when it moves between schemes.<\/p>\n<p>Take a master drummer in a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Yoruba_people\">Yoruba<\/a> town in southwest Nigeria, his hands on the talking drum, the pitch bending under the squeeze of his arm until the drum speaks the praise names of the dead. For him music is the wire to the ancestors. The drum keeps the fathers present, keeps the line from breaking, holds off death by refusing to let the dead go silent. The note is not beauty offered to a transcendent God. The note is the family reaching backward through the grave and finding the grave answered.<\/p>\n<p>Take a qawwal at a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sufism\">Sufi<\/a> shrine in Sindh, leading the long devotional climb of the song until the self thins out and the singer feels himself dissolve toward union with God. For him music is the road to fana, the burning away of the ego. The aim is to lose the I. Set him beside Cobb and the contrast sharpens. Cobb keeps the self intact and points it outward to a Word that stands over against him. The qawwal wants the self gone. Same act, two opposite cures for the same fear.<\/p>\n<p>Take a techno DJ in a Berlin club at six on a Sunday morning, four hours into a set, the room moving as one body, the drop landing and the floor lifting. For him the all-night set is communion and the dance floor a brief deathlessness, a few hours where the dancers are pure present tense, alive and sure of next weekend. The eternity on offer lasts till the lights come up.<\/p>\n<p>Take a session player in Nashville cutting a track he did not write for a singer he will not meet. For him music is craft and the check and the song that keeps getting played on the radio after he is gone. His shot at outliving himself is a hook in a stranger&#8217;s car.<\/p>\n<p>And take the old chorister, English, eighty now, who sang treble in a cathedral as a boy and lost his God somewhere in his thirties and never lost the music. He still goes to evensong. He weeps at the Howells. The beauty is the only church he can still enter. He is Cobb turned inside out. Same sound, opposite scheme. In him the beauty became the idol the Sydney men warned of, and then, when the faith burned off, the beauty was all that was left, and it held. The thing Cobb labors to keep in second place, this man has put first, and it is the last thing standing between him and the dark.<\/p>\n<p>Then there is the woman in the cathedral pew whom both schemes claim. A widow, say, who started coming for the Bach after her husband died, who knew nothing of the diocese or its theology, who came for the cantata and the cool stone and the hour out of the week. The Sydney scheme worries over her. She is the soul who might love the music and never hear the gospel. Cobb&#8217;s answer, the answer his whole position depends on, is that the cantata can carry the Word into a heart the sermon alone might not reach, that the beauty can be the open door and not the closed one. Whether the music delivered her or only consoled her is the question his life turns on, and it is a question no honor from Canterbury can settle.<\/p>\n<p>The same split runs through his other sacred word, excellence. He has spent a career at the highest standard and has been decorated for it. In the concert-artist scheme excellence is the path to a personal immortality, the recording that outlasts the man, the name that goes down. In Cobb&#8217;s scheme excellence is an offering, the best brought because God is owed the best, and it carries a danger the concert artist never feels, because the better the offering, the more it tempts the man offering it to admire his own gift and forget whose altar it sits on. He walks that line every Sunday. He has to be very good and stay unimpressed with being good.<\/p>\n<p>This is the cost, and it is the meaning. Cobb can do the great thing and has tied it to a lord. He directed the music at state funerals and at royal visits, played for <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Queen_Elizabeth_II\">Queen Elizabeth II<\/a> (1926-2022), led the cathedral choir on a European tour for its bicentenary, ran what was called the largest festival of sacred music Australia has staged. And the logic of his own scheme tells him that none of it saves him. The choir will sing at his funeral as it sang at the funerals of the great, and the singing will be magnificent, and the magnificence will not raise him. Only Christ will, by his lights. So his music is honest about its own smallness in a way the cathedral tradition rarely asks its music to be. The beauty admits it is a servant and not a savior. That admission, made by a man who could plausibly believe the opposite, is the heroism. The denial of death sits at the center of it, named and faced. He does not pretend the music is the answer to the grave. He points past the music to the only answer his scheme allows, and he keeps the music from getting above its station even as he makes it as glorious as he can.<\/p>\n<p>Which returns us to the empty room in 2020. To the cathedral tradition, a man playing to no one is a man robbed of his reason. To Cobb the empty room exposed what was always true. The room was never the point and the gathered hearers were never the point. The point was the news reaching all, and the wire that day carried it past the locked doors and the sandstone and out to the kitchens, further than the stones ever threw it. He played to an empty house and lost nothing, because in his hero system the house was only ever a means, and the music was only ever a servant, and the servant does its work whether or not anyone in the room is watching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the autumn of 2020 the cathedral on George Street stood empty and Ross Cobb kept playing. The choristers could not gather under one roof. The law forbade it. So they sang into phones and laptops in scattered homes across &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193932\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42924],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sydney"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t<!-- All in One SEO 4.9.8 - aioseo.com -->\n\t<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the autumn of 2020 the cathedral on George Street stood empty and Ross Cobb kept playing. 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