If that were all, though, it’d be just another orthodoxy; lovely but not, for me, magical. What’s truly extraordinary, and an object lesson for Sydney’s rapidly blandifying culture, is CCSL’s signature mix of high art and “low” social attitudes. This makes stark contrast with the dangerously low-brow and puritanical literalism that increasingly oppresses our city and our culture. Against it, CCSL gleams as a jewel of resistance, opposing greige with ancient beauty, populism with sacred scholarship and cronyism with a muscular concern for social justice. Centring it all is CCSL’s world-renowned musical lineage; its celebrated organist-composer Peter Jewkes, its breathtaking 40-person choir and its mild-mannered plainsong scholar and director of music Dr Neil McEwan who, after 45 years, retires this week. McEwan was born into the tiny Scots-influenced river-mouth hamlet of Fortrose at Aotearoa New Zealand’s grim nether tip. His grandmother was Maori and his father ran the local shop. Sometimes his dad would close early, launch the dinghy and take the kids fishing, returning with a couple of dozen flounder for dinner. Neil McEwan, fourth from left, rehearsing for a performance. Credit:Dallas Kilponen Other times, aged 10 or 11, McEwan and friends would farewell their parents for 24 hours and tear off around the cliffs, cooking fresh fish on a driftwood fire and sleeping overnight in cave or beach.

I tell you that because it wouldn’t happen now, and because perhaps such freedom, in such a landscape, imbues an intensity of artistic perception. Either way, the child McEwan had a fine tenor voice and precocity on the keyboard. In a community where kids did Scottish dancing and played bagpipes, he learned piano from the local nuns and then, from 12, the organ at the Presbyterian church. At high school he was a drummer. “Good sense of rhythm,” he says with a smile. By 14, he was playing Britten and, by 15, giving regular piano concerts – terrifyingly live - on national radio. Leaving school, he worked as a municipal clerk but, already hooked on sacred music, headed to Auckland, winning a spot as chorister and organ student with the late, legendary Professor Peter Godfrey. The interior of Christ Church St Lawrence. Credit:Natalie Boog Then, Sydney. It was meant merely as a money-earning hiatus en route to England but McEwan, finding himself director of music at St Lukes Mosman and concert manager for the ABC, stayed, going on to present Sacred Music on ABC Radio, join the Conservatorium as an academic and study the semiology of early Gregorian chant in Germany. That sounds abstruse, and it is. But abstruse is exactly what Sydney needs. We’re not a spiritual town. Brash, really, getting brasher. But nurturing abstruse specialisms, encouraging flavoursome eccentricity, is what fine cities do. Right now, Sydney’s are disappearing faster than they’re popping up. The Higher Thought Bookshop, Goulds in Newtown, the Dawn Fraser Pool. It’s more than just loss of texture. It’s an attack on difference.

If we’re not very careful this period will be known as the The Great Erasure, when everything small and interesting vanished beneath a corporate tide of big and boring. It’s against this dullification that McEwan’s musical coterie is recusant. The poetic of this resistance is part-musicality, part-scholarship, part-discipline, part-reverence. The choir is almost entirely amateur – literally, they do it for love. And it shows, imparting a sense of genuine reverence, making music that reduces even casual tourists to tears, transporting you - as a US admirer wrote recently - “into company with the seraphim and cherubim”. It fascinates me that, within this careless city, in these hidden caves, people labour unceasingly to polish these ancient traditions, spending time, talent, energy and love for nothing except the beauty of it. It’s ephemeral, gone in an instant, and somehow ego-less: music to listen not to, but through. For this is not about them, this music, or even about itself. It’s about the other. Gregorian neumes from the 14th century with added interpretive marks from the 10th century. McEwan is a world expert in deciphering the interpretive 10th century “squiggles” that predate proper music notation. These chants, with their square notes or “neumes” perched on a four-line stave, form part of the “ordinaries” of the service. The repertoire is large, from Gregorian chant through Tallis and Schubert to Faure and Vaughan Williams. But as voices wind themselves into the intricacy of the whole, you can almost see the angel selves rise.

I find this extraordinarily touching. In a state where our supposedly Christian Treasurer uses “net worth” from selling assets to justify the infrastructure spend that is helping destroy the city, it’s also refreshing. When the flatlanders are in charge, when the orthodoxy is philistine, recusant song may be the noblest response. As to Scott Morrison and his grey-face buddies, I invoke the ancient Psalm 109:8. “May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership.” Meanwhile, recuse, recuse, recuse. Associate Professor Neil McEwan will conduct his final CCSL (orchestral, Haydn) mass at 5pm Sunday September 16.