"This place sucks," I remember thinking as I was being shown around St Catharine’s on an open day. Two hours later, being led around Robinson, I knew I had found what I was looking for. My ‘Helm's Deep to the West’ was no match for a college named after the patron saint of spinsters. And I could imagine no more saintly place in Cambridge than one in which The Tab once reported sightings of Jesus Christ.

But you may enjoy Catz a whole lot more than me. Who knows? The point is, each college has its own character. This is what makes the experience of being at Cambridge so beautifully diverse. Each college has enough of a personality for anybody to walk in and feel something on a spectrum from "this is my Eden" to "I would rather be at Oxford". And in most cases, the societies, clubs, supervisors and fellows somehow match the college’s ethos.

Nevertheless, uniformly across all colleges (and perhaps the world), there is a sickening attitude towards classical music and Anglican choral singing. This unhelpful attitude transcends college boundaries; music societies and choirs – particularly within the CB2 postcode boundary – are a hotbed for snobbery. There’s something inherent in classical music and music education that causes a snootiness which has nothing to do with Cambridge: it’s full of ‘foreign’ words, it doesn’t get reduced to chord charts or tabs, and, above all, it seems to be felt that classical music needs to not just be heard, but also understood. This engenders an artificial rift between the ‘musical literati’ and the ‘laypeople’, according to these bizarre criteria. Those ‘in the know’ often seem to give the ‘great musical unwashed’ a patronising pat on the back. I, as a former ‘muso’, oddly count as somebody in the know: an authority on Händel (fat) and Mozart (wrote songs about poo), despite specialising in Middle Eastern popular music - a subject remote from Mozart’s 41 symphonies. Maybe I perfected the art of quietly listening to something that ‘sounds really complicated’ (read: atonal music) while looking thoughtful.

This snobbery is seen nowhere more than in the odd Cambridge pastime of ranking college choirs. King’s is the best, followed by Trinity and John’s. Arguably Clare and Sidney are somewhere in there, too. And everybody who is anybody is in one of those choirs. Naturally. Choirs from the ‘middle ranks’ aspire to be the ‘King’s of our time’. And worst of all, good new choirs are often treated like arrivistes thanks to the accepted and ‘age-old’ victors. Churchill choir can’t be good; have you seen when it was founded?

Having an unofficial, perceived league table means all choirs are compared against, ostensibly, King’s. This totally ignores King’s function within the world of Anglican music. Stephen Cleobury is a bore! But he’s supposed to be like that. He’s the benchmark. Whatever music happens within the hallowed walls of King’s Chapel is acceptable throughout Anglican Christendom. But is that good? Is that innovative? No. It’s one style of evensong that is on offer in Cambridge, nothing more. Look at Sidney choir. Their director’s Bart Simpson-esque wardrobe consists of one leather jacket (never removed?), and a chaplain who insists on using a certain breed of contemporary hymnody in worship that would make even CICCU snigger. This isn’t inferiority. It’s a different type of worship, a different setting for singing, giving a different musical experience overall.

Then what of Robinson choir, of which I was once president – in thought and word and (occasionally) deed? College is ugly, chapel has no acoustic, choir is mediocre and – Heaven forbid – the chaplain is a Baptist! Frequent criticisms. But consider this: it isn’t subtly imposing (see Trinity), it isn’t huge and ancient (King’s), nor is it quiet and Reformist (Magdalene). It is uncategorisable, and that is its beauty. Even the acoustic – dry – works to alter the perceived spatial dimension between choir and congregation. And as far as the chaplain’s Baptist tendencies, the ecumenical setting provides a relaxed atmosphere for worship. Here the choir can sing a diverse repertoire, preachers of all kinds have freedom to speak their minds (sermons by atheist physicists!), and ‘outsiders’ to formal religion can enjoy the ambience without being bound by the strictures of pure Anglican liturgy which is so typically ‘Cambridge’.

Did God so love the world that He gave His only son so that we could desecrate His holy spaces with choirs that ‘want to be King’s but are just, like, not’? Perhaps it is time we realised that there is no ‘right’ way to be a church musician, and Cambridge is living proof of that. It is not Cleobury who defines what is ‘right’; instead, a choir should match the college it is in.

Regrettably, that is not wherein this article’s conclusion lies. Of course a choir is supposed to match its college. But the depressing point in this discussion is that it’s sometimes the choral scholars who are condescending to volunteer members of their choir. Pooled choral scholars from King’s, Trinity and John’s then resent those members of their choir who don’t count as ‘literati’, and try to compensate by being snobbish. Instead of supporting fellow singers, they often try to tell them how it’s to be done, betraying their desire secretly to be elsewhere.

It is those people to whom I address this article. Will they be able to celebrate the diversity of the world of classical music, or will things remain as it was in the beginning and is now? It’s my hope that they at least remember this: there is nothing wrong with having choral aspirations, but being like King’s is not the only way to excel. You’re only ever as good as your self-inflicted comparison with the top four allows you to feel.