Merger in the cathedral

This Christmas girls will outnumber boys in a unified choir at Salisbury Cathedral. Traditionalists argue that girls' voices are not suited to Anglican music; reformers disagree. Nicholas Pyke examines a debate dividing congregations across the country

Christmas came early this year for the pupils at the Salisbury Cathedral Choir School. It arrived last Wednesday evening, to be precise, when the BBC's Songs of Praise rolled up to record its annual carol service, scheduled for next week. Then, just as quickly, Christmas went away again. The angels were hauled out of sight, the ivy replaced with vases of daffodils, and by the following night the choir school and worshippers were helping the BBC pretend that it was Lent.

Traditionalists may wrinkle their noses at this televisual sleight of hand, but that would be nothing compared to the continuing anger caused by a more obviously modern intrusion into the seasonal celebrations, visible on your screen next week. The boy choristers, in green cassocks, are outnumbered by the girls, in green tabards.

Salisbury was the first English cathedral to open up to female trebles, establishing a separate but parallel choir amid much fanfare in 1991. Since then, girls' voices have grown ever louder in choir stalls around the country. Services at Ripon, Lincoln, Wells, Exeter and Salisbury cathedrals and at York Minster are regularly sung by girl trebles, now. There are mixed choirs in Edinburgh – which first introduced female singers in the 1980s – and Manchester. And Winchester has a choir composed of older teenage girls. Of the 1,000 full-time choristers at choir schools, girls account for between 100 and 150 according to the Choir Schools' Assocation (CSA), while female singers make some sort of formal contribution at more than 20 cathedrals.

Simon Lole, the director of music at Salisbury, is confident that his two choirs, 15 boys and 18 girls, are of the same, high quality. They receive the same training and they share the burden of nine services a week, plus weddings, funerals and TV shows, more or less equally. Only at Christmas and Easter do they get to sing together. (The rest of the choir, six men singing alto, tenor and bass parts, remains the same, whoever happens to be on the top line.)

The school and the cathedral say that the girls are now so well established, even experts often fail to work out which choir is which. Yet the girls still run into an astonishing degree of prejudice.

"I do get some hate mail," says Mr Lole, who was knocked backwards by the response he received after a recent service featuring Purcell's music. It came from the head of a company in charge of a coach party. "Two days later I had an anonymous letter in through the post. They're always anonymous. It said: 'Henry Purcell must be turning in his grave at the thought of these bumptious upstarts. Where was the proper choir? We're never going to come to Salisbury again'. It was really vindictive, nasty stuff." At another recent concert, a woman had stopped and said, in full hearing of the girls, "Oh, I thought it was the proper choir. I'm not staying for this." One choir girl was left in tears.

His response was straightforward: Mr Lole stopped telling the public which choir was singing which service. "People used to look at the notice-board and if the girls were singing, they wouldn't come," he says. Angry visitors even took to ringing him up in an attempt to avoid listening to the female trebles.

This sort of mistrust is scarcely new, even though according to the CSA, there have been girls singing church music since Saxon times. Girls have been accused of making the wrong type of sound for the Anglican music, of singing badly and of deterring the boys by making music seem sissy. The author Peter Giles, who founded the Campaign for the Defence of the Traditional Cathedral Choir (CDTCC), has argued long and hard that church music was written for boys not girls and that it should be performed authentically. Boys and girls, he insists, do not sound the same.

The scientific evidence suggests otherwise – although there is not a great deal of it. In 1997 Graham Welch and Desmond Sergeant, then of Roehampton Institute in London, conducted a blind test showing that listeners were not in fact able to identify the sex of properly trained voices apart. According to Mr Welch, who is now at London University's Institute of Education, the vocal physiology of girls and boys is more or less identical.

As girls become better established, so the opposition has gradually diminished in ferocity. Speaking last week on behalf of the CDTCC, for example, Dr John Sanders, former choirmaster at Gloucester Cathedral said that the chief concern is a shortage of singers overall, and the fact that the few remaining boys will be put off by the presence of girls. The decline in church-going has only increased the pressure. "I have got no problem with girls singing," he says. "If they want to sing, they should have equal opportunities. But if there is any danger that by introducing a girls choir the boys choir would be damaged, I wouldn't be for that. It would be a great mistake."

This fear is held widely, including at Salisbury, which is why most cathedrals keep two separate choirs rather than running mixed ones. Simon Lole points out that parish choirs have already seen the steady disappearance of the choirboy. With churches struggling for singers of any sort, the arrival of women on the top line in the past 30 years seems to have stamped out the last embers of interest among the boys. A traditional all-male choir at a parish church is a real rarity and this, he says, is a shame partly because 12- and 13-year-old boys often have a strength and power to their singing that girls only reach a few years later.

If rank prejudice is starting to diminish, girl choristers now face a different sort of obstacle – a financial one. Cathedrals do not have the cash to encourage girls to sing. So while ancient trust funds subsidise the fees for boy choristers at their cathedral choir schools, there is no such pot of cash for the girls. Even after 10 years of running a separate investment fund, Salisbury struggles to find the money for its girls. The boys' trust fund, in contrast, was established in the 14th century, giving them a discount of up to 50 per cent on their £12,000 annual fees. The girls mostly survive on 25 per cent, although Salisbury is at pains to point out that no one has yet been refused on financial grounds. At Wells they get only 10 per cent. Elsewhere they do it for free.

The shortage of cash is now so serious that cathedrals and their schools are unable to establish new girls' choirs. They would like them to sing at Lichfield Cathedral for example, where girls already attend the choir school. But the current financial climate makes it near impossible when roofs need replacing and ancient steeples repairing.

"We're not going to have girls – simply because the funds are not there," says Richard Dingle, the school's director of music and a great admirer of Salisbury's achievements. "You can't run a choir where the boys are funded and the girls aren't, just because the scholarships are not there. We have discussed having a voluntary girls choir once a week."

So, for the present, the steady crescendo of girls' voices has reached its limit. "A lot of the enquiries I get are from people looking for girl choristerships," says Jane Capon at the CSA, "and I'm a bit stuck because we've had the same ones for such a long time, and there are no new ones. Most of us would love to have girls choirs if we could afford it".

Meanwhile, Simon Lole and Salisbury Cathedral are braced for a fresh sack of angry correspondence.

education@independent.co.uk