‘Girls and women to sing as members of The Choir of St John’s‘

[ardcarp]

I wonder if Miles, or anyone who is more of a scholar than I, would expand upon the likelihood of girls singing sacred music by Byrd during his 'Catholic exile in Essex' (self-imposed) ? Is there any written historical evidence? I think about my own childhood when girls just didn't (couldn't) sing in church choirs. Is it likely that the equal status and standing of women and men, which is quite rightly today's ethic, would have pertained in the early 17th century?

This isn't me wading into the current girl/boy chorister argument. I'm just intrigued.

[french frank]

I wonder if Miles, or anyone who is more of a scholar than I, would expand upon the likelihood of girls singing sacred music by Byrd during his 'Catholic exile in Essex' (self-imposed) ? Is there any written historical evidence?

On this, an article by Rory McCleery in which he writes of Byrd during that time:

"It’s clear these works were intended for secret gatherings: no longer was Byrd writing for the lavish musical resources of Elizabeth’s large professional Chapel Royal, but instead the relatively modest ad hoc provision of well-to-do amateurs, with most likely single voices for many pieces, and women (rather than boys) singing the top parts."

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/28/singing-in-secret-william-byrd-isolation

I suppose you wouldn't be able to conclude more than that the soprano parts were sung by women, but what Byrd had in mind as he composed, how could one know?

[Vox Humana]

I wonder if Miles, or anyone who is more of a scholar than I, would expand upon the likelihood of girls singing sacred music by Byrd during his 'Catholic exile in Essex' (self-imposed) ? Is there any written historical evidence? I think about my own childhood when girls just didn't (couldn't) sing in church choirs. Is it likely that the equal status and standing of women and men, which is quite rightly today's ethic, would have pertained in the early 17th century?

This isn't me wading into the current girl/boy chorister argument. I'm just intrigued.

It just stands to reason, really. Recusant services were clandestine, held in country houses for example. For obvious reasons you couldn't borrow a church choir and there was no question of training one of your own. If you didn't want to die a grisly death, you had to know your friends very well: the government had its spies. Musicians would have had to make do with whatever resources they could muster and I suspect the choirs at such gatherings were not at all big, maybe no more than one or two voices to a part. Many pre-Reformation choirs had hardly been bigger anyway, even sometimes in the treble and mean parts. If you or your friends had a musical household you'd surely use those resources, boys and girls indiscriminately. I doubt you could be picky.

The only firm evidence I know is a well-known description of a clandestine Catholic celebration in the autobiography of the recusant Jesuit priest Father William Weston. He says:

“we left the city and went out nearly thirty miles to the home of a Catholic gentleman, a close friend of mine … In the house was a chapel, set aside for the celebration of the church’s offices. The gentleman was a skilled musician, and there was an organ, other musical instrument and choristers, both male and female. During those eight days it was just as if we were celebrating the octave of some great feast … Mr Byrd the very famous musician and organist was among the company.”

[Miles Coverdale]

I wonder if Miles, or anyone who is more of a scholar than I, would expand upon the likelihood of girls singing sacred music by Byrd during his 'Catholic exile in Essex' (self-imposed) ? Is there any written historical evidence? I think about my own childhood when girls just didn't (couldn't) sing in church choirs. Is it likely that the equal status and standing of women and men, which is quite rightly today's ethic, would have pertained in the early 17th century?

This isn't me wading into the current girl/boy chorister argument. I'm just intrigued.

In his Positions … Necessarie for the Training up of Children, the Elizabethan educationalist Richard Mulcaster (d 1611) wrote that there are four subjects necessary for young gentlewomen to study: reading, writing, singing and instrumental music; he adds that ‘Musicke is much used, where it is to be had, to the parents delite, while the daughters be yong.’

Many of the domestic music sources of the time, such as the Paston manusripts, contain three- or four-part extracts from larger works by the earlier Tudor masters such as Fayrfax and Taverner (and much else besides) which need high voices to be performed, and I don't think it’s tenable to suppose that these were the preserve of boys.

In his article ‘Sacred songs in the chamber’, John Milsom writes (of Robert White’s psalm-motets) that: ‘Possibly they were composed for use in churches, possibly for spiritual recreation in the chamber; no one knows for sure. In the case of Tallis’s Elizabethan motes, and conceivably every piece of Latin-texted music that William Byrd ever composed, it is the chamber rather than the church that can lay the stronger claim.’

So while they may not have sung in church choirs, it seems to me virtually certain that women and girls sang sacred music in a domestic setting.

As an aside, I still vividly recall the experience of going with John, then my tutor at university, to Ingatestone Hall in Essex, home of the Petre family, Byrd’s patrons, to hear the recording for Radio 3 of Byrd’s three-part mass and some of the Gradualia. To hear that music in that setting, with the priest hole only yards away, was quite something.

[Vox Humana]

And in 1636 Charles Butler described the mean voice as ‘a middling or mean high part, between the Countertenor, (the highest part of a man) and the Treble (the highest part of a boy or woman) and therefore may be sung by a mean voice’ (my emphasis). There is absolutely no doubt that women sang—although I took ardcarp's question to be specifically about recusant services.

[ardcarp]

Thanks MC and Vox. That sounds like pretty solid evidence of the use of female voices, albeit in straitened circumstances.

[Resurgam]

‘If this has been forced on Andrew Nethsingha by the school or the college unnecessarily it is an absolute disgrace.’

The St John’s Choir website states that this move has been spearheaded by Andrew himself, a development he has long wanted. So therefore no disgrace, absolute or otherwise. DH at King’s is quoted as wanting something similar.

jonfan,

In my opinion it is even more of a disgrace if this is true.

I find it impossible to believe that a DoM who has inherited a top class college choir of boys and men and carried on the tradition for some years suddenly wants ( or has long wanted ) to do away with it.

I think that it is more likely that he is finding it difficult to recruit boys or to get the necessary commitment from parents and sees a chance to go mixed in the current climate especially at a University and overcome his problems. Otherwise, he would surely have kept the boys choir going.

This is going to be a very sad year at St John's. To listen to that fabulous all male choir sing the Advent carol service for the last time will be unbearable for me others and many people and probably quite moral sapping for the boys, especially those who are likely to be there next year, who may, with justification, think that their efforts as a top line are no longer valued and required.

[DracoM]

<< This is going to be a very sad year at St John's. To listen to that fabulous all male choir sing the Advent carol service for the last time will be unbearable for me others and many people and probably quite morale sapping for the boys, especially those who are likely to be there next year, who may, with justification, think that their efforts as a top line are no longer valued and required. >>

My guess is that - at least for a bit - income from the latest CDs from the John's choir will sag.
BUT
ironically it will make the price of Guest etc CDs from way back rocket.

Either way, the college is likely to suffer - and not just financially.

Another guess - how long before John's pulls the plug on its choir?

[ardcarp]

Having heard the glories of St John's 'in the flesh' so to speak, I don't see Andrew N. presiding over any diminution in standards.

I can quite understand your point, Draco, that boys of a certain age don't (a) especially want to socialise with girls and (b) don't want to partake of the same activities. This (gross generalisation as it may be) certainly would have its impact on recruitement to a parish choir. I don't see it being quite the same at a prep school whose major function is to provide choristers.

[Braunschlag]

Read this - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Saw-Eternit...A%2C1899344071

It explains it all….

[Old Grumpy]

Read this - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Saw-Eternit...A%2C1899344071

It explains it all….

Very interesting...

...shame you linked to Bezos' outfit though. The publisher's website has the same message https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/3093.../9780141988597

[cat]

While that's an excellent book in the accounts of various choirs it provides, I can't say I found it as revelatory as others appear to have done. Surely we already knew that standards took a dive in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Not sure it has much to say on the topic of this thread either.

[french frank]

While that's an excellent book in the accounts of various choirs it provides, I can't say I found it as revelatory as others appear to have done. Surely we already knew that standards took a dive in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Not sure it has much to say on the topic of this thread either.

Only in as much as, just reading the blurb, it doesn't touch on the matter of girls singing, but this seems to have some relevance:

"It has been widely assumed that the King's style essentially continues an English choral tradition inherited directly from the Middle Ages. In this original and illuminating book, Timothy Day shows that this could hardly be further from the truth. Until the 1930s, the singing at King's was full of high Victorian emotionalism, like that at many other English choral foundations well into the twentieth century."

As I read it, that doesn't suggest that 'standards took a dive' but have now returned to a tradition hundreds of years old; but that this is an essentially modern sound, perhaps a hundred years old ('The choir's modern sound was brought about by two intertwined revolutions … '). It 'feels' as old as the stonework to modern ears.

[cat]

I think it's a bit of a straw man. Was it really widely assumed, prior to this book, that the choir has always sounded like it does today? Does the fact that its sound has changed over the decades and centuries really mean that any aspect of an English choral tradition has not been continued?

[french frank]

Was it really widely assumed, prior to this book, that the choir has always sounded like it does today? Does the fact that its sound has changed over the decades and centuries really mean that any aspect of an English choral tradition has not been continued?

No, but there are two separate considerations: one is the membership of the choir, which traditionally has always been boys and men only; the other is the much valued sound - 'the epitome of English choral singing' - which is so valued. What the book seems to be saying is that it is the 'special sound' which is valued, and which is the 20th-c. culmination of an evolution in Anglican choral singing. As to what was 'widely assumed, prior to this book', I'm suggesting that even here comments have been made which suggest that this is a centuries-old tradition. The centuries old tradition is, ' No girls'.