Cathedral Choirs rated?

[inquires]

I am pleased you posted it - give us all a chance to rail against such vanity!

[Quilisma]

I'm relieved to note that this is the same egregiously awful "article" which caused eyes to roll among liturgical musicians when it first appeared, more than a year ago. I supposed I "should" be flattered that the choir in which I have sung for the past ten years happens to have "made the cut"... But frankly the whole thing is nothing more than a stupid piece of clickbait concocted by the kind of PR/marketing "content creators" who like to pretend that what they put out there is interesting but who must secretly know that it's meaningless and of no consequence whatsoever.

I'm glad that people have noticed that not all of the "illustrative" videos linked are even of the right choir, and that many of the selections are distinctly arbitrary. (The one used for the choir in which I sing would not have seemed the most obvious choice from all those which are available of us; it's also from several years ago, and from several years before the "article" was concocted.) And the same can be said of the which choirs are featured and which aren't. Sure, all of them are, or at least are often, excellent choirs. But "others are available" too, and everything fluctuates.

The idea that there is, or should be, a fixed league table, and that choirs are either "hot" or "not" because of which they happen to be, is insidious and noxious. Most of us who work in liturgical music feel it's arrant nonsense. Unfortunately it can also contribute to the idea that a particular singer on a particular putative career path should be aiming towards a particular timetable of outcomes by "moving further and further up in the world", like footballers seeking transfers to progressively more and more prestigious (and mega-rich) clubs, and that could potentially lead to the very unhelpful mindset that X should really be somewhere "better", that X is "wasting their talents" and that X should be focusing more of their care and attention elsewhere.

That doesn't mean that it's wrong to want to "upgrade" oneself, of course: after all, there are often vast disparities in pay and conditions between one foundation and another, and the lure of prestigious foundations might be strong. But we need to take all of this with a huge pinch of salt. And we can start by ignoring "articles" like this, or at least laughing at them.

[mopsus]

I haven't looked through to see which was the earliest (and hence most out of date) 'clip' for any of the choirs, but Guildford's appeared to be a good half-century old!

[DracoM]

Indeed - wow, really wished I hadn't put it on the For3 site!!

[Keraulophone]

really wished I hadn't put it on the For3 site.

Quite.

Minutes of our lives expunged to no good purpose.