CE Guildford Cathedral 14th March 2012

[Double Diapason]

Well there is such a disparity of opinion on here that I felt compelled to join in. I agree with most of DD's second paragraph; professional & amateur opinions are equally valid and many a professional is blinkered in a way that amateurs frequently are not, and I also doubt that the sharing of the workload between boys and girls is either needed or has much of an impact on 'tired' voices, though it may allow extra time to learn additional repertoire.

But I am alarmed by his first paragraph and am pretty sure that numerous experiments & examples have led us to realise that girls can be trained (should one so wish) to mimic exactly the sound of similar aged boys. Having followed this forum in the past I have no wish to give extra fuel to Lizzie's Winchester bias, but there they have a slightly older girl's top line I believe, which is not only absolutely first class and quite possibly the equal of the boys line there but also produces a very similar sound - though I would wager that is because they are trained in exactly the same way rather than because the DoM wishes to confuse the casual listener!

Winchester is a good example of one of the best Cathedral Girls Choirs on the planet and I assume that the DoM trains both boys and girls rather than the DoM training the boys and the ADoM the girls (which I disagree with BTW!)? Maybe Lizzie could clarify.
However good the Winchester girls are and how ever much they are trained to sound like boys they will never make the sound that the boys do. I'm not saying its better, more/less musical just different! Its not a criticism of the girls but that's just the way it is. A physical impossibility!

[Lizzie]

Winchester is a good example of one of the best Cathedral Girls Choirs on the planet and I assume that the DoM trains both boys and girls rather than the DoM training the boys and the ADoM the girls (which I disagree with BTW!)? Maybe Lizzie could clarify.
However good the Winchester girls are and how ever much they are trained to sound like boys they will never make the sound that the boys do. I'm not saying its better, more/less musical just different! Its not a criticism of the girls but that's just the way it is. A physical impossibility!

Sorry, only just got home from Choir Practice - yes, we old folk sing in Cathedrals too! I believe that at present our DoM trains the Boys and our ADoM the girls. Sadly though, we shall be losing Simon Bell at the end of the Summer term.
I think it would be fair to say that it is not the intention at Winchester to try to get the Girls to sound like the Boys. They both have very individual sounds and qualities, both very fine and when the forces are combined, they complement eachother exceptionally well. We are justifiably very proud of both teams and indeed, both sound wonderful with our excellent back row.
Yes, I'm biased but, who wouldn't be when surrounded by the music they ALL make?! Liz

[Tenebrae]

Well I didn't say they sounded the same or that there was any intention that they do so, but they are closer in sound to the boys at Winchester than is the case at say Salisbury, where a younger girls line makes a very different sound to their boys...and by the way I have seen Andy Lumsden conduct the girls at Winchester so even if Lizzie is correct in asserting that the ADoM does the majority of their training there, I am sure that some of the sound that the DoM wishes to create has been picked up by them - a 'house style' if you like. Winchester though are perhaps not the best example of my original point (though they may well be the best example of a girls' top line?) - and that was that I can't agree with DD when he states that it is a physical impossibility for girls to sound like boys. I suspect this may have been discussed at length before somewhere on this forum, or a previous incarnation of the forum, and don't want to send us round in circles but surely there were some well documented examples of trained ears failing the 'blind' test of: Is it a boys' or a girls' top line?

[terratogen]

A physical impossibility!

I don't know that this is wholly true. It's certainly the case that most boy treble lines will produce a sound different from that of most girl treble lines—even to my layman's ear, the two excellent groups of choristers at Winchester do sound a bit different—but I wonder how much of this, given boy and girl choristers of similar ages, is really biologically determined fact and how much of it is down to intentional musical training or unintentional social conditioning.

Maybe, as Tenebrae's said, Winchester is a bad example here, since its boy choristers are pre- to peripubescent and its girls peri- to post-pubescent, but for cathedrals whose boys and girls are pulled from the same 8-13 age group, I don't know that there's any major biological factor that should contribute to a 'boy sound' or a 'girl sound', except perhaps amongst the very most senior choristers.

The whole thing is difficult to pin down, since children mature at different rates, but the MRI studies I've looked into seem to suggest that physical differences in the vocal apparatus generally don't begin to emerge as sexually dimorphic and statistically significant until a point in later peripuberty—Tanner Stage III into Tanner Stage IV, or about 12.5 years to 14 years old—that, arbitrarily or not, marks the upper end of the age boundary for most choristers. Up to that point, voice differences between individual girls and between individual boys are quite likely to be more pronounced and measurable than differences between the voices of girls as a unit and of boys as a unit.

What does differ—and what, I suspect, does contribute to a choral 'boy sound' or 'girl sound'—is how groups of boys and girls use their voices, and these usages tend to split quite definitely (and quite remarkably) along gendered lines: on the whole, young girls learn quickly to speak more quietly, to utilise the higher reaches of their registers and often to 'up-talk' or 'down-talk', while boys—even very young boys whose voices have not yet begun to change—learn to rely on their lower frequencies and louder volumes and to 'talk flat'. This is why most adults can reliably distinguish even between prepubertal girl and prepubertal boy speakers whose vocal mechanisms are still of near-identical shape, size, and position.

That leaves the question, though: in foundations where the boys and girls are peers, why do some boy/girl comparisons produce markedly different sounds (Salisbury) and others almost identical ones (Wells)? Moreover, in foundations (Winchester, for instance) where the boys and girls are not peers and where different tones should perhaps be more reliably expected, why do the choristers make more similar sounds than some peer boys and girls do? Heightened awareness of what audiences consider 'appropriate?' House sound? DoM preferences?

I'd love to really get stuck into the research. In the meantime, I'm going to go on speculating that a tabard versus a surplice makes all the difference in the world!

[DracoM]

House sound is critical.
Both boys and girls in mid-Tanner stages are consciously and unconsciously almost obsessive mimics and will accommodate to local frequencies and intonations as a way of buying into ongoing relationship matrices.

[Wolsey]

...That leaves the question, though: in foundations where the boys and girls are peers, why do some boy/girl comparisons produce markedly different sounds (Salisbury)...

Is that the case now? During Richard Seal's tenure, they were indistinguishable - so much so that their 1994 CD Canticum Novum (Guild GMCD 7101) actually challenged the listener to decide which tracks were being sung by the boys/girls.

[terratogen]

Is that the case now? During Richard Seal's tenure, they were indistinguishable - so much so that their 1994 CD Canticum Novum (Guild GMCD 7101) actually challenged the listener to decide which tracks were being sung by the boys/girls.

Canticum Novum is one of my favorite disks from Salisbury. I think—though I can't be sure, since digital downloads still don't generally come with CD booklets—that I have a pretty good idea of who's singing what as far as Salisbury's recordings go. The sounds are only sometimes 'markedly different'; at times, detecting what little difference there is is a matter of following patterns in certain vowels or word endings, if that makes any sense.

That said, I had the pleasure of hearing the boys/men and the girls/men on two separate days a bit more than a year ago, and from my place in the cathedral, I think it very possible that I would have failed the blind test.

[Double Diapason]

I suspect this may have been discussed at length before somewhere on this forum, or a previous incarnation of the forum, and don't want to send us round in circles but surely there were some well documented examples of trained ears failing the 'blind' test of: Is it a boys' or a girls' top line?

Are they well documented? Where? I would be genuinely interested to explore this. I am not blowing my own trumpet but I have never been fooled and that is why I am so certain of my opinion that girls and boys will sound different, always!
I haven't heard the Seal Salisbury recording but will search it out. Maybe we could use that as a blind test and see if boarders can agree on what sex is singing which tracks?!

[Magnificat]

Sadly though, we shall be losing Simon Bell at the end of the Summer term.

Where is Simon going Lizzie?

VCC

[terratogen]

Are they well documented? Where? I would be genuinely interested to explore this.

There have been a few studies conducted over the last decade or so, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. (One, for instance, could be criticised for having too small a respondent population, another for pitting Winchester Cathedral's boy trebles against the girls' choir from a New Jersey middle school, and yet another another for realising too late that all of the boys' samples were Rennaissance polyphony and all the girls' samples Christmas carols.) Taken as a whole, they are (perhaps unsurprisingly) inconclusive: some conclude that listeners can identify the sex of a chorister or a group of choristers fairly reliably (60-70% of the time), while others find that listeners do no better than chance when asked to guess who's singing the top line. Every few years, a new study contradicts the previous one, and those with a dog in the race can (and do) latch onto the studies that support their beliefs and disregard the ones that don't.

I have maybe half a dozen peer-reviewed studies and a few less formal ones stashed on an external drive somewhere, but I don't have easy access to them right now, and I'm not sure what this house feels about re-sharing material from journals. If you're interested, though, DD, you might want to look into research by a Dr Graham Welch. He seems to be quite interested in children's voices generally and perceptions of cathedral choristers more specifically, and his work, if I'm remembering his papers correctly, strikes a really lovely balance between the technical, the physical, and the social considerations at hand. He's published quite a bit (sometimes alongside a Dr Howard or Dr Sergeant) and seems to have done the most and the most comprehensive work on the boy/girl chorister subject thus far. He and/or his partners have run tests with trained and untrained children, with choristers from the same foundation and from different ones, with 'professional' listeners and 'laymen', with choristers alone and with full choirs accompanied. If you're looking for information on the perceptions of 'trained ears', I believe it's one of his papers you're looking for.

Unless, of course, you meant the trained ears of this forum, in which case I apologise for going on and on!

[Tenebrae]

Where is Simon going Lizzie?

VCC

I think I can answer that...he is off to be Do(Choral)M at Dean Close School which dovetails with running the choirs of Tewkesbury Abbey

[Lizzie]

I think I can answer that...he is off to be Do(Choral)M at Dean Close School which dovetails with running the choirs of Tewkesbury Abbey

Sorry folks couldn't respond for two days as the site had locked me out! Tenebrae is right of course! Will be terribly missed by us all but will be a star in Tewkesbury too! Liz

[Magnificat]

Sorry folks couldn't respond for two days as the site had locked me out! Tenebrae is right of course! Will be terribly missed by us all but will be a star in Tewkesbury too! Liz

Good move for Simon I would say.

Super organist and this job will give him the chance to really develop his choir training skills with boys which I know he has always been very keen to do. The particular set up at Tewkesbury will allow him plenty of time to concentrate on this without many of the additional pressures of a full cathedral DoM position.

VCC

[Gabriel Jackson]

Good move for Simon I would say.

Super organist and this job will give him the chance to really develop his choir training skills with boys which I know he has always been very keen to do. The particular set up at Tewkesbury will allow him plenty of time to concentrate on this without many of the additional pressures of a full cathedral DoM position.

VCC

The job at Dean Close School involves working with teenagers (male and female) as well.

[Lizzie]

The job at Dean Close School involves working with teenagers (male and female) as well.

He will be superb at it and a whole lot of young people will reap great benefit from working with him. I look forward to singing under his direction for the last time in July for Nave Choir CE.

We sang our final services under Richard McVeigh this morning and it's also been a pleasure working with and learning from him. All the very best to him as he does a term at Salisbury as ADoM. We'll miss them both. Liz