Smash all-male choirs? A choral expert responds

Much fuss has been caused in the choral world these past few days by a suggestion from Lesley Garrett that it's high time all-male choirs were abolished. Some defenders of the great English choral tradition, in which these have featured since forever, have been up in arms. Others lean strongly towards providing equal opportunities for girls to sing, because at the moment they still miss out, and have done for centuries.

I was somewhat amused by a press release that landed in my in-box the other day in which a famous choral conductor vaunted the importance of keeping choirs all-male, saying - without irony - that boys would lose opportunities to make music if they admit girls (um, what does he think has been happening to women all this time?) and that the choir is defined by its people, after which he lists a number of highly distinguished personages going back to the 19th century, who are of course all men. My instinct is to cheer on Lesley Garrett's opinion. At the same time, though, I know it is really not as simple as perhaps we'd like.

What solutions could we present? One is that every institution that has a boys' choir should also start one for girls - indeed, many have already done so. But Anna Lapwood, a choral conductor and director of music at Pembroke College, Cambridge, has another suggestion. Here's a guest post from her on the topic. JD

The choir of Pembroke College, Cambridge conducted by Anna Lapwood sing Eric Whitacre's Lux Aurumque

GIRLS IN CHOIRS: A SOCIAL ISSUE

I grew up wishing I could be a chorister. And yet, when I saw today’s article by Ben Dowell in the Radio Times advocating introducing girls into King’s College Choir, I was angry. 

I consider myself an advocate for gender equality and for encouraging young woman in choral music. I was the first female Organ Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford; I was part of an all-male choir; I saw how far we had to go before we could achieve equality. 

However, I also eavesdropped on the unique dynamic of an all-male choir. What I saw was mutual respect and support; an environment where the back row understood what it was like to be a chorister, and helped them through it.

Having set up a girls’ choir at Pembroke College, I’ve observed the wonderful dynamic that comes from an all-female choir too: not only the shared singing, but a shared understanding of getting your ears pierced for the first time, or braces, or periods. A girls’ choir like ours, or the choirs at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge and Merton College, Oxford, provide an opportunity for a non-linear educational experience, in which children seven years apart can come together to make music. This is unique, and it’s important. 

I have worked with numerous treble lines made up of boys; I have watched them perform as professional musicians to thousands of people without batting an eyelid. I’ve also watched them turn into quivering messes when they’re talking to a girl they fancy. The issue, in my mind, is not one of the sound of the voices; the voices of young boys and girls are both wonderful, and should be celebrated. The issue is one of social implications. 

Research has shown that boys sing better in an all-male environment, in which it is totally normal to love singing, and do it every day. I fear that if we were to mix the treble line, the boys would lose confidence. 

Choral conductor Suzi Digby did an experiment several years ago, creating two parallel after-school classes. One was mixed with 12 girls and 12 boys, and the other was all boys. At the end of two years, both groups had grown to have over 40 singers, and yet there were only two boys left in the mixed class. It’s not a huge step from boys losing confidence to giving up entirely.

Anna Lapwood conducting the girl choristers at Pembroke

Losing boy choristers completely is something I feel would be a great loss for both the choral world and the wider world of classical music. The education of a chorister is gruelling; in addition to the busy life of a school child, he or she is expected to rehearse every morning and sing Evensong almost every day. 

It is this education that produces the lay-clerks of tomorrow, and more recently-formed girls’ choirs are now providing this opportunity for females; daily familiarity with the rhythm and repertoire of choral worship is one of the most important aspects of a chorister’s education.

 If, as has been suggested, girls were to sing half the services in a place such as King’s, this education would be diluted for both the boys and the girls. We’ve made huge progress in the past 20 years, creating more and more opportunities for girls in choral music, and yet we’ve still not achieved equality. In my mind, there is only one way to do this: a choir needs to be set up with an all-female treble line, singing with male and female lower parts. This would be a choir where girls would sing six services a week; a choir where girls would receive the full educational scholarship of a chorister. This would be a step towards equality. 

I have absolutely no doubt that we need to generate more opportunities for girls in choral music. However, these opportunities should be in addition to the ones available to boys, not a call to abolish all-male choirs altogether. 

Anna Lapwood

Director of Music, Pembroke College, Cambridge

My first opera...

I've enjoyed taking a trip down an operatic memory lane for Sinfini, plus talking to a range of celebs about their first experiences of opera and what got them hooked - among them ballerina Zenaida Yanowsky, actor Henry Goodman and comedian Rainer Hersch. Read the whole thing here: http://sinfinimusic.com/uk/features/2013/02/my-first-opera-curtain-up/



What follows is a further ramble on the topic...

Thinking back, I owe my whole opera thing to my parents, who never talked down to me about music when I was a kid. They seemed to know how to encourage an enthusiasm without piling on undue pressure and when I picked up that Magic Flute box (tempted by the picture: left) and wanted to know what was in it, my mum showed me how to follow the translated text as if it was the most natural thing in the world (it was the classic Klemperer recording, in German, without dialogue). It was good of them to put up with my unfortunate singalongaluciapopp tendencies, too.

I’m not surprised they bought me an alternative. This was easier: just one LP, in English, much of it positively designed for singing along. It was The Little Sweep by Benjamin Britten: the story of a group of children and their nanny who rescue a small boy chimney sweep from his abusive employer. It was easy to follow and impossible to forget. Nobody ever seemed to perform it, though. At the time, I had no idea there could be anything sinister in a song about a boy in a bath and I still find myself humming that syncopated, swingy waltz melody now and then. I’ve never once seen this opera live. A footnote: one of the child singers on that recording turned up in my year at university and we used to have a whale of a time playing violin and piano music together (he’d swapped the voice for the fiddle long before). I enjoyed the notion that I’d cut my musical teeth by inadvertently listening to my duo partner singing.

I fell for Eugene Onegin on the car radio, but seeing it in the theatre aged about ten (starring a young soprano named Kiri Somethingorother) left me colder than I'd hoped it would. It was all a bit static, it was hard to hear the words and I couldn't work out why on earth Tatyana fell for Onegin in any case, as he wasn't exactly an appealing kind of chap. 

Eventually live performance did enchant me – but not as you might expect. It was comedy, courtesy of English National Opera. The gods in Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld perching on their clouds; Lesley Garrett stripping off as Adele in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus; and above all, the sight of my father reduced to complete screeching, weeping helplessness over the nuns in drag in Rossini’s Count Ory. This could only happen in the theatre. And when it happened, there was no point resisting. 

Interesting to see that while a lot of my interviewees cite Mozart and Puccini as their ways in to opera, Ed Gardner thinks those aren't such a good place to start. He plumps straight for Shostakovich and Janacek. 

 

Lesley Garrett to play the spy who sang to Hitler

We interrupt the seasonal festivities to bring you news of a film in production based upon the extraordinary story of Margery Booth. An opera singer from Wigan, Booth became a spy during World War II and apparently sang to Hitler while state secrets were hidden in her knickers. Imperial Film Productions is developing the project with screenwriter Ralph Harvey, director Xavier Koller and, in the leading role, the one and only Lesley Garrett. The cast is also to include Udo Kier as Hitler.

More information about Margery Booth: The Spy in the Eagle's Nest can be found at www.margerybooth.com. Interested co-producers are urged to get in touch via the website to share the bringing of this fascinating story to the screen.

Ralph Harvey writes:

Margery Booth – The Opera Singer who spied on Hitler
It was her beautiful mezzo-soprano singing that melted the heart of one of the most evil men in history.  From humble beginnings in Wigan, Margery Booth, by sheer determination and armed with the magical gift of a magnificent singing voice, rose to be one of the top opera stars of Europe.
Courted by Ernst Ströhm, a wealthy business man and heir to a brewery fortune, Margery succumbed and eventually married him.  Although the union was initially successful, it ultimately proved to be a disaster and after the war in Europe ended Margery eventually divorced him.
Through her husband’s contacts in high society in Germany she rose to the top, and her highly acclaimed performances drew the attention of none other than the Führer himself, Adolf Hitler, who on one occasion personally delivered 200 red roses wrapped in a swastika flag and, totally enamoured of her, continued to ogle her throughout her performances from his private box.
Margery had, however, been recruited by MI6 whilst MI9 had also recruited John Brown, a former but now disillusioned member of Mosley’s infamous Fascist Blackshirts, and through the SOE arranged for him to be captured on the Normandy beaches so that he could work as a spy in a PoW camp.
As a guest in Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair, Margery rubbed shoulders with the top ranking Nazi hierarchy and, now totally trusted by Hitler, she was allowed to visit PoW camps where she not only sang but was able to contact John Brown and collect secrets for passing on.
Margery was suspected at one stage by the SS who moved in to search her, but John thrust some secret plans down her dress when they weren’t looking.  They escaped their search unscathed, but henceforth she was forever known as Margery the “Knicker Spy”.
In the closing days of the war she was arrested again but escaped during an Allied bombing raid just as she was about to be tortured, eventually reaching the American lines.  Then nearly shot, but fortunately it was her accent which miraculously saved her as an American soldier recognised it, having had been in Lancashire before the war.
Margery Booth’s story is one of the most amazing – and until now untold – stories of the war, and I have been privileged to research and write it for Imperial Film Productions and now on IMDb as Margery Booth: The Spy in the Eagle’s Nest.
This then is her story. 

Ralph Harvey – screenwriter.