Yorkie wrote:Pink and blue - interesting example of fixed gender stereotyping you chose to belittle me with.
I think that you're reading scorn in my levity, Yorkie. I'm not at all out to belittle anyone, and I'm absolutely not here for a fight.
I'm aware of the twentieth-century flip in pink/blue connotations; but I'm also aware that upon the birth of a healthy baby (with unambiguous primary sex characteristics), staff at so many western hospitals say, 'It's a [whatever], Mrs Walker!', snip the cord, and get the child into a pink or blue beanie or into a plastic bassinette with a pink or blue ID card. It's social short-hand. And it sticks around in ways both obvious and invisible.
Yorkie wrote:Now it is not only a matter of proving the equality of the sexes but also that there can be no differences. I find that a little sad.
The issue isn't so much that there musn't be differences; the issue is that insisting on and reinforcing these differences as things to be maintained at all cost can be hugely problematic and potentially damaging— as when working women consistently earn less than working men in comparable positions; or when young people whose self-presentations are considered somehow 'queered'—not 'masculine' enough, not 'feminine' enough— are repeatedly made targets of violence whislt uncomfortable teachers look the other way and commenters dismiss it all as 'kids just being kids'. Which, of course, turns into adults just being adults.
Yorkie wrote:Well I can hear the difference so therefore I am amazed when other people can't. I have to wonder if when somebody as musically untalented as I am can tell the difference why others seem unable to.
I think it's fair to say that not everyone listens to as much choral music as you do, and not everyone is as emotionally invested in one specific choir type as you are. My mother's listened to a houseful of boys chirping about for twenty years, and she can't make an accurate age or sex guess on a 'Pie Jesu' recording two times in ten. My father's worse still. (Then again, my mum once called Eminem a 'musical visionary' and likes to tell people that she sings like Amy Winehouse.
)
Yorkie wrote:I'm not aiming to prove anything - which of us is writing the thesis? And please share your veiled 'theories' (which almost carries a sinister threat to my ears).
Of course, if you're asking. This is where it should become all too clear, if it wasn't already obvious, that I'm approaching this whole question as a student of Anthropology, not as a student of Music.
Part of my thinking was sparked by a line from an article in the
Times a few years back:
A gentle revolution it may be, but it is inspiring a passionate debate across the country, in congregations where the sound (or, perhaps, sight) of mop-headed boys in cassocks is considered quintessentially English.
The implication that the cultural fondness for 'mop-headed boys in cassocks' might have something to do with a reluctance to welcome girls struck me as interesting. Not groundbreaking, but certainly interesting. And it was especially interesting when mapped onto the persistent imagery of the choirboy as something of an angel and his voice as a sexless, ethereal, angelic sound. Sexless, but necessarily male? Ethereal, but, in the words of Aled Jones, girl-chasing and football-playing? It's a bit dissonant. It's interesting, to me, to see so much stress laid on a physical, biological foundation for the boy's treble voice (and
only the boy's treble voice), when, on the other hand, there is so much resting on casting the boy chorister as something angelic, somehow removed from the physical and biological world.
The image of the choirboy is just as important, it often seems, as the treble voice. Maybe not to music, on the direct level of sound, but socially. It's a social trope, almost. It's entered into our language. It is a sign, a symbol of something, whether that something is Englishness, high churchishness, eternity, angelicness, boyhood, one's own childhood, tradition, the good-old-days... There's a lot invested in the image, in which girls, thanks to their very, very recent subsumation into the tradition, have no or very little part yet. But we quickly figure out that we're meant to place emphasis on the voice and to ignore the image in the discussion of choristers, because we're afraid of conjuring up any less-than-savoury Room Elephants.
And you're absolutely right, Yorkie; for some, there
is a sinister element to it— a sinister element that, unfortunately, I found substantiated just yesterday in a fairly stomach-turning way. A sinister element that medieval artists and architects acknowledged when they frescoed images of the Sirens around abbey choirs. Does something sinister motivate all interest in boys' choirs? No; of course not. That's like suggesting something about all Roman Catholic priests, all P.E. teachers, all football wives, or all— well, all anyones or anythings. But the very existence of that sinister intent, even if only in a small population, has, it seems to me, shaped the way in which everybody else thinks about and discusses singing boys— and shaped the ways in which advocates must frame their arguments for excluding girls from cathedral choirs.
...
Phew.
If anyone needs me, I'll be in my trench.
—but it seems that high-quality recordings of girls singing are quite difficult to come by— unless you're wanting such choral gems as 'Would You Like to Swing on a Star?' or 'Accentuate the Positive.' (Why, Salisbury? Why?) Further, finding (for instance) Salisbury's boys on Piece X and then finding Salisbury's girls on Piece X? And then finding the combined treble line on Piece X? Forget it. I may have to sneak around and record evensongs for the next three years to have the means for that sort of comparison. (And even then, I'd expect to find the boys on most of the more beloved anthems and the girls on quite a number of the Marian pieces and works by female composers.) 
I suspect that it's just because I'm a filthy lefty who eagerly awaits the enlightenment of our so rigidly-gendered society and the liberation of children (and adults) from artificially pink and blue boxes. That, or I'm actually working toward a law degree with a very infamous client already in mind. You might have heard of him. Horns, tail. Hot-weather type of person.