viabuona wrote:Well, maybe you tell us first of all in which science you write this thesis (philosophy, sociology, religion, physics, etc.)
Of course. I ought to have said it in the first place. The 'science' in which I'm writing is Anthropology, but—and this, I'm sure, would have half of the course and a number of the faculty coming after my blood—I try to avoid framing it as a matter of the 'social sciences.' I don't know where I sit with the term generally. It often feels that the discipline is, as we move away from trying to quantify the abilities of 'the other' (for instance) is more of a 'practical humanities.' 'Field humanities.' Something. But science? Nah; I'm tending to keep away from the 'lies, damned lies and statistics' when possible.
(Besides: I once exploded a lab set-up in school. Enormously messy. Science and I don't tend to get on well.)
yorkie wrote:Before I answer the questions I would like to know what your personal opinion is (I asked you on your Newbie introduction post but you never got back to me).
Sorry for that, Yorkie; I've just now looked back and found your question, which I likely never saw because I was up to my eyes in end-of-term papers and finishing up with exams. (Read as: I'm atrocious with deadlines and had procrastinated to the point of terror in that week before Christmas.) I hadn't meant to ignore you.
In terms of this thread, I hadn't intended on coming out swinging with my opinion, since I've learned that it makes a lot of people quite unhappy; but since you've asked (and since I'd rather discuss here at the moment than actually put honest work into my paper) :
yorkie wrote:I get the feeling that you think girls are unfairly treated in this matter but that is just me speculating.
In a way.
I know that bodies like the CTCC enjoy flaying the media/government/parents/schools/etc. for (always in scare quotes) 'political correctness' for its own sake. I hear the word 'unfair' in a drawn-out whine, and that isn't how I mean it. (Though, to be fair, I'm sure that many of those parents/schools/politicians
do whine 'unfair' because it's the easy thing to do; it's putting a quick little bandage on the thing.) If there's inequity here, then it's only being disguised as, 'Oh, look at the poor girls who don't get to sing. I demand a change.'
I love the sound of a boys' treble line, be it over the voices of men in the acoustics of a cathedral or, as in Libera's case, split umpteen times into a really lovely SSSSSAAA(etc.) arrangement in a concert hall or baseball park. (Or at a rock concert!) In terms of my biased personal preference as far as cathedral music goes, I would choose Winchester or St John's College over the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or the Harry Simeone Chorale ninety-six-and-a-half times out of 100.
Changing the composition of Libera—admitting girls alongside or in place of the boys—would, to be perfectly honest, likely try my enthusiasm for the group, just as admitting girls to choristerships at King's would likely do. Everyone has a personal bias, and that's mine. I can acknowledge that. Much of it has to do with my having internalised the image of childhood that the choirboy has come to represent; much of it, as I believe I've mentioned somewhere in another thread, has to do with nostalgia for my own childhood; much of it has to do with the kind of stellar education that I know choristers receive.
But precious little of it has to do with the sound of the choir. I can't help but think that the so-called essential, eternal, ephemeral (or what have you) quality of the boy's voice is 'the old lie' in this old argument, and I have a difficult time buying into the idea that 'boys' voices alone are the ones suited to such-and-such a genre, because they sound such-and-such a way.' Just listen to how celebrated treble voices have changed over the past century. We've invented the Essential Treble Voice for ourselves, and we've internalised the idea into our collective imagination.
The Treble Chorister Voice, I think, is just as socially-constructed as the Pop Princess Voice, as the Teen Boy Band Voice. It's down to education, if not in full then at least in enormous part, and if it's only boys who are being educated and conditioned to sing in such a way, of course it's only the boys who will sing that way.
fan_de_LoK wrote:Dr Peter Giles, Vice chairman of the Campaign for the Traditional Cathedral Choir...
Aah, right. Regarding the Campaign for the Traditional Cathedral Choir, I'm a bit torn; while I think that the very heart of their heart is in the right place—that is, in encouraging boys to sing and in trying to provide them spaces in which to do so when so much of the world would mock them—I honestly find a lot of what they actually write down to be barely short of despicable in tone and in implication. But that's another kettle altogether.
My nasty little secret is that, when it's all boiled down, my thesis is perhaps only superficially about choristers. Does introducing girls into a previously all-male choir drive boys of their peer-group away? Not universally, but that certainly seems to be the case in many places. But that, I truly, truly believe, is a symptom of a much larger problem—one that reaches far beyond Anglican choral music specifically or even music in general—and not the devil in itself.
If we didn't—consciously or subconsciously, through popular music and television, through religious practice, in schools, in sport, in games, through clothing, through phrases like 'man up' or 'sit like a lady' or 'don't be such a girl' or 'grow a pair'—constantly pit girls against boys, we wouldn't have the problem of male flight from the choirs. If we didn't set children up as potential threats to each other in cases like this (my main issue with the CTCC), children wouldn't be threats to each other.
In Frank Wedekind's 1890 play
The Awakening of Spring, Moritz, a nervous young adolescent who becomes a large part of the 'tragedy' of the play's subtitle, tells his friend that he hopes to raise his future children, boys and girls alike, in the same clothes, in the same room, doing the same things; he concludes, 'It seems to me that if they grew up that way, they would be easier in mind than we are under the present regulations.'
I have no way of proving that, of course; society changes so slowly. But I'm inclined to agree.
Ahem. Now that you all must have me pinned as a subversive, tree-hugging, patchouli-burning, pot-smoking, granola-eating, long-haired, fire-extinguisher-throwing, in-need-of-manning-up pinko sissy anarchist madman—!
symphonica7 wrote:and Mixed Choirs!!!! aged between 7 to 16
Wow; PCSM are just fantastic in that concert. Their "Pueri Concinite" (also from that series, I think) was one of my highlights this past Christmas.
Rebecca (: wrote:As for their popularity, I think it would go down for some types of fans, and up for others.
Is there a certain type of fan for which you think their popularity would go up or down? I'm not trying to catch you out, I promise. I was just wondering if you thought it would be a random change or whether, say, they would see increases in popularity among peer boys but decreases among older women, etc.