Requiem sounds for the all-male cathedral choir

ON CHRISTMAS morning 18 angelic voices will delight the congregation of Wells Cathedral with their In Dulci Jubilo anthem. Worshippers may praise the purity, the accuracy, the tone, but what some at the back will not realise is that all the choristers are girls.

This year, for the first time, Malcolm Archer, Organist and Master of the Choristers at Wells Cathedral, is fielding his girls' choir for the Christmas Day matins and sung eucharist, and the Boxing Day carol service. The boys have been told they must wait their turn. By next year the voices of some will have broken, so they will no longer be eligible.

Such a radical departure from the centuries-old all-male choral tradition has been greeted with dismay by the Campaign for the Defence of the Traditional Cathedral Choir (CDTCC). One member, Michael Howard, formerly Organist and Master of the Choristers at Ely Cathedral, said: "We are asked to resort to faking it because of a certain sort of feminism which is so keen to advance women's equal rights that it refuses to recognise basic biological differences between the sexes."

The advent of girl choristers in cathedrals is the latest equal opportunities row to divide the Church of England after women priests. Salisbury Cathedral was first to recruit girls, in 1990. Now nearly a third of cathedrals have opened their choir stalls to girls. So far, only Manchester Cathedral and St Mary's, Edinburgh, have mixed choirs. Salisbury Cathedral boys' and girls' choirs sing together at Christmas, Easter and end of term. Last week they gave a joint concert at St James's, Piccadilly, in London.

Peter Giles, a former lay clerk at Ely, Lichfield and Canterbury cathedrals, and chairman of CDTCC, fears mixed choirs are the next step. The all- male tradition will be dead in a decade, he says, because the cost of running a parallel girls' choir - estimated at the Dean of Winchester Cathedral to be pounds 35,000 a year - comes from the cathedral budget. If money is short, Mr Giles feels the choirs will be amalgamated.

Opinion is divided about whether there is a difference. Canon Paul Lucas, precentor of Wells Cathedral, feels only the "cognoscenti of the cathedral" will be able to tell that it is a girls' choir singing on Christmas Day. "Most of us wouldn't know from the quality of the sound," he said. "It's a bit like the difference between a Beaujolais last year and this year. Only a wine connoisseur is going to detect the difference."

Desmond Sergeant and Graham Welch, of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Music Education, played recordings of boys', girls' and mixed choirs to experts. Most were misidentified. "We have a clear stereotype of a cathedral boy choir sound," said Mr Welch. "This study shows that if girls are trained in that tradition, they sound the same as boys."

Mr Giles said: "A boy's voice breaks at 13 or so and he'll never sing treble again, but a girl will sing soprano for the rest of her life. There's not much equal opportunity about it. Nature ain't very equal."