A choice to axe a combined choir at St John’s Faculty, Cambridge, in an try and make room for a “broader” vary of music has been condemned as “essentially regressive” by the previous archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Dame Sarah Connolly and Aled Jones.
The choice to cancel funding for St John’s Voices – which has female and male singers and has been operating since 2013 – will “diminish” choral music on the faculty and has left its members “devastated”, according to an open letter.
The letter says the choice in 2021 to permit feminine singers within the separate St John’s Faculty Choir has been “weaponised” to justify the disbanding of St John’s Voices, whose members have launched a petition to reserve it.
St John’s Voices has 14 feminine singers who can be left with out an outlet when the choir ends in June 2024.
Addressed to the school council, the letter states: “We’re devastated by this choice, which we imagine is a essentially regressive transfer for the school, the choral neighborhood in Cambridge, and the broader arts provision for girls within the UK.”
The faculty took the choice after a evaluate in 2023 and stated the step had been taken “to undertake a broader method to the supply of co-curricular alternatives in music for our college students, together with in numerous genres”.
St John’s Faculty declined to remark when approached by the Guardian, and there was no affirmation of what that “broader method” would imply in observe.
That lack of readability was criticised within the letter, which known as the decision-making course of unreasonable, whereas some stories have pitched the row as a battle between custom and the extra progressive beliefs of range and inclusion.
“A British choral custom with equal alternatives is one thing that St John’s Voices ought to be championing, not seeking to diminish,” the letter continues.
“It’s upsetting {that a} outstanding step ahead within the choral world (the admission of feminine singers into SJCC) has been weaponised towards the very existence of one other ensemble, supposedly within the title of broadening alternatives.”
Different supporters of the letter, which was posted on Wednesday night and requires the choice to take away funding to be reversed, embrace the broadcaster Alexander Armstrong and the host of the BBC actuality present The Choir, Gareth Malone.
The director of the choir, Graham Walker, will lose his job when the choir is disbanded on the finish of the Easter time period. “Terminating SJV will go away over 30 members with no choir, its director redundant, and a gap within the musical lifetime of the school and the broader college,” the letter says.
The choral custom at St John’s dates again 400 years however it is just since 2013 that ladies have been allowed to participate. Aquila, an all-female a cappella group was based in 2017 however is a “secular vocal ensemble” and never a part of the choral custom.
The problem of male-only choirs continues to be divisive, with the custom clashing with establishments which have signed as much as equal alternatives charters.
Anne Atkins, whose father was head of King’s Faculty, Cambridge, lately wrote about not being allowed to sing in its choir, which continues to be male-only, persevering with a practice that stretches again to Henry VI who decreed there ought to be 16 boys within the choir.
Different choirs have turn into inclusive lately however “there are nonetheless comparatively few alternatives for ladies in our main choral establishments”, wrote Atkins.
