Choral singing is one of the oldest and most popular British art forms. Long before Tallis, Byrd and Purcell, choirs in inchoate cathedrals were making their early clerestories ring. Church choirs made the first music in England. The choirboy in his scarlet robes, white surplice and ruff is a defining image of national life. Not so much an Anglo-Saxon attitude, but an angel crossed with Just William?

This tradition is threatened, according to an article today in times2. It is 30 years since the first cathedral choir in the United Kingdom (Edinburgh's Episcopal Cathedral) accepted girls. And now girl choristers form more than a quarter of the total. Adult choral societies flourish in the lay world, but choirs in parish churches dwindle. Many cathedrals have recruited girls' choirs, but they segregate them from their boys' choirs. In England, only Manchester Cathedral has a mixed choir.

Traditionalist precentors claim that a boy's treble is a different instrument to a girl's soprano. And that to mix them muddles the sound. It would be instructive to conduct a blind hearing of this theory. Another notion is that boys walk away from choirs when girls are brought in. This seems improbable in an age when the two sexes grow up together more freely than before. When church attendance is falling, it is possible that fewer children are hooked early by the reward of choirs. But choral singing is one of the great pleasures of existence. It is the nearest Man (and Woman) can get to flying. Let the pealing organ blow to the full-voiced choir below. To fret about the sex of the voices is musically irrelevant.