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Any music loving Johnians on?
Old Git Roundabout 24 Mar 24 08:29
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Your ( female) Master has high handedly abolished St John’s Voices, a world class Choir which provides women with an opportunity to sing at elite level in the Chapel.

There is a petition signed by 8800 people and rising, supported by a former Archbishop of Canterbury, a Chief Conductor of the Berlin Phil and many other eminent musicians. And Aled Jones.

 

It’s a remarkable act of cultural vandalism, the effect of which will disproportionately affect women in the College and University. 

Please consider signing the Petition.

 

This news happened to be analysed in some depth on R4 a couple of days ago and it seems to me that the issues involved seem to be much more nuanced than those that you have highlighted.

The College's argument is than even though the choir there gives more prominence to female voices than many other college choirs in the University and elsewhere the problem is that traditional chapel based choral music still has substantially more roles for males than females and, above all, participants tend to be predominantly white and middle class. 

Accordingly, the College was suggesting that the funding given by it to Johns Voices might be better spent in this day and age on musical and other activities that by their very nature encourage greater diversity amongst participants etc.

If they’re really worried about diversity it’s bizarre to do something which has a grossly disproportionate effect on women singers. 

You have also made the lazy assumption that they’re all white middle class and English. They aren’t.

What they are is a world class choir. Before deciding to destroy something like that you might think they have consulted the clergy and the Music Director.They didn’t . 

The so called ‘proposals’ were previously unheard of and were rushed out when it dawned on them that they were facing a full scale PR disaster. They fool no one. 

And it’s slightly tricky to base a decision on the saving of the relative pittance it costs when St John’s is sitting on an endowment generally reckoned to be £800 million. 

They will have almost certainly lost sums in excess of that pittance since many alumni have withdrawn their financial support for the College.

An even bigger and even less justified cock up than the BBC made with the BBC Singers. 

You have also made the lazy assumption that they’re all white middle class and English. They aren’t.

OGR, I did nothing of the kind myself. I was merely reporting the line taken by one of the commentators appearing on the R4 programme on which this whole issue featured.  Ok, the person in question may have had an 'anti-establishment, anti- elitist' axe to grind but that should not prevent them running that argument in public and for that other side of the argument to be heard too. Amongst other things, they maintained that the College's money could be even better spent in ways which benefitted women, if that was a principal feature of the defence that the petitioners wanted to run to keep the funding alive.

Ok TR. That is what they said, but there really isn’t a lot of nuance on this one. 

Strong piece by Lord ( Michael) Berkeley in the Telegraph today. 

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