The Women Should Be Silent in the Churches
Poor old St Paul. It probably never occurred to him as he dashed off his letter that his words would set off centuries of furious argument and be used to justify the oppression of women in the church right up until the present day. Would he be upset, I wonder, to know that a woman curate in a Cornish church that bears his name was on sick leave after a vicious campaign by someone opposed to women’s ordination culminating in physical attack. When I decided a few years ago to formally leave the Roman Catholic church on account of the repeated homophobic and misogynistic blasts from Rome, and join what I perceived to be a more accepting denomination, I wasn’t at the time struck by the irony of joining a congregation in which adult women were not permitted to sing in the choir. I had been brought up in a tradition in which women were not permitted to do anything – could not, in fact, cross the altar rail on to the sanctuary (unless they were nuns who somehow didn’t count). My new tradition did ordain women, so the shock of seeing for the first time a woman wearing a chasuble brought me to tears, and began the process of healing all those messages I had absorbed as a child about the inferiority and uncleanness of women. I noted the rainbow clergy and servers’ team, and came to the conclusion that this congregation, without needing to make a big song-and-dance about it, was a safe place for gay Christians. I did, however, ask the person who interviewed me when I joined about the absence of women from the church’s powerful musical life. The answer I got shocked me to the core…………………….”Oh, women only join choirs to find husbands”!! What I expected to hear was that although there is no longer any liturgical argument for the absence of adult female voices, there is certainly a musical argument, as it changes the sound, and if what you are after is the “Anglican hoot”, you won’t get it unless all your female choristers are Emma Kirkby. However many of the experienced female members of local choirs who I could see sitting silent in the congregation appeared to have carried on singing even after having found husbands, and in my own choirs most of the husbands were members too. What that comment really meant was that adult women who sing are not “real musicians”, and the sound that their voices produce is not considered “angelic”. Of course the authentic way to achieve that “cathedral sound” is to use castrati, but even the Roman Catholic church gave up on that idea a few centuries ago and I suspect that re-introducing it might not have helped the choir with its recruitment difficulties. It was an excuse, and despite the ostensible inclusivity, an attachment to an old-fashioned and unhealthy misogyny. In the end, because not enough little boys were coming forward to be choristers, women under 30 were admitted, and of course that proved to be the thin end of the wedge………….but the divide between “professional” and “other” musicians remains, and the model is absolutely not about enabling the congregation to sing but about providing a stage on which the clergy and designated musicians perform and the role of the congregation-audience is to admire and applaud.
Is the “angelic sound” what we’re really looking for? I am old enough to remember the tremendous pain and disruption caused in the RC tradition by Vatican 2 and the changes in church music that followed. Out went beautiful Latin plainchant, in came guitars and folk hymns in the vernacular……….and out with the plainchant went many people who loathed the trendy music and sometimes banal lyrics and missed their favourite old-fashioned, sexist and sectarian tunes. Some congregations broke away and stubbornly stuck to the old Latin. People get extremely attached to their favourite music and extremely upset when it is tinkered with – and it was not so much tinkered with as completely trashed. I listened to the argument raging across our own dining-table at home………………..my deeply musical father was a traditionalist who detested pop music and avoided disturbance to his spiritual life by going to the early mass which was a safe folk-hymn-free zone. Mum was much more of a rebellious iconoclast who, while professing a love for the contemplative beauty of the old Latin, still rather enjoyed the happy-clappy excitement of modern hymns. From my point of view, the main difference was that instead of sitting bored in the pews listening to men in funny clothes chanting in a language I couldn’t understand, I was up on the sanctuary with other people of both sexes and various ages as part of the “music group”, leading the worship. The new music was inclusive. It was modern. It was simple enough for non-professional musicians to play or sing, and everyone could understand the words. As time went on, people even began to write hymns using inclusive language and doing away with some of the terrifying pictures of God as a vindictive tyrant in favour of kinder, even (shock-horror!) feminine imagery. Meanwhile my musical spiritual journey swept me through folk hymnody, Taize chants, Church of Scotland congregational belters (a very different model of church music from the Catholic one of my childhood), South African freedom songs, and secular songs that acquired spiritual meaning such as Kate Bush and Phil Collins’ “Don’t Give Up” which at one point literally saved my life. People in recovery often talk about how their musical tastes changed as they got well and the difference between their “drunk music” (Patsy Cline seems to be a favourite…….) and what they listen to now. I will forever associate REM’s “Everybody Hurts” with rehab where we played it constantly to remind ourselves of the dangers of self-pity. And in the background, of course, I lived on the constant diet of sacred classical music that any choral singer knows……………..it would be virtually impossible to sing in any of the dozens of well-established local choirs, big or small, without singing “God stuff” on a regular basis. I realised recently that I have spent considerably more time singing sacred music in concert halls than in churches. Secular amateur choirs and most professional ones are generally mixed, so the notion that “women don’t sing” is a peculiarly religious one.
I had been drawn to the church by the music, and I remain full of admiration for the extremely hard work, commitment and expertise that goes into it. However after a while I began to wonder on what beliefs and attitudes that model of church music was based, and it came to the point where I could no longer tolerate it. Were they perpetuating the idea that music and hymnody which is offered to God is something terribly difficult and complex for which you need professional training? You need to be able to sight-read, and you need to be young? The new Church of Scotland hymn-book, like the old one, contains the music as well as the words, in the expectation that the congregation will follow it. Taize has demonstrated that huge ad-hoc “choirs” of untrained musicians can sing parts. The hymn-book used by that congregation is 20 years old, is stuffed full of fearsomely non-inclusive language, and was edited entirely by men. The assumption was made that everyone knew the hymns, as no music is provided; the congregation are not enabled to sing the harmonies, and if the hymn happens to be one of the ones that only comes round on special feast-days, hard luck if you didn’t manage to learn the tune last year. The response to my questions about why the congregation were not given the music was that if people wanted they could buy their own hymn-book. It became increasingly difficult for me to feel any distinction between going to church there and going to a concert. In fact, for me there isn’t one: going to a concert is as much a spiritual experience as going to church and quite often more so, and who can forget that sacred moment as the last note sounds and the silence goes on for what seems like ages until the spell breaks, the audience returns from wherever the music has taken them, and the wave of applause crashes on to the stage? Not for nothing are great opera singers called “divas” – goddesses – no amount of listening to recordings can compare with the experience of going to hear one of these amazing creatures standing right in front of you and watching them “switch it on” when the accompaniment starts…….
It all comes down to what the church community believes to be important. Is it about enabling as many people as possible to “make a joyful noise” like Joyce Grenfell’s lady choristers – “We are not very musical, but we are very keen………………….” – and accepting that it’s going to be a bit mixed and may not always sound that great. Or is it about a model of service and hard work towards a standard of beauty and perfection which sometimes places an intolerable burden on a few and excludes the many? In the end, I had to admit that the them-and-us cathedral -choir model of church music did not work for me as my regular form of worship because I was jealous. As a singer I could not sit there and listen to a choir that excluded people like me because we were the wrong age and sex: I got enough of that in my personal life and it was not in keeping with my belief in an inclusive God. And then I was head-hunted by a Church of Scotland church choir, and left. A different set of challenges presented themselves, to do with a different tradition and congregational history. I started sidling up to people at coffee-time and saying “Why don’t you join the choir?” and got some revealing answers, many of which were not “Because I can’t sing.” But in this more egalitarian tradition, it was at least not because they were women.
