What is to stop girls standing in the choir, shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts? Just the small matter of over 1,000 years of tradition, discovers Lucy Hodges.

The girls raised their eyes heavenwards and sang the opening line of Barry Rose’s “Morning glory, starlit sky”. It made the sweetest sound as it wafted up to Salisbury Cathedral’s lofty thirteenth-century roof. And they were a beguiling sight, these 17 girls in their green and blue tabards over white robes, with their Doc Martens poking out underneath.

On Christmas Day the same girls sang another anthem, “Hodie Christus Natus Est” by the Dutch composer Sweelink, this time with the Salisbury choir school boys. Nobody batted an eyelid. The girls are now a fixture in the Gothic cathedral. They sing alongside the men and hold their own in harmony with them.

Today it is accepted in the formerly sacrosanct choir school world or in that bit of it which has girl choristers that girls are as musical as boys. Which may be self-evident to you and me, but not necessarily to people who have been steeped in an all-male tradition that dates back over 1,000 years, in the case of York, to the time of the Venerable Bede.

Girls’ voices may be lighter and breathier but the girls work hard and are a bit quicker than their male counterparts. “They apply themselves very well, ” said Salisbury’s organist Richard Seale. “They want to get as much as they can out of it. They’re quite ambitious.”

Until 1991 all choristers in English choir schools were male. Many of the schools had gone co-educational during the 1970s and 1980s, but the choirs had remained the preserve of boys. Choir schools are in fact run on the same lines as other schools some are for day pupils, most take boarders. Most are independent, many with mediaeval foundations and two are maintained secondary schools. The one feature they have in common is the special education of hand-picked choristers, a small elite in each school.

Salisbury’s decision to take girl choristers and to have them singing separately from the boys except on special occasions like Christmas set off a minor revolution. Today four of the 39 choir schools belonging to the Choir Schools Association have girl choristers.

Edinburgh has a mixed choir, and Manchester will shortly have boys and girls singing together too. York Minster is opening its doors to girls next September. Other cathedrals have voluntary girls’ choirs in which singers are drawn from local schools rather than a choir school: Bristol, Wakefield, Rochester and Norwich fall into this category.

But it has not all been plain sailing. Behind the statistics lie furious debates about whether girls can sing as well as boys, whether ancient traditions are being undermined, and whether boys will be driven away from singing by the advent of girls. Like any closed world, cathedral life has its strengths, its centuries of history and distinction. But it also has its backbiting and factionalism.

People tend to have strong views for and against girls. Richard Shephard, headmaster of the Minster School in York, who is in favour, does not mince his words. “If being a chorister is an education, then it is morally indefensible to deny it to half of the population,” he says. “Implying that the only suitable musical medium for worshipping God is an all-male choir verges on the blasphemous I wonder what God would think about it?” He and like-minded heads are supported in their views by a climate of opinion which has led to women priests in the Church of England and reports from two archbishops’ commissions which recommended that English cathedrals should recruit girls to their choirs. But many organists and others in the cathedral hierarchies have been against.

At York Minster, for example, the organist Philip Moore was originally opposed to having girl choristers. Three years ago he was holding firm on the grounds that girls would dilute the boys’ achievement. Today he has accepted the inevitable, though he says: “I still stand firm by my reservations, but I am now going into this fully aware of the dangers.”

One of his objections was that boys achieved what they did through the frequency with which they did it, and that girls would reduce the boys’ opportunities. Boys sing so well because they do so every day, he said. Who would sing on broadcasts, recordings, concerts, tours and the like?

That worry has been assuaged by York Minster’s plan to take its choirs out into the diocese to perform for the community and increase their chances of singing. Moore was also won over by the enthusiasm of the girls who turned up last month to audition for the 20 new chorister places.

These candidates, pink-faced and bursting with excitement after their auditions were anxious to recount how silly were their brothers to want girls kept out of the choir. “I think we can sing as well as boys once we have been trained properly,” enthused Polly Lees, 11.

The girl choristers at York will sing separately from the boys just as they do at Salisbury and other places, the reason being that boys, apparently, would desert any choir that contained girls. According to choir school experts it is an incontrovertible sociological fact that boys between the ages of eight and 13 are willing to sing with their own sex but regard it as “sissy” or “uncool” to sing with girls.

This seems to be the main reason advanced by those institutions which are still holding out against girls, such as Chichester and Canterbury. David Flood, organist at Canterbury Cathedral, one of the most traditional choir schools in England which has no plans to take girl choristers, is worried at the effect “the Salisbury experiment might have on the fragile treasure trove of English boys’ choirs”.

Anyway, boys and girls sound quite different, says Flood. “A boy’s voice in the year or so before it breaks has a particularly magical quality,” he explains. “It is more powerful than a girl’s.” Female voices do not reach their peak until much later, according to Flood.

Opponents of the change cite cash problems to clinch their argument. “In these days of financial restriction, when cathedrals are not finding day-to-day finance easy, is it really right to build something which you don’t really need and might just extend the budget a little too far?” asks Flood.

Money is a problem for Winchester, where 12-year-old Emily Edmondstone has been waging a battle for girl choristers. The cathedral has bought time with the setting up of a working party. “We have decided in principle that we would like a girls’ choir,” says organist David Hill. “But we are not sure we can pay for it.”

To endow places for girl choristers, and put them on the same footing as the boys, would cost a fortune a cool Pounds 2m, according to Hill. That isn’t possible, so other alternatives will have to be investigated.

At Salisbury, for example, more than Pounds 500,000 has been drummed up through an appeal, a Downing Street dinner, marathon runs and the like. Each girl chorister is guaranteed Pounds 1,500 a year to help with fees of Pounds 6,000. No one is ever turned away for financial reasons, says the school. But the fact remains that Salisbury girl choristers are not funded as generously as the boys: they receive a scholarship worth one-quarter of the fees whereas boys get a half-fee scholarship.

Such inequality was something York Minister wanted to avoid, which is why its dean, the Very Rev Raymond Furnell, committed an estimated Pounds 1-2m of Minster money to endowing 20 places for girls. Furnell will not give the exact amount but it will mean that York girls will receive 80 per cent remission of fees just as the boy choristers do.

Salisbury maintains that the majority of its choristers would not be in fee-paying schools without its scholarships and its results certainly speak for themselves. Salisbury girls have won music scholarships to Sherbourne girls’ school and King’s College, Taunton, while Headington School, Oxford, created its first music scholarship for a girl trained at Salisbury choir school.

It has all happened in the space of four years. Novelist Joanna Trollope, author of The Choir, who addressed the Choir Schools Association on this topic in 1991, must be stunned by the speed of change. Girls could bring new life to cathedral music, she said. Vivaldi proved that when he introduced choirs of orphan girls to European audiences.

“A girl’s voice,” she told her audience, “used judiciously yet with just the right degree of daring, could add to the music of a cathedral service exactly that small but telling degree of warmth and human passion that would only serve to enhance the platonic purity of everything else, and give it new force and meaning.”

To which one can only say “Amen”.