Andrew Nethsingha, who is said to have led this change, has just been named to take over at Westminster Abbey.

to say nothing of the peculiar sound that only boy trebles can make

It's funny though that the people making this argument are opposed to blind auditions.

I remember when this was announced that people were saying that finally the Cambridge colleges were getting with the times: obviously none of them were aware of the fact that the ONLY all-male choirs at Cambridge were King's and John's: Trinity is mixed (and quite excellent), as is Clare, Downing, Gonville and Gaius, etc., etc.; now only King's is left. Oh well, I guess it will give the boys at King's an edge in the King's vs. John's chorister football (aka soccer) match...if that isn't a tradition that will also go the way of the dodo.

The situation at St. John’s is rather different than it is in 99.9% of American chorister programs. Because of what that choir is, Nesthinga and co. can be highly selective and take only the best boys [and girls], and being a chorister there involves a complete life change for kids: a new school and living away from parents.

Whereas in America, music directors are working 80 hours a week trying to convince any parent with a heartbeat that 1) their kid can be an amazing singer in just two hours a week, 2) what is being done is Fun and Cool and A Good Opportunity, 3) rehearsals and liturgies are more important than football and ballet and no unexcused absences are allowed, 4) yes, the first and third commandments apply to you and your family and none of this is unreasonable and actually we are a loving and gracious choir…..and then all this beating of the bushes might scare up 5 kids a year, of which 2 can match pitch, 4 will miss every other week, 3 will leave next year once they join chess club and have a schedule conflict, and 1 might be actually useful. And you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t, because if you are as choosy as you would be if you still cared about musical integrity, you will have a “choir” of 3 this year and no job next.

In this culture, the boys seem to get sucked into overscheduled sports and also pushed harder to stay on track to a lucrative job much earlier than girls. So of course there are fewer parents of boys who will even tolerate the idea of another commitment, and then there is also the ridiculousness of serious music being considered a thing for girls. So very naturally – if you have a coed chorister program in America, you get girls joining, and you have the problem of a total lack of boys once they see they will be [nearly] alone in what looks like a girls’ club.

It’s a totally different thing in the more selective institutions, and I am glad they are making provision for girls these days.

The other problem in the U.S. is that sports and boy scouts are the only things that boys can do with other boys and build comradery and have male role models working with them. Also the U.S. has a cultural problem where instruments and vocal ranges are clearly and rigidly divided between girls/women and boys/men, and any male who crosses that line is, as they say in pop culture today, "gay". Boys in the U.S. don't play clarinet or flute, or even sing in a choir, because it is considered "gay" to do so: Why? Because "that's for girls". And God help any American man who sings countertenor: even if he's married to Miss Universe and has 100 kids, he still "sings like a girl" and is "gay". What concerns me isn't that girls and women are being given an opportunity, what concerns me is the possibility of a cultural shift in England, helped along by the influence of American "culture", where boys will effectively be denied the ability to sing because it has become taboo to do so.

I guess recently depends on time and place. Doriot Dwyer, the famous principal flutist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was appointed in 1952 (retiring in 1990), when that was pioneering. Because turnover in major orchestras was/is glacial, it took decades for this kind of thing to work through the system, but even when I was a competitive hornist in the NYC metro area in the '70s, there were plenty of girls and women in serious competition. I can't even think of an orchestral section that was single-sex. Yes, flutists were girl-dominant, and tuba/baritone (but not trombone, horn or trumpet) sections in bands were boy-dominant. But all of the string sections and the rest of the instrumental sections were random with annual school turnover in terms of whether any sex was dominant.

And countertenor sections in American collegiate glee clubs go back decades. I know Harvard and the University of Virginia had them firmly established by the 1970s if not earlier, and I doubt they were alone in that regard, and at least some of those guys were training as countertenors even before they matriculated.

The nice thing about shape note hymn sings is that the four sides of the square were/are not sex-segregated.

The real problem in the USA is the comparatively decayed state of school music programs; what once was a prevalent and enthusiastically supported activity has become more fringe (in terms of interest and support) in the last 50 years.