At 9:33 AM -0700 7/21/05, Tyler Turner wrote:
"Association spokeswoman Amy Lear said the group enacted the rule two years ago because of concerns that girls auditioning for tenor parts were hurting their voices by singing too low.
Hi, Tyler! You are certainlly entitled to your opinion, and your defense of it is very well written. I just don't happen to share it. The above remark is nothing but political weasling, since it is based on the pre-judgement (otherwise known as prejudice) that all girls singing low are hurting their voices. In fact that is not true, as I've pointed out previously.
"If you make a rule one way it has to work both ways," Lear said, adding that the association does not hold auditions specifically for countertenors because the part is rarely included in the group's music.
More half-truth and more political weasling. A countertenor is a male alto, or more rarely a male soprano. Therefore any piece of music that has an alto and/or a soprano part is suitable for countertenor. Q.E.D. Chanticleer is half countertenors, singing soprano and alto. They don't get involved in terminology wars! The reporter in a Texas newspaper also brought up castrati, which has absolutely nothing to do with Mike's situation.
In late May, Rawls asked the association to reverse its policy and let auditions be non-gender specific, or to create a new audition category specifically for countertenors. In his petition, Rawls said the countertenor is a legitimate voice part that should be recognized by music teachers, and he argued the policy amounts to gender discrimination.
I agree totally with making auditions non-gender specific because in the real world all singers do not fit into our convenient little boxes. I do not agree with creating a new category, for the very reasons you cite later in your post.
Neither Lear nor association president Kerry Taylor could think of another male who ever wanted to audition for a traditional girl's part on the All-State Choir.
And I suppose no girl in Texas has ever tried out as place kicker on her high school team, as has happened elsewhere, because "everybody knows" that girls are supposed to be decorative cheerleaders! Once again, that particular "tradition" is only a couple of centuries old. Someone on the ChoralTalk List came up with a newspaper description of an early 19th century civic concert in Boston which all the singers were named. The sopranos included Mrs., Miss, and Master. The altos were all male names with Mr. The choirs Mozart wrote for, the choirs Bach wrote for, and the choirs Palestrina wrote for were all male; THAT'S the tradition, not what 20th century choirs have adopted as standard practice.
Taylor said the policy doesn't amount to discrimination because Rawls can try out for any of the more traditional male parts. "
For which his voice is not as well suited, which then puts HIM at an unfair competitive disadvantage!
I see TMEA's justification as being completely legitimate. This boy proposed two solutions, both which I agree are unacceptable. 1. Create a new countertenor competition category. Great. You have the elite choir members who work extremely hard to get where they are and whom are rewarded with a once in a life-time opportunity. And then you let a couple of kids into the same group who can get in because they don't have to compete with anyone. Furthermore, you're going to limit the music which can be sung to songs which have unique parts for this vocal quality. As a former member of a Texas All-State group, I can tell you this would make me quite angry, and it would be a slap in the face after all the work I went through.
As I said above, I don't care for this solution. Mike should have to compete with other sopranos for the available chairs, which would again place him at a disadvantage because there are many more sopranos trying out than tenors or basses, but if he wins a chair in fair competition then he deserves it, and if he doesn't, he doesn't.
2. Allow males to sing alto or soprano parts. They created a rule 2 years ago to prevent girls from auditioning as tenors because there were girls who were damaging their voices. This is why the rule was created. Letting it go the other way, allowing males to sing vocal parts, can just as easily be called gender discrimination. And it's of a worse variety - it's inconsistent.
No, it's because there might possibly be girls who might possibly be singing in too low a range for their voices and who might possibly be damaging their voices. My wife got caught in that trap in high school, assigned to sing alto because she could read music well. She didn't discover that she was actually a high soprano until she got to college. Once again, let them compete for chairs in the tenor section, if they wish, and let them be excluded on an individual basis for reasons of vocal health, not on the basis of a general, poorly-thought-out, gender-biased rule.
Opening the door for this one boy to sing soprano opens the door for a whole gender discrimination liability mess.
On the contrary, not opening the door has opened the door for a gender discrimination suit, although his mom has enough sense not to want to go in that direction.
How do you as a judge eliminate a boy soprano because he sounds like a boy?
Well, how about screened auditions, so that the suitability of the voice can be judged without knowledge of the singer's gender? From comments I've seen, I suspect that Mike is probably a better soprano than the average high school girl!
A quality countertenor does not sound like a female soprano, and the musical parts they are trying out for were written specifically for the female voice quality and in some cases gender roles - not just the range.
Now YOU'RE weasling, Tyler. Female voice quality is so variable that there is really no standard to measure voices against. Someone once asked Robert Shaw how he managed to get a particular sound from his sopranos. "I hire the ones who can do it," was his reply.
If you let this boy into the Texas All-State Choir as a soprano, you must also allow him to be a contender for soprano solos.
Well of course! What else, and why not? If he's good enough to make it on his own merits, he's good enough to audition for solos. That's were gender roles COULD make a difference, but not in most music.
It's not fair to any other member of that choir to have their performance tainted by a vocal quality or gender role that doesn't fit the music.
Isn't it up to the guest conductor, and not the board of the TMEA, half of whom are instrumentalists, to decide what does and doesn't fit the music?
I'm sorry, but the world is bigger than this boy. He has found success and acceptance as a countertenor, and he should go forward with that. But asking for new rules to be made for the sake of one person, when these rules can make a mess in who knows how many other ways, is just selfish.
Not if, as I believe, the rules were made based on outdated gender stereotypes and the outdated prejudices of traditional, 19th-century opera-oriented voice teachers.
It's not the nature of the world to adapt to the needs of one person. I think in many ways we give kids the impression too often in our schools that the world works this way.
Ever hear the one about the squeaky wheel getting the grease? One person can make a difference, when that one person demonstrates a fundamental unfairness in the system. That's what happened with both racial discrimination and gender discrimination in this country. We've got a long way to go on those matters, but at least we've recognized the flaws in the system and we've made progress dealing with them. How is vocal gender stereotyping any different? There was one black person who was the first to enroll in an all-white university in the South, and there was one female person who enrolled in the all-male bastions of the Citadel and the Virginia Military Institute. Hopefully there will be one person who will break the gender stereotyping in the Texas All-State Honor Choir, whether it's Mike or someone else.
John -- John & Susie Howell Virginia Tech Department of Music Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
