Looking back at September 2019, when I arrived at Christ Church, the world now seems almost unrecognisable, our everyday experience of life and work is so altered. What a bizarre time, then, to have been attempting to embed Frideswide Voices, Christ Church’s newest choir, into the rhythms of the Cathedral and its worship. The choir was founded in 2014 as an independent organisation under the auspices of the Frideswide Foundation, to give girls the opportunity to sing Anglican liturgy of the highest standard as choristers – the first such choir in Oxford. In the first few years of its life, the Choir ‘chapel-hopped’, singing in many Oxford colleges and churches, finally settling into a pattern of one term each year at Christ Church, New College and Magdalen.

In May 2019, the Choir was adopted by Christ Church and brought into the Foundation, and now sits happily alongside the other three choirs which contribute to the Cathedral and College’s rich musical life. At this point, I was appointed to take over as Director from Will Dawes – himself an ex-Christ Church Cathedral lay clerk – who had already accomplished the Herculean task of founding a chorister team from scratch, alongside an ambitious, dedicated and supremely talented team of Trustees and staff.

The task ahead was in equal measure daunting and thrilling. Whilst the chance to lead the Cathedral’s first cohort of girl choristers was (and is) a privilege and a pleasure, there were challenges too: concerns both logistical and musical. One immediate issue was that the girls, who had up until then sung most of their services without lower voices, needed to learn a huge amount of full choir repertoire in order to match the task of singing each week with the Lay and Academical clerks. At the same time, the Frideswide Voices administrative machine needed to adapt to sit within the Cathedral and wider College framework.

Our installation service in September 2019 was a happy occasion, suffused with warmth and enthusiasm from the Cathedral community, and a sense of homecoming for the Choir’s founders, who had laboured long and hard for the cause of girls and young women in Oxford’s choral landscape. We were all moved by Canon Foot’s opening reminder that the girls were not new arrivals, but rather that they were returning to a site founded in order for women to sing the praise of God Helen Smee, Director long before the college, Cathedral or boys’ choir came into being.  The girls themselves were rightly proud of their part in the history of Christ Church, but also – I think – bemused at the level of celebration. It is hard for them to comprehend that their forebears (and indeed, many of the women involved in the formation of the Choir) were excluded from similar opportunities as children, since their lives are largely untouched by gender inequality and latent sexism. Long may that continue.

Helen Smee, Director