The Wells Cathedral Girl Chorister Trust will give equal opportunity of access to girls as well as boys to a tradition of choral music that is at the heart of the worshipping life of England’s Cathedrals. until very recently, this tradition has been the exclusive preserve of boys. Down the centuries only they have been able to sing in Cathedral choirs. Now a number of Cathedrals – and Wells was one of the first – have formed choirs of girl choristers, offering not only equal opportunity but a significant enhancement to the musical life of the cathedral.

However at Wells there is no financial endowment and therefore no proper scholarship provision enabling girls from less well off homes to be educated at the cathedral choir school, which provides the necessary training for this standard of musical excellence. This means that, unless the situation changes, only girls whose families can afford the fees will be able to be choristers and many girls who have the talent and a vocation to sing will be excluded.

The Wells Cathedral Girl Chorister Trust aims to raise sufficient funds to ensure there is adequate scholarship and bursary provision so that no girl who can sing need be excluded.

The Trust is therefore about

• equal opportunity,
• providing a first class musical education for girls as well as boys,
• ensuring that a girls' choir remains at the Cathedral thus enormously enriching its musical life.

But it is also about more than this. The tradition of English Cathedral choral music is the primary means through which the worship and adoration of God is offered in our cathedrals. The music of cathedral choirs provides an extraordinarily beautiful language of praise that can take the worshipper beyond words into an experience of the Mystery of God – into what the psalmist calls ‘the beauty of holiness’. Those who give to this trust are helping to ensure that this experience of beauty in worship – an experience of a living spirituality – continues to flourish at the heart of our cathedrals, and that future generations of girls can both share in it, and receive from it.

Canon Patrick Woodhouse
Precentor