Letter: Girls in the choir

Sir: Your letters about cathedral choirs are getting increasingly bad-tempered and sad! We should celebrate "all kinds of music", as it says in Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, which the Three Spires Singers were rehearsing yesterday evening.

However, in our large secular choir, which is conducted by the organist of Truro Cathedral, Andrew Nethsingha, we have an acute shortage of tenors. Three of them are women! We sometimes are reinforced by visiting choral scholars, who spend a year in Truro, signing in the excellent Cathedral choir, before going on to university.

Equality is all very well, but girl choristers need to know "the facts of life". If you want to sing "with the men" when you are forty, encourage the boys now. An all-female orchestra is possible. An all-female B Minor Mass is not.

MARGARET SELLWOOD

Truro, Cornwall