Richard Seal
Organist and choirmaster who braved controversy but brought about change when he introduced choirgirls to Salisbury Cathedral
RICHARD SEAL, who has died aged 86, was the cathedral music director who introduced girls to the choir stalls at Salisbury in 1991; the move heralded a transformation of the musical landscape of the Church of England at the highest level, but not one that came easily. Indeed, it would be another 23 years until Canterbury, the mother church of the Anglican Communion, followed suit.
According to his detractors Seal had not only overturned hundreds of years of Church tradition, he had also diluted the purity of the boys’ voices. His supporters saw it differently. Seal, who was at Salisbury from 1968 to 1997, was bringing the music of the Church of England into the modern world. And while many musicians accepted that boys’ voices sounded different to girls’ voices, they insisted that neither was better or worse.
Seal began considering a girls’ choir in 1989 after receiving a letter from the mother of a pupil at Salisbury Cathedral School asking if he would be prepared to audition her daughter. Separately, the sister of an existing chorister wrote to Jim’ll Fix It, the BBC children’s television show, asking if it could be arranged for her to sing with her brother in the cathedral choir.
For the Church, which at the time was in the midst of a painful schism over the ordination of women priests, there was also the risk of legal action under equality legislation.
Seal was present at a meeting of church music directors held at Church House in Westminster when the subject came up. Also present were Richard Shephard (York), Stephen Cleobury (King’s College, Cambridge) and others. They determined that resistance to girls’ choirs must be overcome and vowed to do all they could in their own places of worship.
The Salisbury girls sang their first service in October 1991, the 900th anniversary of the establishment of the boys’ choir at Old Sarum. Like their male counterparts the choir was formed of 18 girls aged between 8 and 11 drawn from the cathedral school. The routine was much the same as for the boys: frequent choir practices and daily services.
Official recognition quickly followed: in 1994 both the girls’ and the boys’ choirs took part in a performance of Britten’s Spring Symphony at the Festival Hall, while the following year the girls’ choir was at a reception hosted by Norma Major, the prime minister’s wife, at Downing Street.
There was also a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No 3 with the National Youth Orchestra at the Proms under Mark Elder in 1995 and, in a move that raised some eyebrows, the girls received sponsorship from Mcdonalds for a Christmas CD that was played relentlessly in the burger chain’s outlets.
Yet, with the world’s eyes on the girls, Seal – ever the thoughtful father-figure – was careful to watch the reaction of his boys to this intrusion. “One had to woo them a bit,” he told The Guardian. “They were very proud about what they did – they did have this huge history, centuries behind them. They didn’t want that to go.”
Meanwhile, the Campaign for the Traditional Cathedral Choir was gathering momentum. Its objective was “to champion the ancient tradition of the all-male choir”, yet it faced an uphill struggle. Equality soon caught on in the choir stalls, with a good number of cathedrals catching up with what had long been a reality in a many parish churches. Many cathedral schools were already co-educational; to outside observers it was hard to fathom why girls were not in the choir.
Seal remained quietly proud of his achievement. “Girls have found their rightful place now,” he told The Guardian in 2014. “There is no stopping them. Girls from Salisbury have gone to Oxford and Cambridge and carried on their singing there. Some are in professional choirs. It is wonderful.”
Richard Godfrey Seal was born at Banstead, Surrey, on December 4 1935. He was a boy chorister at New College, Oxford, under HK Andrews, where he knew Lord David Cecil. He was also the subject of a ghost story written by Christopher Woodforde, the chaplain, and published in a collection entitled A Pad in the Straw.
He went on to Cranleigh School, Surrey, and was organ scholar at Christ’s College, Cambridge, before spending a year at the Royal College of Music while serving as assistant organist at Kingsway Hall, London.
After National Service in Malaya, Seal served as assistant organist at St Bartholomewthe-great, Smithfield. He joined Chichester Cathedral in 1961 as assistant organist to John Birch at what was an exciting time to be on the south coast. Birch, with Dean Walter Hussey, was commissioning extraordinary new art works for the cathedral, not least the Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein in 1965 and John Piper’s tapestry of the Holy Trinity, which was consecrated in 1966.
Seal also accompanied the Chichester choir on recordings of church music, including one from 1966 that was reissued in 1975 to mark the cathedral’s 900th anniversary.
His move to Salisbury, in succession to David Willcocks (1947-50), Douglas Guest (1950-57) and Christopher Dearnley (195768), brought him to greater prominence. There were recordings and overseas tours with his choir, but his main priority was the daily office of the cathedral. Evensong on a wet Thursday in February was just as important to Seal as the Royal Maundy service, which was celebrated at Salisbury in 1974.
Seal was a kind, gentle and undemonstrative man, who cared deeply about his choristers. He made a point of siting at their table for both lunch and dinner at the cathedral school. One former chorister recalled how “every day we moved down one place, so that every 18th day each chorister got a chance to sit next to Richard. That way he could keep a check on us, see how we were doing.” His first disc with the Salisbury choir, in 1978, covered a wide range of repertoire, from Henry Purcell in the 17th century to William Mathias in the 20th, and was described by one critic as “the best record of cathedral music that has come my way this year”. Others included a recording of church anthems in 1980, Evensong in 1981 and Christmas carols in 1985. Amid all this it would be easy to forget that Seal enjoyed an active musical life beyond the cathedral close, notably as a splendid musical director of the Salisbury Musical Society, a welcoming host to the Southern Cathedrals Festival, which rotates between Chichester, Winchester and Salisbury, and as a dedicated organist. In 1981 he recorded a fine disc of Bach’s organ music on the Meridian label.
By the time that Canterbury had caught up with Salisbury in 2014 there were reported to be 765 girls and 1,008 boys in English cathedral choirs. Seal was always keen to point out that while the girls’ choir was on an equal footing to the boys’, it was a separate choir.
For a while he was in favour of equality of opportunity, he dismissed the notion that girls’ and boys’ voices were the same. “I am tired of people saying: ‘Ooh, you cannot tell the difference,’” he told a conference in 1997. “You can.”
Today the singing duties are divided equally between the two sets of choristers, usually singing with the men of the choir.
Although Seal was outwardly unfazed by the negative reaction to girls’ voices of so many colleagues in the cathedral world, inside he was upset by the treatment he received. Yet even his detractors eventually struggled to criticise him.
At the time of his retirement in 1997 the Campaign for the Defence of the Traditional Cathedral Choir, while continuing to voice its disapproval of his achievements, said that its members “celebrated his exceptional gifts as a choir trainer”.
That retirement was spent at Bishopstone, a small village west of Salisbury, where Seal enjoyed playing the organ for Sunday services at churches in the Chalke Valley and maintained his correspondence with the many church musicians of his acquaintance.
A generation on, many of the girls who had their first experience of cathedral music thanks to Seal, are now successfully established. “If the amazing Dr Richard Seal had not had the courage to confront convention and tradition I would never have had the wonderful experiences I had,” Alison Hill, one of his first girl choristers who became a member of the Monteverdi Choir, told Gramophone magazine in February 2014. “I’m so glad that he had the guts to go through with creating it.”
Thin, lithe and active, Seal spent many a holiday in a tent in the Lake District. In his seventies he was still camping and climbing some of the highest peaks in the region. In 1992 he was awarded a Lambeth degree for his services to music by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a great admirer of Spike Milligan and was known to give the boys recordings of the Goons for Christmas.
In 1975 Richard Seal married Sarah Hamilton, a gerontologist; they had two sons.