A court Friday blocked a 9-year-old German girl from joining Berlin's oldest cultural institution, its all-boys choir, after she sued to be allowed to sing with the chorus, in a case that pitted a push for gender parity against centuries of musical tradition.
Berlin's administrative court said that the choir's artistic freedom is more important than equal treatment in this case.
The case had prompted a fierce debate about the difference between the voices of girls and boys at certain ages and the mystique surrounding the tone quality of boys' voices - described as "wondrous" and "natural but utterly transient."
But the suit argued that because the choir - the State and Cathedral Choir, part of Berlin's University of the Arts - is a publicly funded cultural institution, its high-quality, intense musical education, voice training and performance opportunities must be made available to everyone, regardless of gender.
In March, the choir invited the girl to sing before a selection committee, but rejected her.
Abbie Conant, an American trombonist who is now a professor of trombone at the state conservatory in Trossingen, in the Black Forest region of Germany, said that what was at stake in the Berlin case was more than just the right to sing: It was about granting girls the same access to music education that can shape their lives and careers.
"I have several male colleagues who were in boys' choirs and had that training and experience performing at a very early age, and that gave them a leg up in their careers," Conant said.
The 9-year-old girl, whose identity has been withheld under German law because she is a minor, has a voice that causes patrons in a cafe in Germany to pause when she breaks out in a traditional Christmas carol.
Christian Ahrens, a professor emeritus of musicology who published a study on gender parity in the world's leading orchestras, said that although he supported equal access to music education, integrating boys' choirs was not the way to do it.
Ahrens argued that beyond the sound, there is the fact that because boys' voices break around age 11 or 12 while girls can continue to sing the highest notes until up to 15, girls' voices would dominate.
"In a mixed choir," he said, "the girls will have much stronger voices and simply drown out the boys."