Interview: Mezzo-Soprano Nina Vinther on Female Power, Sustainability and the Magic of Stories
Nina Vinther
Nina Vinther is a mezzo-soprano pursuing a Master of Music in vocal performance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. While still a student at Cambridge, Nina became the first female choral scholar with St. John’s College Choir, one of the great Cambridge choirs which has sung daily services since the 1670s. TWoA talked to Nina about music, Cambridge, feminism and the role culture can play in making the world a better place: Nina is passionate about using the power of music and culture to inspire people to fight climate change and to encourage a positive transformation of our societies.
Music Means Telling Really Good Stories
Musical memories are a powerful thing. For Nina, music has always been connected to stories. When she was a little girl, she would join her mother at the piano: “I remember her playing chords and just loving to find the middle note of the chord and also listening to ‘Peter and the Wolf.’ That for me was the first one where I was like: ‘Oh my God, what a story.’ I was on the edge of my seat.” She has played the piano, the cornet and the trombone, but singing has been the musical constant in her life ever since she joined a cathedral choir at age seven. The choir’s routine was intense: “I’m so grateful, it was an amazing opportunity, and I learned such discipline which I took into many areas of my life.”
Performing in several school musicals made her realize how much she loved performing on stage, and what a powerful sense of community singing can give to young people at a time when a sense of community is often lacking from their lives. It also made her think how the power of singing together could be harnessed to benefit a good cause. Nina is passionate about many causes such as feminism and sustainability and hopes to put her gifts as a performer at their service: “I love being on stage, and I love story telling. That is what music is for me: telling really good stories.”
Cambridge: Combining Academic Studies with Music
Nina is now studying music full-time at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, but only after completing an undergraduate and graduate degree in modern languages at Cambridge: “As I applied to university, I was realising how great languages were going to be for singing because languages are so bound up with culture. Languages are so creative in and off themselves.” Also, she knew it would be easy to combine academic studies with music at Cambridge: “There is so much music and so much drama there. I did all of my studies, but then I also sang most days, whether it was in an opera practice, or some song recital, or in choir. It was hard, but when you are very busy doing music, when you have that discipline and that passion, you can manage everything, if not better than people who don’t have that other thing that’s so meaningful. I think it is kind of a powerful thing to say: I managed Cambridge and I’ve got the singing. I really wanted to go to Cambridge particularly because they have so many fantastic choirs, so I knew that I would have wonderful, wonderful music as well and there’d be really interesting people there who are passionate not just about music, but engineering, maths. That’s a really valuable time, when you are eighteen or twenty, having so many different people influencing you. It makes you a better storyteller in the end. That’s why I went to Cambridge, and I’m very happy I did, I’ve got amazing, amazing friends.”
Girl Power: St. John’s College Choir
Towards the end of her time at Cambridge, Nina became a part of Cambridge music history: in April 2022, St. John’s College Choir became the first Cambridge/Oxford college choir to accept both young girls and women into a choir traditionally comprised of male students and young boys enrolled in a school attached to the choir. She had sung in the celebrated mixed choir at Trinity College Cambridge before, a choir that does not include children: “I got the call from John’s in my final term at Cambridge where they said: ‘We are losing an alto, obviously a countertenor, a male alto, and we are getting three new little girls. For them to have someone in the backrow who they feel like that’s where they are going would be amazing. So, I also helped out in the school, where they had chorister practice every morning, kind of as a role model. There were moments every time where we walked in, and I just remembered that I was really representing the first of women – obviously in a long line of incredible women who laid the groundwork and of course men who made the decisions because they were able to. I just felt really, really lucky. It was the cherry on top of the whole Cambridge experience.”
It is easy to forget that Cambridge’s all-male colleges only started admitting women in the 1970s: “Essentially, Cambridge was a massively male run space.” Before the all-male colleges started admitting women, there were only two, all-female colleges: “Those women were very much considered radical by the men. Either they were there to be objects of affection or derision. There was lots of stuff about women cycling and how political that was. There’s an amazing, horrifying picture of a female effigy on a bicycle in her bloomers hanging up and men throwing stuff. It would have been amazing to be around – well, maybe amazing is the wrong word - very, very interesting historically to have been around at that time and see. So, women are quite new to the whole picture.”
Cathedral choirs around the country have been opening to women and girls: “It’s not equal by any means, but we are getting there. And I just thought, why not, it’s so silly. I think there are studies to say girls are more mature, so that suggests as musicians, they would be a fantastic asset to any choir. Also, vocally they sound very the same up to a certain point. It’s more the difference between a countertenor, a male alto voice, and a female alto voice, that potentially you need to do more work on blend, but why not? I think in anything, diversity makes you stronger and more exciting and more relevant.” Interestingly, Nina found that members of her mother’s or grandmother’s generation were the most excited about St. John’s Choir opening to girls and women. The young girls joining St. John’s took it more as a matter of course: “It’s funny, I don’t think they felt it. I think they were just absolutely thrilled to be there. A couple of them at least had brothers who had been in choirs, and they just were like: when will it be my turn? For them, it’s like: why do they get to do something that I can’t when I’m just as good, if not better than my brother?”
The Power of Representation
There were some moments were Nina felt particularly keenly that she was the only woman in the room. One time, she sang at a joint service of King’s College Choir, which is still all-men, and John’s College Choir. She was the only woman singing for this joint service: “There were maybe about sixty men in the building, and I was the only woman. That was a bit of a moment where I was like - WOW: this space is so male, and there is no one who’s really realized that this is a bit strange. I got a bit of a taste of what it’s like to really feel you are in the minority and you are not represented and therefore how powerful representation is to the people who are younger and coming up. Otherwise, you drop out of classical music, or you drop out of ballet, unless you are really bold and courageous and have a lot of support behind you. You are not very likely to continue because you don’t see yourself there, so it’s very hard to imagine what that life might look like.”
Having a Woman in the Room
The men in the choir have been extremely welcoming, even though having a woman in the room inevitably changes the atmosphere: “I think I was very lucky because they were genuinely a lovely group of guys, really welcoming. I think even just being there, some things they might say because there are no women and they just don’t think twice, not even being maliciously a bit sexist, just lads’ banter: as soon as you put a woman in the room they realize - actually, that’s not funny, why are we laughing?” For some guys, this might be difficult: “Maybe some guys might think, oh well, a woman being there is
taking away our safe space to be boys. But actually: it’s not! That’s not a right that you have, to be sexist or to be wrong about minorities. I think it’s only right that’s changing. There is a lot of previous privilege, and I think actually these guys were of a generation where most of them were pretty, if not completely on board with just opening it up. They also saw no reason why they shouldn’t have lovely female colleagues.”
Use Your Own Pockets of Power: Sustainable Touring
Nina is also deeply concerned about climate change and has been exploring how one’s own actions can encourage others to do more sustainable things. Towards the end of her time with Trinity College Choir, she conscientiously objected to the choir’s upcoming Canadian tour because of the huge carbon footprint of international touring: “This isn’t what I want from music and because I was one of the oldest in the choir and the most experienced I kind of knew that I had a little bit of leverage. I wasn’t trying to sabotage at all, but I think unless you do something that’s a bit hard for yourself, you don’t change anyone’s mind. So, I think I’ve realized you need to kind of align the personal with the political, and not just say, well, it’s the job of big businesses. People have a lot more power, particularly when people work together. By working together, which is what a choir is essentially. That’s the foundation of good choral singing: good teamwork, trusting each other. I hope that more people in the future feel like they can also take a similar step. And it might be as normalized as saying I object to animals being hurt; therefore, I’m not going to eat this chicken. I feel the fact that I’m taking a flight for two tons of carbon where that would be the entire life span of carbon of ten Namibians. I don’t quite feel right about that because singing is something I love but that knowledge is actually taking some of the love out of it for me.” Other members of the choir joined Nina’s objection – and it was decided to cancel the Canadian tour (which, in the end, would have been cancelled because of Covid in any case.) Another girl in the choir proposed a cathedrals outreach tour instead: “We realized a lot of our families in the UK couldn’t hear us if we went to Canada. We were just completely neglecting the communities that we come from and neglecting the communities that our future choristers at Cambridge come from, like up in the North for example, or less privileged areas in London that we could actually go to. And there are so many beautiful places in the UK that we could also visit so it’s not that we never tour again, it's that we are a lot more mindful and creative.”
Empowering People: Art Translates Facts into Stories
Nina is keen to use culture’s ability to foster a sense of identity and community to unite and inspire people to work together towards positive change. Art is all around – and its magic can be a powerful, emotional translator of dry political and scientific facts: “You need translators of scientific messages, we need people who are able to story-tell for your average person. Data is very important and underpins a lot of political decisions. Stories actually resonate with people. Maybe facts are what some people eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, some more scientific minds will prefer facts to stories. But most people are more literate, and understand better a good story, because it really speaks to your heart, not just your head. That’s why we need culture in politics.”