It seems that Christ was born with the sound of choral music in his ears. That, at any rate, is what is to be deduced from many of the works of art that the manger scene has subsequently inspired. There is the holy family gathered round the crib, gold and lapis lazuli everywhere, beneficent animals kind of smiling at the smiling Christ child and, raised rather above all this, angels singing. Perhaps officially they are sexless — Wikipedia isn’t very discursive on the gender of the cherubim and seraphim — but as far as I can see they look like girls and are meant to be men. This makes for all sorts of interesting speculation, not least in the matter of what they sounded like.
It used to be a favourite game trying to work out how choirs of the past sounded from looking at contemporary depictions of musicians’ facial expressions and general posture. I remember years ago accompanying one of the doyens of this topic — Howard Mayer Brown — around the castles of the Loire, examining tapestries for what they had to tell us about performing angels. Every heavenly grimace was analysed for suggestion of what it might tell us about the vowel sound being produced, and the tone quality underlying it. The conclusion was always ‘nasal’, which in turn led to an ensemble singing style in some British early-music groups, typical of the Seventies and Eighties. Mercifully, this has now gone out of fashion.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn from the angels’ male-inclined androgynous appearance is that they were either castrati or falsettists. This would give a tessitura of upper voices. At the same time, I don’t get the impression that each singer is doing anything very individual — the heads all tend to be looking the same way while producing the same grimace in unison — so I fear we are back to the chestnut beloved of so many: vague, swirling, incense-laden singing from a great distance, reverberating down a gothic nave, the original ‘angelic choir’.
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