How High Should Boys Sing?

How High Should Boys Sing?

How High Should Boys Sing? Gender, Authenticity and Credibility in the Young Male Voice

Martin Ashley Edgehill University, UK

© Martin Ashley 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Martin Ashley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ashley, Martin, 1953– How high should boys sing? : gender, authenticity and credibility in the young male voice. 1. Singing—Social aspects. 2. Singing—Psychological aspects. 3. Boys—Psychology. 4. Voice, Change of. 5. Voice types (Singing) I. Title 782’.008341—dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ashley, Martin, 1953– How high should boys sing? : Gender, authenticity and credibility in the young male voice / Martin Ashley. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6475-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Singing—Social aspects. 2. Boys—Psychology. 3. Voice, Change of. 4. Singing—Instruction and study—Great Britain. 5. Singing—Psychological aspects. I. Title. ML3830.A84 2009 783.7081—dc22 2009007665 ISBN 9780754664758 (hbk) ISBN 9780754696148 (ebk.V) Bach musicological font developed by © Yo Tomita.

Contents List of Figures   List of Tables   Acknowledgements   Introduction  

vi viii x 1

1 The Background   2 Singing as Social Control of Boyhood   3 Physiology of the Young Male Voice   4 Subjectivity and Agency in the Young Male Voice   5 Admiration of the Boy   6 A Child Doing a Man’s Work in a Man’s World   7 Angels in the Market Place   8 We Can’t Sing Like Men, So We Won’t Sing At All   9 Ambassadors and Mediators   10 The Future  

5 23 41 57 73 93 111 133 149 165

Index  

175

List of Figures 1.1

Conceptualizing learner identity   

11

3.1

Speaking fundamental frequency (Hz) against age (yrs)  

43

7.1

Spirituality according to the National Curriculum Council (1993)  113

9.1

Cartoon figures used in research on boys’ vocal identity  

155

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List of Tables 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

Boys’ growth (50th centile) for membranous fold length, standing height, body mass and speaking fundamental frequency   45 Speaking pitch and Cooksey stages   47 Male vocal development during adolescence (simplified from Cooksey, 1993)   49 Correspondence of current quantitative and qualitative nomenclature  52

4.1 Representative vocal colours in perceptual tests   4.2 Boys’ vocal agency at fourteen years of age   8.1

Age estimates of fourteen-year-old singer based on peer audience perception of pitch  

62 69 137

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Acknowledgements My intentions in writing this book are discussed in the Introduction, so I will not repeat them here. It would be appropriate to acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, for this book is the result of two substantial grants from that organization which has recognized the importance of the boy treble voice to musical culture. Some of the material has previously appeared in a monograph entitled Teaching Singing to Boys and Teenagers: The Young Male Voice and the Problem of Masculinity, published by the Edwin Mellen Press. However, for this volume, which is aimed at a wider audience, it has been substantially reworked and significant new material has been added. I owe many people thanks for their help in compiling the material and somebody is bound to be forgotten, for which I apologize. My singing teacher colleagues, Jenevora Williams and Frith Trezevant I am particularly grateful to, and to that doyen of vocal coaches, Janice Chapman, who has always been ready to respond to a request for clarification or definitive ruling. My co-worker, Professor David Howard of the University of York has also kept a watchful eye over my straying into the territory of electrolaryngographs and voice science. David and his colleague Professor Graham Welch of London University were responsible for the creation of NetVoTech, a network of singing teachers and voice scientists to which I have belonged and which has been a source of inspiration and access to other colleagues knowledgeable in the field. I would also like to thank Gethin John, a sound engineer whom I initiated into boys’ voices and who has subsequently been a valuable technical support. Cathedral organists, past and present, have given of their time and I need to thank Dr David Flood, Mr Mark Lee, Dr Roy Massey, Mr Tim Noon, Mr David Poulter and Mr Christopher Stokes. I am also particularly grateful to Mr Andrew Kirk and his predecessor in Bristol, Mr Antony Pinel, and to Mr Mike Brewer OBE and Mr Greg Beardsell of the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain. Mr Roger Ovenden and Mr Robert Bacon of the Choir Schools Association have really supported this work and others in the music industry have done me favours. Of these, the contribution of Mr David Adams has been outstanding. Finally, Mr Stephen Beet, compiler of the Better Land series of great boy soprano recordings has supplied me with historical material as well as valued introductions to some boy singers of the present. I cannot really refer by name to the boy singers who have given me so much of the material for this book or, sadly, to their parents or teachers in school. Those who welcomed me into their homes for detailed interviews and particularly for periodic measurement and recording sessions are particularly to be thanked – they

Chapter Title

xi

will know who they are! To the boys themselves, however, I need and desire to express the greatest of all my thanks. This book is for you – for your future careers and for the generations of boys who I hope will come after you. Martin Ashley

Introduction Two days before I drafted this introduction, I was on a shopping trip with my wife in a fairly large town in the North of England. We had only been living in the North for a year, so this was a first visit. To my delight I saw that the parish church, an elegant clerestoried building, was open, so I popped in to escape the shops and have a quick look. The lights were on, stewards were present to welcome Saturday visitors, and a recording of what sounded to me like a men and boys’ choir was playing quietly to add to the ambience. ‘Is that your own choir?’ I enquired of a steward. ‘Yes’, he replied. ‘Well, it was in 1980 when that recording was made,’ he continued, ‘we had a great choir then.’ ‘Indeed’, I retorted. ‘And now? Do you have any boys in your choir?’ ‘No’, he replied, shaking his head sadly. ‘Two tenors, two basses, perhaps. No boys. All gone. It’s just ladies now, all we can get. Boys won’t do it anymore.’ I left the building both saddened and vindicated. I felt vindicated because a significant part of this book is concerned with why ‘boys won’t do it anymore’. There are a few places where boys still sing and that fact, paradoxically, is what saddens me. I think singing is a great thing for boys to do and during the writing of this book I have met many boys who still do ‘it’ and who agree with me. It is the fact that these boys enjoy their singing so much that makes things sad and difficult. If they would just all die out and be consigned to history, like perhaps the sailing ships of the Georgian navy, I would not have needed to write this book and my life would, frankly, have been easier. Alan Mould has recently written an excellent and definitive history and I am grateful for this, for I draw on it several times. But I am not an historian. I am a social scientist and I write about what boys do now. I also happen to have musical training and have taught music in days prior to academic life. So what do I mean by ‘it’? That is quite difficult to define, but I would like the reader to be reasonably clear about what is likely to follow. This is not a book about church music. It is about boys’ singing. It just happens that when the church music dimension is taken away, a huge hole is left which compels that we answer the questions of how high boys should sing and what, other than church music, is to count as credible and authentic singing by young males who are in most other aspects of their life true blooded, risk taking, sport playing, mischievous boys. It is too often said that boys don’t want to sing because they do ‘not want to sound like girls’. I shall be critiquing this idea throughout the book, but for the present it should by now be clear to most readers that this is a book about boys with unbroken voices who have no desire to be girls. I do not like the term ‘unbroken’ and I devote two chapters to explaining why the term ‘changing voices’ is to be preferred to ‘breaking voices’. Neither do I like



How High Should Boys Sing?

to disparage girls. It may surprise the reader to learn that the body of theory in which I ground my work is what is commonly referred to as pro-feminist. Returning to what ‘it’ is, there is perhaps one more idea that must be introduced at this stage. The kind of singing I shall be writing about is sometimes referred to as ‘angelic’ or the ‘voices of angels’. Of course, the Christian church once had a near-monopoly on angels and their voices, but no longer. In pursuit of answers to my questions about how high boys should sing and what might be authentic and credible in their singing, I shall need to devote significant space to the different genres that employ angels as singers. I shall need also to address the question of whether there is an alternative for boys with ‘unbroken’ voices to singing like angels. I have been encouraged to write this book because of the constant level of interest that has been shown in its subject matter. Some ten years ago, I first published the results of a small-scale but highly detailed enquiry I undertook into the lives of the members of a boys’ choir. That study was never intended to be the beginning of an occupation that has subsequently dominated my professional life. I had completed my PhD on the topic of young people’s values with regard to the natural world and reached a somewhat depressing conclusion that for the most part, these were highly instrumental, consumerist or ‘me-centred’, and unlikely to underpin the kind of widespread revolution in environmentally responsible behaviour that many educators were hoping for during the 1990s. I wondered whether, for a small post-doctoral study, I might look at a parallel case of something other than wild animals and scenic majesty in understanding how a sense of intrinsic value developed in children and chose, for this project, to look at how the boys in a choir valued music. The media were not that interested in my PhD study, but the boys’ singing study was reported around the world on the day I first gave a conference paper. More to the point, the story of boys and music I uncovered revealed that children did not necessarily have to be totally materialistic. Ever since then, anything I have written about boys and singing has been almost guaranteed space in the newspapers and air waves. This tells us that there must be something unusually special about boys and singing that touches something deep in a collective psyche. A book such as this is needed and I feel privileged to have written it. The choice of boys and singing for post-doctoral study was not entirely arbitrary. Writers in the social sciences such as myself acknowledge the importance of such matters as objectivity, reliability and validity, but we claim less and less to achieve it in the way that writers in disciplines such as physics do. Instead, we highlight the importance of transparency and trustworthiness in our work. Who am I, where am I coming from and how much credibility should a reader place in what I have to say? For that reason, this book is written in the first person. There has been no attempt to write my own self out through passive language intended to convey detached objectivity. It may, in this context, be helpful to know that some fortysix years ago, a small boy who absolutely hated the piano practice he hardly ever did was set to be an engineer. In total innocence, that small boy was sent to a new school that just happened to be a cathedral choir school.

Introduction



The fact that it was a choir school was of little consequence to my parents who knew little of such matters and cared less about them. For the first ten years of my own life, singing and music had been about the last things on my mind. Then a cathedral, its thunderous organ, its smells of medieval timber and heating oil, and its choristers in their blue (and on Sundays and greater holy days deep red) cassocks changed all that. I must have had a gene that responded to what was one of the most critical events that has made me. The only possible explanation of my life is that I had the nature but not the nurture when it came to choral music. I have been trying to make sense of that ever since and we shall return to snippets of this story as and when necessary to maintain transparency and trustworthiness as the book proceeds. This book is not a biography, however. It attempts to be a scholarly analysis of boys and singing. It addresses the question of how high boys should sing, but it does so because this question is related to the fact that an awful lot of boys do not sing at all. A principal reason for writing this book is that I believe most strongly that many more boys should sing than do. Part of this comes from within. Singing has become a major part of my life and identity that I know has carried me through the bad times and given meaning and purpose to living in a way that little else can. That alone would not be a sufficient reason to write the book. It has been my discovery through researching the topic with boys that I am far from unique. I do not know how many there are – nobody does, but there are many, many more boys out there who have the nature but not the nurture. To give an enduring sense of meaning and the worthwhile to the lives of these young people at a time when so many boys seem to be facing emptiness that can lead to crime, drug abuse and indifference to other people and the world we share seems to me to justify the writing of the book. I want to be clear that I have written it because I think singing is good for boys. I have spoken to several hundreds of boys during the course of gathering material for the chapters that follow and I have seen that some of them gain so much through singing whilst so many others who would benefit miss out for the reasons I am going to describe and analyse. Of course, I hope what I have written may be helpful to those choir directors who live the daily angst of wondering where the next male singer will come from, but I want to be clear that my first priority is the boys who are missing out. I shall be writing about a good deal more than choral singing, cathedrals and their boys’ choirs. Most kinds of music, most kinds of singing have the power to change lives. That boys sing at all is perhaps more important than where or what they sing. Neither will all of what I write about cathedrals and their choirs be in any case complimentary either. If it were, the book would be a polemic in support of classical sacred choirs, not a critical scholarly analysis of the field of boys’ singing. But I owe a great personal debt to cathedrals and their choirs and the experience of hearing or singing with a good one is still one that can evoke the fullest range of emotions from ecstasy to agony – something that for me goes far beyond mere entertainment.

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Chapter 1

The Background In this chapter I am going to address three preliminary issues. First the question of what a boy actually is, which is not as simple as might be imagined. Fundamentally ‘boy’ is a socially constructed concept, not a biological entity. The meaning of the word therefore can and does vary according to context. The definition I develop in this chapter is that which will serve us for the specific purposes of this book. Second, I discuss a little of the way in which I, as an educational sociologist, have come to theorize boys and boyhood. Much of what defines ‘boy’ has to do with another socially constructed concept, gender. However, I hope to show that gender is not the only way to construct boy. Though it is highly significant throughout this book, my thinking has moved on from a purely gendered examination of boyhood and continues to do so. Finally, I describe in somewhat abbreviated form the methodologies employed in my research on boys and singing. This book was never intended to deal with methodology in depth, but readers will rightly want to have some indication of how I have arrived at the data from which I draw my conclusions, what has been included, what has been excluded and why. Those who wish to delve further and have a technical interest in educational research methods are referred to the academic papers listed at the end of the chapter. Boys – What Are They and Why Do They Matter? Most people would imagine that it is unproblematic to define what a boy is, but a little bit of thought may dispel this notion. A boy is a young male – but how young? And when does a young male cease to be a boy and become a man? There is no absolute answer to questions such as these. It is essential, however, that we examine the issue because as I shall demonstrate shortly, singing contributes significantly to a young male’s identity – who he believes himself to be. If he thinks singing will give him the wrong sort of identity, he will not sing. That, indeed, is one definition of ‘boy’. A boy is a young male who experiments daily with different possible identities because he is learning who he is and how he relates to other people. Walker and Kushner (1999) have contrived a good metaphor for this – the building site. The Victorians have bequeathed us the legacy of what is sometimes referred to as medicalism, the belief that answers to questions such as ‘what is a boy?’ can be found in the assumption that there is a simple and direct connection between social identity and readily measurable physical qualities of the body. For those who appreciate certain kinds of music, it is certainly possible to propose that boys

How High Should Boys Sing?



are distinguished from men by the pitch of their voices and the part or range that they sing. This is very much the case in classical sacred choral music where the word ‘boys’ is often used in place of sopranos, it being a shared meaning in that context that the ‘boys’ sing the top line and the men (or ‘gentlemen’) the alto, tenor and bass parts. I certainly began this work with such a distinction in mind, but as I have come to address with increasing seriousness the question ‘how high should boys sing?’ I have come to see how problematic such an approach is. Whatever ‘boy’ is, it is not something that can be defined in such neatly convenient and simple terms. Janssen (2007) is rightly critical of the attempts of authors who draw on Victorian psychomedical concepts to differentiate childhood from adolescence without consideration of what are termed socially constructed factors of identity, of which gender is but one example. Some authors, such as Archer (2004) attempt to deny altogether the significance of socially constructed phenomena, but in so doing they seem to have inherited a Victorian psychomedical mindset which unfortunately denies them the most powerful analytical tools that are available. Numbers will be useful to us in some circumstances, but if we see them, as do those of a certain narrow scientific bent, to be the answer to most problems they will fail us in our quest to understand boys’ identity. We need to look to language and the way concepts are constructed within the social world to get the necessary lever on what a boy might be. Janssen (2007) has examined the lexical conundrum of ‘boy’ and suggests that in the etymology of modern English usage, ‘boy’ meaning male youth has been emancipated from the archaic meaning of ‘servant’. Certainly, on a recent visit to India I was instructed to leave my baggage so that the ‘boys’ could take it to my room. Some writers, such as Groth (2007), propose an existential crisis for young males that is linked to an uncertainty of identity between boy and man. Mac an Ghaill (2002) has likened this to living in a state of melancholia. Boys, he suggests, yearn for an adult masculinity they cannot have. Groth writes more strongly employing the term ‘great poignancy’ to refer to the period of late boyhood, where he sees a ‘suicide of the boy’ and a state of non-being preceding adult masculinity. This, he argues, can lead to the nihilism of older boys. Writers on fathering such as Pleck (1987) have attributed significance to the fact that, unlike girls, boys must go through an often difficult and protracted re-orientation from mother to father, which makes the transition from childhood to adolescence and young adulthood a harder task. This question of mothering and fathering has particular relevance as we move backwards in the life of an individual to explore the earlier years where 

  The word ‘treble’ is often used in place of soprano in this context to give additional emphasis to the fact that it is boys and not women who are singing, though in terms of vocal parts, the two terms amount to largely the same thing. If they are different to sopranos, trebles are perhaps distinguished by lack of vibrato and the term ‘treble’ can now apply to girls who imitate this particular style of singing.

The Background



there may be other uncertainties as to whether the young male is then a boy, or more meaningfully described as a child or an infant. Traditionally, the ritual of ‘breaching’ (see Chapter 2) has marked the beginning of boyhood as the time when the infant is no longer the ward of the mother. Many ideas of the commencement of boyhood proper are still rooted in the notion of the young male beginning to achieve some degree of independence from the protectorate of women, so some kind of struggle against the opposite sex seems to be part of the process of identity formation in boys. At the very least, a young male must show his peers that he is not a mummy’s boy. Unfortunately, boys are often not good at this. It is probable that levels of social and emotional maturity are amongst the most significant qualities in separating boys from men. Boys, for example, do not know how to handle drink, men (supposedly) do. ‘Boy racers’ drive real cars as though they were toys because their growth in social maturity has not kept pace with their reaching the age at which a driving licence is permitted. A traditional angst for mothers has been their sons’ apparent need to go to war to demonstrate that they are no longer boys to be looked after by women. The word ‘boy’ can be used to enhance the poignancy that attaches to young men being killed in the armed services – a family grieves because their lost son was ‘only a boy’. We shall see later that competing social understandings of ‘boy’ and ‘man’ in music have been profoundly significant. ‘Boy’ thus has plenty of social meanings, including servant, that amount to ‘less than man’. If ‘man’ and ‘manliness’ are held up by society to be the ideal, then ‘boy’ is a deficit form of identity, a condition to be escaped. This seems to be the dominant condition in the Western world at the present time. Much is written about men and masculinity and boyhood is not generally a valued state of being. There are indeed similarities and differences here between boyhood and womanhood that we shall need to explore. Moreover in the UK at least we live in a society that seems to have become unusually careless of boyhood and hostile to boys. In spite of a rhetoric of ‘enjoyment and achievement’, the values of the education system are driven by preparation for adult (economic) life rather than attentiveness to the life of the child in the present. Boyhood does not matter, constant testing does. Boys in England are tested on their schoolwork more frequently than almost anywhere else in the world. The UK is apparently more hostile than most other Western countries to boys. The tabloid press has made a fairly thorough job of demonizing boys, creating the impression that most of them are ‘hoodies’ or ‘feral youth’, much to the chagrin of the hundreds of thousands of perfectly pleasant, hard working young people who are genuinely distressed by such labelling. This kind of attitude was reflected recently in an influential international study by UNICEF which appeared to show a particularly poor attitude to and treatment of children in the UK. An answer I would like to see   An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries: A comprehensive assessment of the lives and well-being of children and adolescents in the economically advanced nations, UNICEF Innocenti report No. 7, Florence: UNICEF. In this report, the average ranked position of the UK on six dimensions was 18.2 out of 21 developed nations. 



How High Should Boys Sing?

to this problem is more boys singing in choirs or other vocal groups, an aspiration that is certainly shared by organizations such as Youth Music, but successive UK governments appear to have prioritized placing more boys in prisons. According to the Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE) approximately twenty-three in every 100,000 young people are now in custody, rendering the UK already the European nation that is significantly the most likely to harass and lock up young people. In spite of this the rhetoric of both major political parties appears to favour building more prisons and yet more locking up of boys in response to the apparently escalating mistrust between generations and social classes. I believe that I have good reasons for straying into this political territory. It reiterates my most important point, that I believe singing to be good for boys and that more boys should sing as part of a strategy to reduce the perceived problem with young people and rebuild trust between generations. I know that some people will not take me seriously but if they do not I think that is because we in Britain have a deeply ingrained and unusually class based attitude in which singing by boys is seen as for a ‘soft’, privileged elite whose activities contribute little to the real national business of competitive economic growth and, in previous centuries, the ruthless exploitation of other peoples and cultures. I happen to think all this matters, not least because it is arguable that such an attitude has bequeathed us the twin legacies of climate change and global terrorism. Of course, boys’ singing is only one small part of the cultural revolution needed to heal the planet’s ills, but the reader might recall that it has been my starting point. I hope the chapters that follow will do something to justify my position. I would like now to explain a little more of the relationship between singing and young male identity and how we might study this to good effect. Singing and Identity Let me reiterate, the development of identity is the most fundamental task of boyhood. To boys, it is far more important than schoolwork and a failure to understand this by those who create schooling has much to do, I suspect, with the popular ‘moral panic’ about boys’ supposed underachievement in schooling. I do not wish to say too much about this here. It is just another way in which boys have been demonized and the issue has been inaccurately reported by politicians and the popular press to create a whole mythology of underachieving boys. Certainly it is the case that crudely aggregated figures indicate that girls outperform boys in almost every test at every level, but there are questions to be asked about the validity of the tests and what precisely their long-term value is anyway. It is also the case that when we look beyond the crude average we begin to see inconvenient detail such as the fact that middle-class boys do significantly better in school tests than working-class girls, but that such girls remain invisible as their fate seems to be considered less important by the majority of populist commentators.

The Background



There is a large and well regarded literature which deals with such matters in an appropriately critical, analytical way. The general conclusion is that much of the hype that attaches to boys’ underachievement is not justified. The reader can consult literature such as Epstein et al. (1998), Ashley and Lee (2003), Francis and Skelton (2005), Connolly (2004), Mills et al. (2007) to ascertain this. Let me reiterate instead that the voice and singing are absolutely fundamental to a boy’s identity and if he thinks that singing will not give him an identity with which he feels secure, he will not sing. Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli (2003) describe a boy’s body as a ‘living, moving text’ (p. 14) and, like many other writers, emphasize the importance to boys of physical capital (Bourdieu, 1986). Swain’s (2004) study of primary schools demonstrates just how conspicuous this preoccupation is across the different social classes and cultures. A young boy of any social class or ethnicity is heading for trouble with his peers if he does not ‘perform’ in some way that is suggestive of greater physical capital than that possessed by girls. Green (1997: 27) has also seen the body as a living, moving text and goes so far as to suggest that in singing, the body is on display in a feminine way. I am not sure how true this really is in any kind of sense that transcends the particular time, place and cultural context of Green’s writing, though there is undoubtedly a lot in it. I am more confident of the fact that, as many writers on voice testify, the body, voice and soul are intimately linked (Love with Frazier, 1999; Neslund, 2002; Crabbe, 2005). If the body is a living, moving text, the voice more than anything communicates what lives and moves. I particularly like Crabbe’s observation that Vocal music is especially potent, emanating from deep within the human body itself rather than an external object. Being unmediated, singing is a peculiarly intense expression and exploration of the inner self.

This does resonate with what Green (1997: 185) is saying about boys’ preference for external music technology over the internal voice and the fact that boys are more likely than girls to fear intimacy and resist revealing their inner selves. Never is this more so than when boys are as uncertain of their identities as they are during early adolescence. The performances of strength or displays of physical capital associated with most sports involve more the gross motor actions of biceps, triceps and ‘six packs’ rather than the incredibly intimate contractions of the vocalis muscle that literally give voice to emotion. It is extremely important also to realize that the question of physical capital is not just a question of boys versus girls, it is equally if not more a question of boys versus men. From an early age most boys will compare each other in terms of height and muscle power. They will organize themselves into hierarchies according to who can overpower who and the day when a boy can pick his father up rather than the other way round can give welcome assurance that he is becoming a man. Something as ‘soft’ as singing can be seen as an alternative for boys who are too ‘wimpish’ to enter into such competition, though as we shall see later, I have met plenty of boys who will do both.

10

How High Should Boys Sing?

This ought to alert us to the important fact that there is something fundamentally inadequate with the explanation offered by so many choral specialists and music teachers that they are short of boys because boys ‘don’t want to sound like girls’. There is, as we shall see, some truth in this but it is far from sufficient as an explanation. I have dealt with the question of boys, gender and singing in considerable depth elsewhere (Ashley, 2008) and do not intend to repeat all that detail during the course of the present volume, though I do reiterate some of the most important material. I do, however, wish to draw attention to one particular issue. If, as Kehily (2002) and plenty of others have asserted, boys are terrified of being associated with anything girl-like, especially including the voice, what is so wrong with sounding like a girl anyway? What is so wrong with girls and women that they must be avoided like the ‘pox’ and kept in place as second-class citizens? This, I think, is a question which dwarfs any that relate to whether boys sound like girls in importance. It shows how deeply patriarchal our society remains and how embedded is the notion of the superiority of the adult male in relation to both women and children. This is an important issue that is addressed in Chapter 2. Young boys and girls have tended to segregate themselves by sex for probably as long as we have records. This perhaps shows how much identity learning in relation to gender takes place, but I think the kind of self-imposed and passing sexual segregation of young children may be of a different order to the power relations of hegemonic masculinity to which R.W. Connell refers. Connell’s seminal work on masculinity (Connell, 2005) has spawned voluminous amounts of analysis and discussion. In it he draws on feminist power theories to construct theories of masculinity to explain not only the marginalization of women, but also of men on the basis of class, sexuality or race. His notion of hegemonic masculinity, which currently largely describes the insensitive, macho male with little interest in any culture other than sport, self and money, is a powerful explanatory paradigm. Nevertheless, as Salisbury and Jackson (1996) remind us, masculine identities are full of cracks and fissures as they shift across history and different cultures. Men who sing might now be marginalized by hegemonic masculinity, but this would hardly have been the case in the mining valleys of South Wales during the early twentieth century. This notion of changing masculinity will occupy important space in the chapters that follow and I shall demonstrate that, though the history of boys’ orientation to sport and physical adventure is a long one, singing like a woman has been less of a problem in the past than it has become in Western culture today. Boys could be something different and new, and more equitable social relationships between people of different gender and generation could develop if boorish, hegemonic masculinity were more strongly resisted and the status of adult male were not implicitly embedded in Western society as something more worthy of human aspiration than womanhood. I shall draw not only on Connell’s work, but on that of the French philosopher Michel Foucault to point to the curious paradox that feminism is potentially a strong ally of boys’ singing. This is because for as long as boys fear to sing like women, it is the case that both boys and women

The Background

11

are oppressed by adult males and in feminist scholarship we have a powerful tool for the study of oppression. Of course, boys grow up to become men and it is an alarming prospect that so many are currently growing up with some of the attitudes associated with the forms of masculinity that are currently hegemonic. The popular and simplistic belief that boys’ problems will be solved by ‘more male role models’ or ‘more contact with fathers’ must be seen as a frankly absurd one unless it is clearly stated what kinds of men are envisaged and how the problem of the ‘wrong sort of man’ is to be dealt with. For me, if there is a ‘crisis of masculinity’ it has much more to do with this kind of issue than the fact that girls are outperforming boys in school tests of doubtful value. Other Attributes of Identity Important as issues of gender and masculinity are, then, it is important that we do not allow ourselves to be side-tracked by a single focus on gender and thus become blind to other issues of identity which may be as important or more important with regard to boys’ singing. Figure 1.1 shows the way in which identity is conceptualized in the research centre of which I am the director.

Figure 1.1  Conceptualizing learner identity The point of this diagram is to show that though discrete categories of identity such as gender can usefully be studied in great depth, no single one of them gives a complete and holistic picture of the individual or indeed the social group with which the individual is associated. We have already seen how a single focus on

12

How High Should Boys Sing?

gender with no reference to social class can render invisible white, working-class girls. There may well be more than six discrete categories but to my mind, we will never understand boys’ singing unless we keep in mind the principle that multiple factors interact to create the identities that say ‘I am a singer’ or ‘no way’. Ethnicity undoubtedly has a role to play in contemporary multicultural Britain. Boys from Muslim or Black African backgrounds, for example, bring entirely different traditions which both challenge and enrich established cultures such as traditional British folk song or the canon of Western classical music. At a more micro level of place, I have found evidence that it is indeed true that Wales is more a ‘land of song’ than England, and that boys from the North of England are likely to be on average more resistant to singing than boys from the South of England. There are, nevertheless pockets of exceptionality within these regional generalizations. A strong lead in English singing, for example, has developed in the traditionally industrial North East through the Sage Gateshead arts complex which owes its existence to both regeneration and strong local traditions. Self replicating ghettos of entirely different cultural attitudes in big cities develop as a result of historic social class and ethnicity factors, place then becoming a magnet for class or ethnicity. Differences in both means and disposition to travel out of one area of a big city to another have emerged as significant in my research on boys’ singing. Such patterns can be either resistant or responsive to policy intervention. Of the six attributes of identity I have identified, three other than gender stand out as needing particular consideration in a book on boys’ singing. Religion and spirituality have great significance for a small minority, though overall I have found religion to be less important than might be imagined. This is partly explained by the fact that religious considerations are almost inseparably bound up with class and ethnicity. Religion can excite great passions of identity. For the vast majority of young people I spoke to, its irrelevance to music was found to be almost a given, something to be dismissed out of hand. Yet for the minority of boys who had really learned to enjoy and value choral singing, the interest in nine out of ten cases could be traced back, even now, to church or cathedral choirs. A further complication which needs to be appreciated is that not all the boys who sing sacred classical music do so with a confessional religious belief and this is where the question of religion merges with other aspects of identity. Boys are no different in this respect to the adults who were found in a study by Walter (1992) to sing the great sacred choral classics without religious belief, or indeed the college students found in a study by McCrary (2001) to sing gospel music for principally social rather than religious reasons. There is also an important difference between religion and spirituality when it comes to music and I discuss all this in greater depth in Chapter 7. The first of the two qualities that rank as at least equal in significance to gender is undoubtedly social class, a theme that will permeate all the chapters other than those dealing with the purely scientific or technical aspects of voice. The seminal, reference work on the topic is probably still Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984). Bourdieu, through his well known concept of ‘habitus’, discusses

The Background

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the appropriateness of behavioural repertoire in any given subculture or culture. Individuals must carry a mental structure in their heads in order to deal with the world. In doing so, they are rational actors capable of making choice and not merely the products of social structures. Individual choices are likely to represent conscious decisions about social positioning and the cultural products and practices associated with the social positions identified with. Nevertheless, loyalties to the social class in which the individual is encultured are strong and Bourdieu draws from Marxist ideas of class and conflict. Significantly for the present work he asserts that ‘nothing more clearly affirms one’s class, nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 18). In addition to the habitus, Bourdieu has given us the notion of cultural capital, which is closely related to social class. The issue is not that of absolute wealth, but the degree to which the available financial capital is converted to cultural capital through investment in the process of education. By this criterion, music is again symbolic of some of the greatest social divisions there are, at least in the UK. Cultural capital in the form of a classical musical education is valued very highly by those who possess it and parents of modest means can make great sacrifices to help their children acquire it. They do so against a tide which is running with increasing strength against the canon of Western classical music and must increasingly resort to costly private education. Lucy Green’s (2002) book How Popular Musicians Learn summarizes the position very well. This experimental, creative, learner-centred approach has revolutionized music in many state schools, but it seldom results in boys discovering the full potential of their voices across a two or more octave range to high Gs and As. This is only likely to happen as a result of deliberate instruction and enculturation that, with some exceptions, happens only in schools chosen by parents already in possession of some degree of cultural capital. The effect on boys’ singing, as we shall see, is profound. Carey (2005) notes with approval that Bourdieu’s work is grounded in empirical data and thus ‘elevated from theory into sociological fact’ (p. 121). Whilst far from being beyond criticism itself, the empirical nature of Bourdieu’s work distances it from the pontifical and polemical approach of many writers on art criticism consumed, as Carey regards it, by their own self-importance. The very criticisms of Bourdieu’s work that are made by Carey and others indeed ring true when the empirical data obtained from boys is discussed later. These clearly show how individuals behave as rational actors in negotiating personal style that is a compromise between deeply felt inner values and social group and class allegiances. Choice and the ability to make choices as a result of the cultural capital held and the social groupings and class to which allegiance is felt is indeed of fundamental importance to boys’ singing. Other large-scale works on a similar theme such as the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project (Savage, 2006) have modified or refined Bourdieu’s ideas in the light of contemporary Britain, but rather than challenging the fundamental principles, they have pointed increasingly to the important fact that middle-class boys are advantaged over working-class boys with regard to their ability to make

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How High Should Boys Sing?

choices. The concept of cultural omnivore, which neatly describes the contents of a middle-class boy’s iPod, is one that appears to be increasing in importance (Savage, 2006; Wing Chan and Goldthorpe, 2007). Choice is stressed by the UK’s National Music Manifesto, a government inspired attempt to put music for all young people back on the agenda: by the age of 11, many young people are making their own decisions about the music they want to hear and play and where and how they want to do it. Music providers within and beyond school have to listen to what young people want and act on providing it for them. (National Music Manifesto, 2006: 48)

I read this statement with some degree of reservation for it could be seen as both class-blind and reactive in nature. We shall see shortly that it may be also generation-blind. I do not dispute the importance of choice, neither the centrality of it in young people’s lives today. What I wish to call attention to is my own finding that the eclecticism of the culturally omnivorous middle-class boy permits openness to boys’ singing which I have not found in working-class boys. Such boys possess less cultural capital than middle-class boys and some culpability for this attaches to schooling which as well as being sometimes class-blind can display a patronizing ‘not for the likes of them’ attitude to the very social classes imagined out of existence. Class-blindness, like post-colonial guilt, is possibly a condition of contemporary Britain and one that is encouraged by politicians. The New Labour government that came to power in 1997 in an electoral landslide did so by marginalizing the traditional, class based form of socialism and talking of a ‘third way’ as if social class had suddenly vanished. Similarly, the Conservative Party has sought to play down its traditional associations with the landed gentry and capitalist entrepreneur to compete for the crucial swing votes of ‘middle Britain’. A study of boys’ singing, however, reveals just how much musical taste and opportunities for young people to choose continue to be conditioned by the old and peculiarly British class system. It is almost certainly the case more in Britain than in the rest of Europe and the United States that the education system has been formed by and continues to replicate a division in which a privileged elite receives an education founded upon the liberal arts principle and the masses an education founded upon the principles of preparation for a productive economic life. Nowhere is the class dimension of this more painfully evident than on the front cover of the cathedral music magazine that lies open upon my desk. This shows, as is so often the case, three very white, clean boys imaged in choir robes crowned by bow ties that scream elite establishment from the rooftops in the most brazen manner imaginable. I risk some valued friendships here, but I must disregard any preferences of my own in favour of faithfulness to the evidence I have gathered from young people of every social class in every region of England and Wales. This overwhelmingly testifies to the catastrophic social divisiveness of such images in

The Background

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spite of whatever rhetoric to play down elitism is devised. Would that just a little more care and thought were given to what might be seen, by whom, and where. My personal view is that all young people should have an equal opportunity to make the informed choice of the cultural omnivore. I belong to the generation which in its youth looked idealistically to education as the means of achieving that. One reason I do not like the word ‘elite’ is because it so readily inspires inverted snobbery that leads to the rejection of genres of music traditionally associated with the middle classes. I want as many boys as possible to sing and I want them to sing the best music of all cultures. This can and does mean that boys of virtually any background can come to accept the dress style associated with a wide diversity of musical performance styles, but not if these are thoughtlessly linked to brazen displays of social class. There is thus no absolute need to abandon choir robes or any other outward cultural display. It just means that we have to handle the issue with more sensitivity and intelligence, or perhaps less naivety, than is sadly sometimes the case. The situation we currently have in reality is one in which boys’ vocal technique is effectively one of the most potent indicators of social class that there is. This is not at all helpful. Discussion and analysis of the evidence that supports this claim and what it means as well as painful soul searching concerning what might be done about it will occupy much of the book, but particularly Chapters 6, 7 and 9. Whilst Bourdieu singles out musical taste as the most potent signifier of social class there is little doubt that fashion and dress style are also extremely compelling and the power of the two together is illustrated not only by the above but in almost any situation in which musical performance is accompanied by visual images. Young people are now accustomed to choosing their own clothes at least as much as to choosing their own music. In the case of boys’ singing, we shall see in later chapters that it is very easy for adults to get things wrong when choosing how boys should dress. But why should adults choose how boys dress? This question brings me to the final attribute of identity that I wish to raise in this introductory chapter, that of generation. If this book and the research undertaken for it has anything really new to say about boys and singing, I suspect from all the other books I have read on the subject it may be about the significance of generational identity. The next chapter takes the form of a resume history of boys’ singing, but its particular interpretation is inspired by Foucault and tells an emancipatory story of boys. The power to create identity has slowly shifted over a period of more than 1,000 years from adults to boys. The twenty-first-century boy chooses how he will dress, what music he will listen to and what other products he will consume in a way that would have been unimaginable to the nineteenth-century boy. It has become my main task in this book to demonstrate the significance of this for boys’ singing. It is in the relationship between the generations rather than the genders in which I now ground the most significant parts of my explanation for boys don’t sing. I am going to conclude this chapter with a brief exposition of what I mean and why I think it important.

How High Should Boys Sing?

16

Let us first consider the question of why anybody should want to listen to boys singing. This is at least as important as the question why any boy should want to sing. To put the question more bluntly, if an accomplished performance of a motet by a well trained, adult, four-part choir is available, why should anybody want to listen to a less accomplished performance by boys who lack the accuracy and musicianship of professional sopranos? If Eric Clapton has recorded the definitive version of Tears in Heaven, or John Lennon the definitive version of Imagine, why should anybody want to listen to a small boy squeaking a rendition in a high treble voice? The simple and short answer to this question is that lots of people do not. Boys and girls of similar age to the performer, with few exceptions, certainly do not. There are some adults who do and in this fact is to be found the real meat of this book. Of course, some of these are the parents, relatives, friends and teachers of the boys. We would expect that. Part of children’s learning of any art form is the natural desire for the work to be appreciated by those who have meaning in the life of the child. Children will of course listen to other children’s singing in a pedagogical context. The three pillars of the English school music curriculum have become listening, composing and performing. But there are other adult audience groups for boys’ singing that fall outside this category of pedagogical listening. Boys’ singing has been and still is desired by certain kinds of adult who do want to listen to boys singing because they value it for what it is. It does matter to them that boys rather than accomplished adult sopranos are singing the top line in a mass setting. A boy’s performance of Imagine is important precisely because it is a boy’s performance and there is a commercial market for it. I began my funded work on boys and singing with the hypothesis that ‘the peer group is seldom the audience for boys’ singing’. Not only has this hypothesis been robustly proven, but at the risk of appearing immodest, I think I can state that it has turned out to be visionary. I have spent the last few years coming to terms with its implications and, for those who think boys’ singing is important, they are frankly breathtaking. Much of the remainder of this book constitutes my attempt to demonstrate why. If I am to summarize the argument in one or two sentences, it has to be that most if not all of the performances in boys’ singing that are valued enough to become commercial recordings are the result of boys singing at the behest of, and to please adults. The significance of this is that the values and tastes of adults are distinctly ‘uncool’ as far as the younger generation is concerned. Boys’ singing may be ‘uncool’ for a variety of reasons but chief amongst these is the fact that boys sing what adults want to hear, not what boys and girls want to hear. I have come, on the basis of good evidence, to believe that this may be more significant than ‘sounding like a girl’. This position is reflected in Robin Alexander’s recent large-scale independent review of the English primary school curriculum which identified concern about • • •

today’s children being forced to grow up too soon a cult of celebrity a loss of respect and empathy between the generations. (Garner, 2007).

The Background

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Very similar concerns surfaced in a recent review by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which sought to compare what members of the public considered to be the ‘evils’ of the present age with what were considered to be the ‘evils’ of the time when the Foundation was established a hundred years ago (Watts, 2008). Consumerism, greed, the decline of community and individualism were cited by respondents to this large survey as the new ‘social evils’. Also identified were young people as victims or perpetrators of anti-social behaviour, stereotyping and limited opportunity. It is ironic to talk of ‘limited opportunity’ when there are choir directors crying out for boys to join their choirs. These major reviews point to a clearly felt need for rebuilding of relationships between, amongst others, boys and adults. My own studies of boys and singing both endorse this aspiration but draw attention to the height of the mountain that now has to be climbed. In Chapter 5 I examine the relationship between boys and adult audiences, exploring the nature of fantasies about boyhood that adults can have through music and looking at where the boundaries need to be drawn in intergenerational relationships. Before that, I examine how our present situation has come about during the 1,500-year history of boys’ singing and how changes in the meaning of ‘boy’ have accompanied changes in the understanding, interpretation and performance of masculinity, manliness and boyishness. Methodology The data used in this book have been gathered over some time and are not the result of any single research programme. The process began in the late 1990s with a post-doctoral ethnography of an all male church choir. The purpose of that study was to investigate what values motivated the boys’ high levels of loyalty and voluntary attendance. The study was highly detailed and consisted of regular participant observation of the boys at work combined with an extensive, iterative process of one-to-one and focus group interviewing on the respondent validation principle. Briefly, this means that each boy was interviewed several times, the material for subsequent interviews being a write up of the previous interviews which was shared with the boy who was able to comment on its accuracy, discuss my interpretation of it and offer further insights. I refer in a little more detail to this study from time to time as the book unfolds. This programme of work continued sporadically after the original publication because of the level of interest shown in it and the number of questions I was asked about why it was so hard to motivate boys to sing, in church or cathedral choirs at least. Questioners could broadly be divided into two camps. The majority were those in the media who wanted stories about the imminent extinction of choirboys and who seemed fascinated by the question of what on earth kind of boy still sang in church. A significantly smaller minority, from the music and allied professions, were concerned to know what they might do to stem this decline.

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How High Should Boys Sing?

It was this level of interest that maintained my focus on the topic. The next significant phase of data gathering was associated with a Youth Music funded evaluation of a choral outreach programme. The programme was an early precursor of the present (2006–2010) UK National Singing Programme and involved observing cathedral choristers at work in primary schools with boys who had never encountered such singing. It also involved the construction of detailed case studies of primary school boys from ‘socially challenged’ or ‘deprived’ areas (I do not like such terms, but they seem necessary) joining a junior choir designed to create singing opportunities for children who had none. Similar ethnographic methods of participant observation and interview were employed, though in less detail than the original study. A further funded evaluation of a city council’s arts enrichment programme followed, together with contracts to research the problem of the shortage of male teachers in primary schools and the educational practices of Steiner schools, where boys’ reluctance to sing was found to be generally much less of an issue than in state schools. Detailed interviews with eight- and eleven-year-old boys in eight different primary schools were undertaken for the study Women Teaching Boys (Ashley and Lee, 2003). Music and sport emerged as the two subjects the boys thought the worst taught. They didn’t sing, not because it was ‘girly’, but because singing lessons were either non-existent or reported by most boys in all but one of the schools as extremely dull and uninspiring relative to other subjects. All this work began to confirm an emerging pattern – many boys secretly wanted to sing and enjoyed doing so when stretched, but were held back by the low expectations held by many adults, lack of inspirational singing teaching and often, wittingly or otherwise, the same media agenda that was so interested in the demise of boys’ singing and desirous to portray boys who did sing as odd. A major opportunity to draw all this work together and progress it significantly further came with a successful application for an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research fellowship. This allowed me to devote 100 per cent of my time to the subject. The AHRC were not going to pay for a study purely of choristers and choirboys. Nobody, it seemed, was prepared to fund that. However, I was more than ready to examine boys’ singing across all genres. My only stipulation was that ‘boy’ should mean, as I have already described, one no longer a child but whose voice had not yet become that of an adult man. I choose my words very carefully here for a variety of reasons that are explored in later chapters. This has ever since proved problematical as more than a few people seem reluctant to understand the issues I endeavour to explain in this book. This difficulty is the source of the title – gender, authenticity and credibility in boys’ singing. The young male voice is particularly suited to some genres and unsuited to others. Boys can’t just sing anything at all and sound credible and authentic. It just happens that they are at their most credible and authentic when they sing the sacred choral repertoire. Perhaps this is a subjective and partial view and the reader is entitled to dispute it. I have already alluded to the principles of transparency and trustworthiness which many contemporary writers in social science see as more authentic means of conveying social research than spurious claims to classical or positivistic scientific

The Background

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objectivity. These are often backed by impressive looking parametric statistics, but when the means of obtaining the numbers to be so processed are examined critically, they can too frequently be found to be derived from relatively simplistic measurements that yield little richness of information. The autobiographical thread that runs through the book is my attempt to be transparent. Readers will know what my subjective viewpoint is and interpret what I say as critical enquirers without, I hope, ascribing to me the quality of an Isaac Newton or a Neils Bohr, which is simply not appropriate in social science. For the AHRC project, I decided on a twofold research design. I would first make contact with a representative range of boys who had recorded commercial CDs that were in the public domain. My criterion of pre-adult or ‘treble’ voice would apply. I would look at any genre, provided it had been recorded by a treble. These boys would be the subjects of detailed case study and the methods to be used were to be largely those of observation and respondent validated one-to-one iterative interview that had been developed in the earlier work. I would also visit a range of schools to find out the views of what I termed ‘peer audiences’. This was a deliberately chosen term for I had hypothesized that young people the same age as the singers would be unlikely to listen to boy treble recordings. There was thus deliberate irony in the term ‘peer audience’. Nevertheless, I also hypothesized that if boys did not listen to other boys singing, it would be hardly surprising that few would consider singing as something they might do themselves, so I felt the principle more than justified. The approach to peer audiences would be more survey based and involve less detailed data from a much larger sample. I would employ a multi-media presentation based on the work of my case study boys to be delivered to classes during normal lesson time and the pupils would respond to written questionnaires with open and closed questions. Some whole class discussion would also be recorded and focus group interviews would take place with samples of pupils during breaks. Schools were selected to include a range of different types in which boys might be expected to sing as well as schools chosen on the grounds that music was not a particular feature of the curriculum. As far as possible considerations such as the need to achieve a spread of urban and rural location and differing ethnic and social class demographics were taken into account, although the nature and impact of the music department with regard to boys’ singing was the primary variable. The result of this process was an inner-city comprehensive in a South West education action zone, a city performing arts specialist school in the South East, a city performing arts specialist school in the South West, a rural performing arts specialist school in the South West, a Welsh speaking comprehensive school, a boys’ grammar school in the South East, a technology specialist school in the North West, a comprehensive school on the Isle of Man and cathedral choir schools in the South East, the South West and the North West. Primary schools visited were located in the catchment areas of the secondary schools. Nine Key Stage 2 (ages 9–11), twenty-one Key Stage 3 (ages 11–14) and five Key Stage 4 (ages 14–16)

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How High Should Boys Sing?

classes were visited, resulting in data from 446 young people aged between nine and sixteen. Finally, I would undertake a chorister survey in order to test out the findings of the first ethnographic study on a larger sample of boys who sang regularly. Six cathedrals, ranging from a small ‘parish church’ cathedral to one of the largest and most prestigious in Britain were visited. More details on the methodology employed with the choristers as well as those employed with the solo artists and peer audiences are given in the respective chapters. Completion of this work saw a phase of publication, including an 80,000 word scholarly monograph (Ashley, 2008) in which further methodological details are given. However, the programme has not ended. Significantly more AHRC funding has followed to undertake work with the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain and a range of associated school partners. This work is ongoing at the time of writing and is based upon the findings of the previous work. Most significant of these is the ‘peer education’ principle that is derived from a robust conclusion that older boys, rather than any class of adult, are the most likely agents to encourage younger boys to take up and persist with singing. Boys in the Youth Choir are participating in the creation of a state-of-the-art resource based upon an interactive video game format. The boys have been extensively consulted about the content and I have been able to draw on these data too for the present book, though much remains to be done in this project, including the evaluation of its reception in schools. Ethical approval for work in schools was on the basis of the BERA (British Educational Research Association) guidelines which offered anonymity and the right to withdraw. Consent was obtained through a letter circulated by the schools prior to the work. Work with the case study boys presented a much more significant ethical challenge for a whole variety of reasons. The boys are treated as ‘defended subjects’ – a term associated with Holloway and Jefferson (2000). It should not be hard to appreciate that, if boys are likely to be harmed through ridicule or bullying by the placing of their thoughts in the public domain, the researcher owes them a significant duty of care. This means that careful boundaries between the researcher as advocate, the researcher as critic and the researcher as pastoral friend have had to be negotiated in what is probably a unique enterprise. The only point I wish particularly to stress here concerns the conventions I have adopted for identifying these boys. Where a boy’s work is in the public domain (for example, through a commercial CD recording) and I am commenting on that recording but not reporting the results of an interview with the artist, I have used the real name. At all other times, boys I have spoken to are referred to through individual pseudonyms. Choirs and bands are not identified by name, but referred to in as general a term as is possible. I hope readers will respect the privacy of the many young people who have given me access to their thoughts under the protection of anonymity.

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References Archer, J. (2004), ‘The Trouble with “Doing Boy”’, The Psychologist, 17 (3), 135–7. Ashley, M. (2008), Teaching Singing to Boys and Teenagers: The young male voice and the problem of masculinity, Lampeter: Mellen. Ashley, M. and Lee J. (2003), Women Teaching Boys: Caring and working in the primary school, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste, London: RKP. — (1986), ‘The Forms of Capital’, in Richardson, J. (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York: Greenwood Press. Carey, J. (2005), What Good Are the Arts? London: Faber & Faber. Connell, R. (2005), Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity. Connolly, P. (2004), Boys and Schooling in the Early Years, London: Routledge. Crabbe, S. (2005), ‘Giving Boys a Voice’, ON LINE Opinion: Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate, 29 April, available at http://www.onlineopinion. com.au/view.asp?article=3385&page=2 (accessed 17 October 2007). Epstein, D., Elwood, J., Het, V. and Maw, J. (1998), Failing Boys?, Buckingham: Open University Press. Francis, B. and Skelton, C. (2005), Reassessing Gender and Achievement, London: Routledge Falmer. Garner, R. (2007), ‘The Primary Cause for Concern’, The Independent, 19 October. Green, L. (1997), Music, Gender, Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A way ahead for music education, Aldershot: Ashgate. Groth, M. (2007), ‘Has Anyone Seen the Boy? The fate of the boy in becoming a man’, THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, 1 (1), 6–42. Holloway, W. and Jefferson, T. (2000), Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free association, narrative and the interview method, London: Sage. Janssen, D. (2007), ‘BOY: Linguistic anthropological notes’, THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, 1 (1), 43–67. Kehily, M. (2002), Sexuality, Gender and Schooling: Shifting agendas in social learning, London: Routledge Falmer. Love, R. with Frazier, D. (1999), Set Your Voice Free: How to get the singing or speaking voice you want, New York: Little Brown. Mac an Ghaill, M. (2002), Key Note Address. Expert Symposium, Centre for Research in Education and Democracy, UWE Bristol, 17 October. Martino, W. and Pallotta-Chiarolli, M. (2003), So What’s a Boy? Addressing issues of masculinity and schooling, Maidenhead: Open University Press. McCrary, J. (2001), ‘“Good” and “Real” Reasons College-Age Participants Join University Gospel and Traditional Choral Ensembles’, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 149, 23–30.

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Mills, M., Martino, W. and Lingard, B. (2007), ‘Getting Boys’ Education “Right”: The Australian Government’s Parliamentary Inquiry report as an exemplary instance of recuperative masculinity politics’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28 (1), 5–21. National Music Manifesto (2006), Making Every Child’s Music Matter, Music Manifesto Report No. 2, London: DfES. Neslund, D. (2002), ‘IS there a Future for Boychoir?’, available at http://boychoirs. org/library/future/future001.html (accessed 10 October 2006). Pleck, J. (1987), ‘American Fathering in Historical Perspective’, in Kimmel, M. (ed.), Changing Men: New directions in research on men and masculinity, New York/London: Sage. Salisbury, J. and Jackson, D. (1996), Challenging Macho Values, London: Falmer. Savage, M. (2006), ‘The Musical Field’, Cultural Trends, 15 (2/3), 159–74. Swain, J. (2004), ‘The Resources and Strategies that 10–11 Year Old Boys Use to Construct Masculinities in the School Setting’, British Educational Research Journal, 30 (1), 167–86. Walker, B. and Kushner, S. (1999), ‘The Building Site: An educational approach to masculine identities’, Journal of Youth Studies, 2, 45–58. Walter, T. (1992), ‘Angelic Choirs: Why do people join choirs and sing texts remote from their individual beliefs? A sociologist looks for answers’, The Musical Times, 133 (1792), 278–81. Watts, B. (2008), What Are Today’s Social Evils? The results of a web consultation, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Wing Chan, T. and Goldthorpe, J. (2007), ‘The Social Stratification of Cultural Consumption: Some policy implications of a research project’, Cultural Trends, 16 (4), 373–83.

Chapter 2

Singing as Social Control of Boyhood Introduction In the previous chapter I established that boys are young males engaged in an active process of identity construction. What a boy perceives his identity to be has a crucial bearing on whether or not he will sing at all, and if he does, how high he will sing. I acknowledged that the social construction of gender roles plays a significant part in this process, but pointed out that identity is the product of a great deal more than gender alone. I concluded that generational allegiance has come to be at least as important as gender in the social dynamics of boys’ singing. Crucially, I concluded that much of the singing done by boys is done at the behest of adults. There are certain groups and classes of adults who value the apparent ability of young boys collectively to create the ‘sound of angels’. Without the determination, coercion and enthusiasm of these adults, boys’ singing as we know it today would not exist. In Chapter 5 I explore the nature of adult admiration for boys’ singing in greater depth. My purpose in this chapter is to present a resume history of boys’ singing that will explore how this phenomenon has come about. The story that this will tell is one of power relationships and it will be toward the end of the chapter that we see how a significant change in the balance of power between boys and adults has occurred with extreme rapidity during the final fifty years of a 1,500year history. The consequences of the new relationships that have emerged and the new understandings of masculinity and ‘boy’ with regard to singing that have developed as a result are explored in depth in later chapters. Let me begin by reiterating what may be one of the few constants in this story. It is recognized by Oakley (1994) who discusses the power binary that links women and children together as a category inferior to men. This, she argues, was common practice amongst nineteenth-century politicians and the etiquette of the cry ‘women and children first’ as the lifeboats are manned will be familiar. Boys and women were thus, like colonial subjects, afforded a similar ‘less than adult’ status. Much of what I have to say throughout this book makes sense only if this remains the case today and I believe it does. That, as I intimated in the previous chapter, is why it is such a terrible thing for a boy to ‘sound like a girl’. We still live in a patriarchal society. My argument is that boys are victims of this fact as well as women and that we all suffer as a result. A patriarchal society is not a good one for the rearing of children and may even contain seeds of its own potential destruction.

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The Early Period What I am going to call the early period is a disproportionately long one. In selecting incidents from the history of boys’ singing one is mindful that, like much of what is called pre-history, the periods of greatest antiquity are passed over disproportionately quickly in relation to their length. We might justifiably trace the history of angelic boy singers back to the earliest use of boys’ voices in Christian liturgy. Sent to England by Pope Gregory, the missionary bishop St Augustine founded institutions in Canterbury in 597 CE and Rochester and London in 604 CE. The present-day schools which are descendants of these early institutions like to claim a lineage for their choral traditions back to that time. Boys may well have sung in other cultures and other places before that time but for the purposes of this analysis, the founding of these early Christian establishments can be regarded as a suitable marker of the beginning of the early period and adult control of boys’ singing. It is possible that male voices were favoured in the earliest days because of St Paul’s admonition that it is ‘a disgrace for a woman to speak in church’ (1 Corinthians, 14: 34–5). The notion that only boys’ voices could satisfy the requirements of purity to be classed as ‘angelic’ is probably a somewhat later construct and one that has recently returned to haunt boys’ choir enthusiasts. It is clear that young girl oblates sang the offices in early nunneries, a process which Mould records as being extinct by the 1539 Act of Dissolution (Mould, 2007: 76). A more robust explanation of boys’ favouring is the higher status that was attached to male oblates as future inheritors of ecclesiastical patriarchy. We need to enter the strictly hierarchical mindset of thirteenth-century theology to understand the degree to which boys were allocated roles to which theological significance was attached. It is the hegemonic dominance of the male line to priesthood that is likely to have created the resource of the high voice which composers came to exploit during the Middle Ages as first organum and then polyphony began to develop, the term ‘treble’ deriving from the use of the Latin ‘triplum’ to denote the emergent third and highest range of the thirteenth-century motet. To understand both what characterized and what brought about the end of this long, early period, it is necessary to appreciate that the majority of scholars of childhood argue that childhood, as we conceive it today, was unknown prior to the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries (Kincaid, 1992; Gittens, 1998; Jenks, 2005). Until as late as the early 1800s, infants under the protectorate of women wore dresses regardless of their sex (Ledes, 1995). A ritual known as breaching dominated the centuries before modern notions of childhood. A boy child would receive clothes that were miniature versions of those worn by men, thus marking the end of infancy and the protectorate of women. This could occur at any age between four and seven and the newly breached boy would have a long task ahead of him in ascending the hierarchy of men. This is not to say that boys from the age of six or seven were no longer regarded as children. It is more the case that until the moral campaigns for childhood innocence of the eighteenth century and the sentimentalizing of childhood itself in the nineteenth century, the word child had

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a different meaning. Little thought appears to have been given during the early period to the idea that boys might be protected from the often rough, crude and morally corrupting world entered after breaching. The idea that there was no childhood prior to the eighteenth century is not a universally supported view. Orme (2001) refers to Shakespeare’s seven ages of man as well as illustrated manuscripts, toys, paintings and games specifically for children that date back to the Middle Ages. Such childhoods, however, are likely to have been luxuries for the wealthy that were not enjoyed by boys with less leisure time, amongst whose numbers we are probably justified in including choristers. We might reasonably assume that most boy singers of the Middle Ages enjoyed something of the hard lives of men with jobs to do, to say nothing of the occasional mistreatment by drunken or violent masters. This is of considerable significance in terms of masculinity and singing. Not only does it place boys at the bottom of a hierarchy of men, it also confirms the traditional gender roles that assign males to work and females to domesticity. The fact that the boy chorister was a ‘worker’ is likely to have been more significant than the fact that he sang in a high voice and we shall see later that this remains the case today. Who the audiences might have been during the early period has to be largely a matter of conjecture. That such audiences actually appreciated performances in anything like the way we might now can only be a matter of speculation. We cannot really know whether those hearing boys singing had their minds on the real boy and his voice rather than imaginary angels and the liturgy. Tellingly, there are remarkably few records of boys being singled out by name as having charmed audiences with the particular gift of a voice and precocious singing talent. Mould (2007) has unearthed the rare sixteenth-century case of the boy Robin who was clearly unusually skilled in the prized arts of florid counterpoint with a very high treble (as opposed to lower ‘mean’) part elaborated by decorative improvisation. The composer William Cornysh the Younger did ‘greatly laud and praise’ this boy (Mould, 2007: 51). Such boys, however, were more likely to be the victims of kidnapping by press gangs than to receive reward or acknowledgement of the person. Kings, nobles and high clerics desired such boys in order to outdo their rivals’ choirs and it would seem that consideration of the welfare or rights of children was singularly not an issue. Langfeldt (1981) contends that during the Middle Ages, boys were not ‘children’ through a sexual otherness from adults and the meaning of innocence was closer to a lack of knowledge (Gittens, 1998) that could be legitimately the butt of adult humour. In Elizabethan England, there is evidence that this innocence was not something to be protected, but something to be exploited in the world of entertainment. There are good records of the fortunes and exploits of the choristers of the Chapel Royal during this era and it is quite clear that the boys were workers in both singing and acting. The roles were interchangeable, with apparently little consideration being given to ‘suitability’ in the sense we would see it today. The Elizabethan Children of the Chapel indeed achieved some degree of notoriety for their performances as child actors.

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The boys of St Paul’s Cathedral and St George’s Chapel, Windsor seem to have been similarly employed, suggesting that such roles were normal, at least in the metropolis. There is evidence that boys employed to sing the divine offices offended the sensibilities of some audiences (and perhaps delighted others) through the ‘lascivious writhing of their tender limbs’: Even in her majesties chappel do these pretty upstart youthes profane the Lordes Day by the lascivious writhing of their tender limbs, and gorgeous decking of their apparell, in feigning bawdie fables gathered from the idolatrous heathen poets. (Cambridge History of English and American Literature, 1907–21: Ch. XI, Section 1)

Boys played a significant role on the Shakespearean stage, and it was a controversial one. Shapiro (1994) notes records that mention how a few men, mindful of the Deuteronomic prohibition of cross-dressing were reluctant to play female roles (p. 30), but in 1636 Simonds d’Ewes refused to attend a play at Trinity College ‘because of women’s apparel worne in it by boyes and youths’ (ibid.) The degree to which a ribald bawdiness involving boys’ bodies, women and the treatment of male children was the norm must be partly subject to imaginative conjecture. However, Cope (1974) has argued that Marlowe used boys in love scenes for complex and satiric effects, involving the audience in a plot that the boys themselves could not fully understand because of their relative lack of sexual experience. Mould (2007) records the use of the names Dildo and Catzo (contemporary slang for penis) for page boys in a play by John Marston (c. 1574–1634). We are left to wonder whether the boys had any inkling of this. I find it hard to believe that they did not. The significance of these particular glimpses at history is that for hundreds of years, boys could be freely exploited and enjoyed few if any ‘rights’ with regard to the privacy of their own person or their future status. Any we would today celebrate as talented or musically gifted were simply jealously guarded assets of their masters or employers. Being a child gave them no special status as it was to in centuries to come. The Crusade for Innocence There is no singular event that marks the end of the early period. It would not be unreasonable to propose that boy singers were the recipients of crumbs falling from the tables of the Renaissance, the Restoration and the Enlightenment, all events that played a key role in the transition from the Middle Ages to the newer more rational world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My particular argument about boys’ subjectivity and the associated power relationships is propelled by the rise of Puritanism and the later evangelical challenge to church indolence. Mould (2007: 122) records a sermon preached by one William Crawshawe in 1608 that was instrumental in bringing to an end such practices as boys’ involvement in adult

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entertainment. Interestingly, Crawshawe’s text apparently included the admonition that ‘he that teacheth children to play is … a spoiler and destroyer of children’. There was thus a new concern for boys’ souls, a singularly important change of attitude if our interest is in subjectivity. It presages a religious crusade associated with Susannah Wesley (1669–1742) through which the child was to be redeemed from the universal sins of the human race. Wesley’s obsession with Augustinian notions of original sin is notoriously evident in her determination to ‘break the will of the child’: When the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and stand in awe of the parents, then a great many childish follies ..may be passed by … I insist on the conquering of the will of children betimes, because this is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education … when this is thoroughly done, then a child is capable of being governed by reason and piety. (Graham, undated)

Foucault suggests that the period between the Enlightenment and the early Victorian era was a time when notions of human subjectivity were in the ascendant (Foucault, 1978). It was no longer, as in pre-Enlightenment times, the sin that was being punished but the sinner himself. There thus arose an obsession with boys’ purity that was to receive a further boost through the writing of the eighteenthcentury French physician Tissot. Langfeldt (1981) credits Tissot with the founding of the great battle against onanism that was to rage from then until well into the mid twentieth century. As Foucault suggests, the boy is beginning to emerge as a person with his own subjectivity, but moralistic adults see the need to gain absolute control of even the most private events of a boy’s life. A paradoxical consequence is that boys gained more of a status as boys, being seen as future men rather than as miniature men in the present. It is, however, a subjectivity that is still firmly constructed and directed by adults. We have at least another 200 years to go before boys’ subjectivity asserts itself in the authoring of cultural taste and a boy-audience relationship that emerged during the 1950s to permit distinctively youth orientated musical styles. The Golden Century The approximate period between 1850 and 1950 might be viewed as a ‘golden century’ for angel voices when adults with great enthusiasm and confident moral purpose constructed and directed boys and their singing according to their own tastes. If some adults today feel nostalgia for a great period of boys’ singing, this was it. We can trace the origins of this to a transition in the early nineteenth century from a dominant concern with boys’ moral purity to the growth in the sentimentalization of boys. Our current, popular images of ‘choirboy’ have their origins in this process. Boyhood itself became a subject of much literary interest.

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Writers such as Dickens and Kingsley were presenting images of boys as troubled, abused victims of dreadful social conditions. Dickens attempted to challenge harsh social conditions through an appeal to images of boys constructed around brutally crushed tenderness, the most celebrated being that victim of circumstance, Oliver Twist. Dickens also, as in the case of Pip, reflected Victorian male hegemony in the great expectations that young males starting out in unpromising circumstances might yet have. He was perhaps therefore inadvertently also amongst the originators of the cute boy who, as we shall see, has come to play a major role in twenty-firstcentury boys’ singing. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth had presented a postRousseau romanticized image of boyhood innocence: Oh! Many a time have I, a five years Child, A naked Boy, in one delightful Rill, A little Mill-race sever’d from his stream, Made one long bathing of a summer’s day. (Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude, I’, 1805)

The themes of purity and innocence joined spectacularly with that of cultural imperialism to create what was arguably the most significant boys’ singing phenomenon of the nineteenth century, the Oxford Movement. Drawing on high church ritual as an alternative to the earlier evangelicalism of the Wesleys, this sought to relieve the squalor of the industrial towns through the export of ‘beauty and holiness’ or, as Mathew Arnold would have it, ‘sweetness and light’. Robed choirs of men and boys as well as the high church ritual of priestly vestments and incense found their way into working-class Victorian Britain. Thus was created the model of ‘choirboy’ that has inspired much of the image that remains today. The reforming zeal of Oxford Movement founders John Henry Newman and John Keble was taken up by luminaries such as Sir Frederick Arthur Gore Ousely whose ‘model’ choir school at St Michael’s College, Tenbury sought to interpret the Oxford Movement and impose order through singing and liturgy on boys who would otherwise have been (according to Ousely) ‘degenerate rabble’. Beauty at the time was confidently assumed, in the Kantian sense, to have a moral quality. Thus the recruitment of boys to choir singing offered the high church ritualists a means of leading boys to respectability that was an alternative to the colourless life offered by Susannah Wesley. The certainty of good fortune and superiority that gave the Oxford Movement reformers such confidence with regard to their cultural exports undoubtedly did succeed in promoting the singing of high art sacred music by working-class boys. This testimony by a former parish chorister, now in his late seventies, is a clear indication, not only of successful cultural export, but also of the enthusiasm with which it was received and embraced even up to the early 1950s:

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It was just fantastic. I can still remember it all sixty years on – the effect it had on me. It was all so theatrical in the best possible sense; there was the lovely deep blue cassocks and starched surplices that we had to wear, the candles and smell of incense in the church, the ordered processions … the whole ritual thing. (Quoted in Freke, 2006)

It is far from chance that the cultural imperialism of the Oxford Movement coincided with a great ‘flowering’ of empire, colonialism and hegemonic male power. Familiarity with the writings of Matthew Arnold should confirm the degree to which Oxford cultural imperialism coincided with English cultural imperialism on the global scale. Arnold’s own missionary zeal, to spread the good fortunes of those ‘brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place’ (Arnold 1869 in 1932: 72) certainly matched that of any bearers of the gospel to ‘heathen lands afar’ (or ‘lands both near and far’ as the politically corrected English Hymnal now maintains). To this day, a certain cultural arrogance can sometimes attach to the Oxbridge model of the men and boys’ choir that sets the cathedral close well apart from wider society and remains as a legacy of this imperialistic certainty of superiority. Colonialism as well as the rise of the industrial entrepreneur undoubtedly influenced the forms of masculinity that were hegemonic in the late nineteenth century, and continued to make itself felt until the end of the Second World War. Rugby School (founded 1567) has enjoyed particular attention because of its association with Matthew Arnold’s father Thomas who was one of the principal authors of this ‘muscular Christian’ masculinity. The fictional character Tom Brown was created to portray this at its best and Mangan and Walvin (1987) select this quotation from Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Hughes, 1857): Tom Brown … is a thoroughly English boy. Full of kindness, courage, vigour and fun – no great adept at Greek or Latin, but a first rate cricketer, climber and swimmer, fearless and skilful at football, and by no means adverse to a good stand-up fight in a good cause …. (p. 137)

There is nothing here about singing, though elsewhere in the novel we read of Tom’s ‘singing in’ where, as a new boy, he must stand on a table in the dining hall to be pelted with missiles whilst ‘rendering a song’. His ability to keep singing under such adversity suggests that some kind of singing at least was one of the lesser accomplishments of manliness in those days. This was a period that saw a burgeoning in the number of new foundation public schools, established to ‘make men out of boys’. Thirty-two of these schools were founded between 1840 and 1860. Significantly this was, according to Tosh (2005), a time when the father’s authority had diminished in the home, the mother being the guardian of manliness and moral purity for the boy up to the age of about twelve. Thereafter, boys themselves took over the brutal process of cultivating a manliness that a boy demonstrated through his ability to keep the school rules,

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place duty above self-gratification and know his place in a deeply hierarchical society. Boys growing up within this culture were constantly fed stories of the glorification of Empire and adventure through the penny dreadful comics but also the more respectable annuals for boys that would have been purchased by wealthier families. For those males who did not serve abroad in the military, the fantasy of frontier adventure as escape from the moral rule of women, for middleclass boys at least, was a force waiting to be tapped by Baden-Powell at the turn of the century. Whilst the Oxford Movement was pulling in the direction that resulted in a proliferation of men and boys’ choirs, an alternative masculinity developed amongst the new industrial bourgeoisie pulling in what might at first sight appear another direction. The Georgian dandy and libertine was ruthlessly replaced by the sober Victorian for whom the protestant work ethic was the ground of masculinity. This masculinity saw little value in the politeness of the Georgian era and cultivated a form of directness that was hostile to expressions of feeling between men and time ‘wasted’ on such ‘effeminate’ pursuits as poetry. It is possible that boys’ singing survived this by virtue of the fact that the chorister could be likened to a worker in service of the church (Davidoff and Hall, 2002). This certainly seemed to be endorsed by the new public schools where there was engendered a hearty tradition of chapel singing which survives to this day. It is a tradition characterized by the ‘roar’ of the ‘new baritone’ (see Chapter 3) and persists to the present. As this modern day public school director of music reports: They roar in chapel. They massively outsing the girls, but many of the boys sing an octave down even before their voices break. (Director of Music)

This desire to sing an octave down can be interpreted as confirmation that singing is acceptable, but the high voice less so. It certainly fits the authors’ own boyhood memories of public school chapel in the 1960s where the choir trebles were often the butt of humour directed at their ‘lack of balls’. At the same time, it was known that trebles would eventually get their balls and pass beyond this unfortunate phase. This modern day chorister echoes the public school master in his perception that for most non-chorister boys, this cannot come too soon: I think it’s really annoying being marked for singing high, but it’s natural until thirteen/fourteen anyway. A lot of the boys at school just pretend their voice has broken. (Cathedral chorister, aged thirteen)

Boy trebles were and are known about in the public schools, tolerated perhaps because ‘balls dropping’ is a kind of rite of passage that can be diffused by male humour, a situation that is different to the kind of genuine astonishment that my research has shown to exist amongst boys and girls of primary school age who have never had contact with boy trebles.

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The Pre-war Boy Soprano There is evidence in Beet (2005) that the impact of boy singers in the early part of the twentieth century was not inconsiderable. It is clear that by the 1920s, boys were frequently admired for their singing talent and precocious musicianship. For example, Iwan Davies (1916–96) won fifty-two cups and over 300 prizes during a career that took him twice to Canada with the choir of the Royal Chapel of the Savoy. According to Beet’s research, he was ‘always received with thunderous applause, especially after the ever-popular ballad Daddy by Lemon-Behrend with which he was particularly associated’ (ibid.: 12). Beet records a level of press coverage for the Canada tour that showered the boys with publicity almost unknown at the time and presaging the attention that was later to be given to pop and football idols. Unfortunately, we do not have data on the audience demographic for this phenomenon. Some assumptions, however, might with varying degrees of safety be made. Importantly, it is first fairly safe to assume that the musical establishment rather than any form of youth culture was in control of events. The warmth of reception for the pre-war boy soprano was a product of the fact that these were not only talented boys but good boys who confirmed hegemonic expectations of male competence, demonstrated deference to adults and their tastes and could be held up as improving examples to other boys. We might infer that the audience had a sentimental disposition to cute little boys from the fact that, apparently, the ‘baby of the choir’, ten-year-old Master Haddock elicited sentimental tears through his rendition of Arundale’s A Night Nursery. This would appear to presage the theme of infantilization which, as we shall see later and in subsequent chapters, can bedevil boys’ singing. The unquestioned control of adults and the musical establishment is clearly evident in the choice of repertoire such as O had I Jubal’s Lyre from Handel’s Joshua. We might reasonably assume that press coverage would have been, compared with today’s reporting of media celebrity, relatively respectful of the establishment. Second (and this may be pushing the boat out) we may infer links to the male hegemony of the time in which both press and ‘public opinion’ (a euphemism for male views, according to Tosh, 2005) celebrated any heroic act by a boy. Ideally, a boy would have demonstrated great valour in physical adventure or chivalric action, but to demonstrate similar valour on the public stage might well have come a close second. Significantly the Calgary Herald reported that ‘boys have an advantage over all others in the ease with which they can take the highest notes’ (Beet, 2005: 15, my emphasis) thus echoing the hegemonic male idealism displayed by Stubbs above. As for the audience, the assumption that might be made is that it was predominantly middle-class and predominantly of mixed gender, perhaps with some children or families present. Working-class families, at least from the ‘nonrespectable’ levels, would have been unlikely to attend or take their children to ‘improving’ events such as choral concerts. There was, apparently, some unease

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over the choice of repertoire. The first part of the choir’s programme, which consisted of items from the standard sacred choral repertoire, was unproblematic. Choosing items for a secular second half, however, created the difficulties that have bedevilled boys’ singing ever since and which occupy much discussion in later chapters of the present volume. Much use was made of popular Victorian ballads such as Holy City, but some critics thought these too sentimental. Last Rose of Summer was also a popular choice and there are questions to be asked about why it never occurred to the musical establishment that verses such as Tis the last rose of summer Left blooming alone All her lovely companions Are faded and gone

might not be the first choice of boys concerned about what other boys might think about their manliness. There is no evidence to suggest that the boys themselves were unhappy at the time with the image such singing might create, but this is almost certainly because the boys then would not have been asked their opinion in the way that boys now have been for this book. This is a theme that is taken up in later chapters. An arena in which the musical establishment would have had less control was the music hall, generally regarded as the focus of urban working-class musical culture until finally displaced by television broadcasting during the 1950s. It would seem that boy singers were far from unknown in the music halls. Evans’ Supper Rooms in Covent Garden was one of the so called ‘saloon theatres’ that were to evolve into music halls with the passing of the 1843 Theatre Regulations Act. Mr W.C. Evans, its founder, was himself apparently a ‘chorister’, though the club was for men only and ‘many lewd songs were sung as well as comic turns’. Evans’ could be regarded as a precursor of the night club as much as music hall in that it opened at eight but began to liven up after midnight. In Lee (1982) we find an interesting record of choirboy participation in the following description: The men would eat sausage and mash, and drink stout, while a varied, but to our taste curious, entertainment was put on. This would include songs by choirboys, imitators of farmyard animals … (p. 90)

Evans’ was taken over by one Paddy Green in 1844, whose programmes included entertainments such as ‘a choir of men and boys singing madrigals’ (from the 1911 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica).   Note the version by the Fron Male Voice Choir in which this is sung by the choir’s female director, herself an accomplished soprano. Charlotte Church and Hayley Westenra with Celtic Women are amongst other female artists to have recorded this recently.

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There is evidence to suggest that it was not at all unusual for choirboys to tout their wares around taverns in order to earn some income. As often as not this was for their master rather than themselves, a fact which greatly offended the nineteenth-century moralist, Maria Hackett (Mould, 2007: 263). Hackett is sometimes regarded as the choristers’ champion, though her prim moralist stance might also mark her out as an early Mary Whitehouse and the precursor of a present day obsession with child protection that has, according to authors such as Furedi (2002), assumed the proportions of paranoia. Certainly this desire to protect choristers and guard their moral purity had the effect of claiming them as children in need of female protection from the tavern culture which in all probability tested boys out as future men in spite of their high voices (we shall perhaps pass over questions of what kind of men for the time being). A surprising number of well known twentieth-century music hall artists and popular entertainers began their careers as boy sopranos on the music hall stage. Beet (2005) includes in the list of names Al Johnson, Arthur Askey, Charles Hawtrey and Cliff Adams. Many others, such as Gordon Lightfoot or George Elliott could doubtless be added. It would seem that the ‘boy soprano’ indeed was a recognized genre of music hall act and the fact that a boy sung in a high voice may well have been regarded as relatively normal, with less of the ‘cute’ or ‘weird’ receptions of the present day. The coming of the cinema contributed to the decline of the music hall, but there is evidence that cinema audiences were prepared to hear a boy soprano perform as a live act. One such example was Thomas Criddle who was asked to tour the Granada cinemas as a result of his singing of Because in a talent competition at the Granada Empire in Edmonton (London). All this gives a clue to the way in which boys may have been received. The approximate period 1900–1950 was the era of the invention and development of the gramophone. An early attempt at recording had been made of the boy soprano John Buffery in 1898. However, it was the unprecedented success of the recordings of Mendelssohn’s Hear My Prayer by Ernest Lough in 1927 and 1928 that revealed the strength of the public appetite for boys’ performance. The disc became HMV’s best seller of 1927 and such was the demand for it that the original master wore out and a second recording had to be made in 1928. It became the world’s first golden disc (selling over a million copies). At the time, this accolade had not been invented and it was not until 1962 that golden discs were finally presented to both Lough and his trainer at the Temple Church, the much revered George Thalben-Ball. By then, the record company had lost count of the eventual sales. This, however, was far from being a unique event. Recordings by boy sopranos were popular throughout this time up to the Second World War and, to a lesser extent, beyond then until the 1950s. The Herculean task of searching all these recordings out and re-issuing as many of them as possible as a series of six re-mastered CDs    A fervent Christian moralist who gained notoriety during the 1960s for her sustained attacks on the BBC.

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under the title The Better Land by Stephen Beet constitutes a uniquely valuable cultural project that has captured for future generations something of the nature of boys’ singing during this era. Other names such as Denis Barthel, John Bonner, Leslie Day, Freddy Firth, Denis Wright, Derek Barsham, Billy Neely, Harold Langston, Graham Payn, Thomas Tweedie, Trevor Schofield and many others must be recognized as part of the tradition created by Lough’s unexpected success. There was undoubtedly public demand for the ‘boy soprano’ as a significant genre of the early days of commercially available recorded music. Bobby Breen, born in Toronto, Canada in 1927, was one of the most well known of boy performers who also entertained presumably fairly eclectic audiences through musical films as well as stage and radio in the years immediately before the Second World War. The Post-war Years and the End of the Golden Century The Second World War provides a convenient marker for the end of this golden century for boys’ singing. A radically different ‘golden decade’ from 1954 to 1963 established a new meaning of ‘boy’ that many adults were to find threatening. Names such as Bill Hayley, Buddy Holly or Elvis Presley now had to be contended with. The Teddy boy was the first youth subculture to become a real threat to establishment control of young men. The Teds gained their name because of the way they subverted an attempt to introduce a neo-Edwardian fashion style. In so doing, they established the role of fashion and style in creating a powerful youth identity and market. This market did not, by and large, include younger boys with high voices who lacked the magnetic sex appeal and aggressively masculine voices of this newly extended period of ‘boyhood’. The pure, innocent angel boy was now to become almost exclusively the property of women reluctant to see their sons grow up. Music was at least as important as fashion and the Teddy boys enthusiastically adopted rock and roll as the other principal means of announcing their identity and defining the new terms of cultural engagement. Rock and roll was from the outset disliked by the establishment and frequently demonized by moralizers as a threat to youth. For youth, however, it represented a release from the stuffiness of establishment control of culture (Longhurst, 2007) and attempts to repress it increased its appeal. The rise of the hedonistic teenager was to lead to great losses in the cultural power of the establishment institutions such as the monarchy, the public schools and the church that had previously been all but omnipotent in defining ‘boy’ through singing. This, in turn, led to much loss of adult control of boys’ singing and the audiences for it. The golden decade was possible because post-war economic recovery and expansion allowed, for the first time, the emergence of the teenager as a significant social entity with some degree of economic independence and the ability to make cultural choices. The school leaving age had been raised in 1944 to fifteen and was to be raised again in 1973 to sixteen. With this extension in the years of classroom

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confinement came a compensating extension of the possibilities of youthful hedonism. Prior to 1944, the period of youth had been dutiful and dull. Young men were expected to demonstrate masculinity through employment and the starting of a family, and young women to know their place in that family. University was strictly for the elite and retained something of its connection with the leisure of inherited wealth. The revolution in the rules of engagement with youth that took place during the 1950s and ’60s peaked with such cultural landmarks as Lindsay Anderson’s cult film If, which, for anyone (such as the author) who attended a public school during that decade can be read as an emergence of an entirely new form of ‘boy power’. Previously, ‘boy power’ meant enforcement of the school rules. From this time on it was to mean challenging the school rules and the greatest challenge was to the cultural rules that dictated the music and fashion through which young people negotiated, constructed and expressed an identity of their own rather than the identity desired for them by adults. If a personal reminiscence is permitted, the author remembers that decade as a time of great conflict between the old guard pro-establishment boys who upheld the rules (still through the beating of younger boys) and the new generation of ‘hard lads’ who were beaten for their trouble and for whom Jimi Hendrix was iconic. The term ‘lad’ was used in the sense of anti-schoolwork and anti-school values in boys’ public schools at least a decade before Paul Willis created the popular association with working-class masculinity (Willis, 1977). In spite of this, however, the public schools have emerged after five decades as relatively unscathed. As the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, it is to these schools and their associated junior (or ‘preparatory’) schools that we must turn to find boys singing, in high treble voices, a repertoire grounded in the transmission of the canon of Western classical music. This is a situation that is by no means helpful and I return to a discussion of its present day effects in Chapter 9. Meanwhile, if we are really to understand the effects of youth culture on boys’ singing we must take account of the uneasy relationship between the public schools and the government maintained schools that educate some nine tenths of young people in the UK. The second half of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle for parity of esteem between academic and vocational forms of education, giving way in the final decades to the desire to create a ‘knowledge economy’ in which a target was set for a 50 per cent participation rate of young people in a much expanded higher education sector. The 1944 Education Act saw parity of esteem in terms of a ‘tripartite’ system of grammar, technical and modern schools, based on a belief later to be somewhat scandalously discredited, that reliable selection was possible at age eleven. Boys’ singing endured an Indian Summer under this system as the grammar schools, in addition to their role as seedbeds of rock and roll were often also refuges for classically trained musicians, not infrequently possessing quite a good knowledge of choral technique. A relatively traditional    The work of the psychologist, Sir Cyril Burt, which underpinned the concept of the 11+ test, was found to be based on falsified data and fabricated evidence.

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curriculum was followed and daily assemblies with singing were held in imitation of the public school chapels. As in the case of a young Roy Massey who was later to become a revered elder statesman of cathedral music, these grammar school teachers might well also have occupied the position of choirmaster at the town church, thus making chorister recruitment relatively easy. This post-war tripartite system, however, was relatively short lived and it would also be quite wrong to convey any impression that the grammar schools were classical-only zones. To the contrary, the invention of British rock owes much to grammar school boys in rebellion against their classically trained masters. An early comprehensive school had been established in Anglesey in 1949 and by the 1964 Education Act, an optimistic enthusiasm for this new concept of schooling had become an unstoppable tide in full flood. Lacking the traditions and power structures of the public and grammar schools, the comprehensive schools much more readily accommodated the cumulative successions of youth cultural tastes that followed the Teddy boys. Deprived of the advocacy of enthusiastic adults, the boy soprano became a real rarity in the state schools. A new generation of music teachers offered little resistance to the dismissal of adult tastes, including most of the classical repertoire, as ‘posh’. Arguably a possible countering of this cultural trend was compromised by the peaking of public distaste for elitism and the aloofness and separatism of the public schools during the crucial decades of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. The established church, principal patron of boys’ singing for over 1,000 years, offered little resistance. Against a background of rapidly falling overall numbers, a waning of influence in national life and escalating loss of public respect, there occurred a significant shift in taste which led to the marginalization of Oxford Movement style services. Within only three or four decades, adult desire for boys’ singing as a near obligatory part of Sunday services had all but evaporated in parish churches with the unfortunate effect of a retrenchment of the boy treble into a core domain of cathedrals and public schools. Against such unpromising circumstances, it is remarkable that boys’ singing of the sacred choral repertoire has survived at all. However, the cathedrals have proved remarkably resilient and their continued desire to find and educate talented boys as choristers has provided not only the continuity of a tradition but a national resource that is drawn upon whenever a boy’s voice is still desired. Matthew Billsborough was, in 1975, the first of a long line of winners of what started out as the Rediffusion Chorister of the Year Awards. Now managed by the BBC, this prestigious national competition continues to locate significant boy talent for the recording industry, although, tellingly the competition is now won with disproportionate frequency by boys from cathedrals and independent schools. Most of the cathedrals have also proved adept at accommodating the inevitable need to offer to girls opportunities similar to those traditionally offered to boys.    Sunday attendance down 40 per cent between 1988 and 2006, according to the National Statistics Office.

Singing as Social Control of Boyhood

37

Something of a stir was created by St Edmundsbury Cathedral in the 1970s, but it was Salisbury in 1991 that showed the foresight to create two parallel, single sex choirs as a positive step rather than a reaction to recruitment difficulties. Contrary to the inevitable prophecies of doom, this has not led to the demise of the traditional men and boys’ cathedral choir. If there is currently a threat to these choirs, it arises more from a failure to deal with the issue of social class than of gender. We will consider in greater depth the threats and opportunities which now confront cathedral choirs in a later chapter, recognizing for the time being the degree to which they punch well above their weight in maintaining a culture of boys’ singing. During the early 1980s there arose in Aled Jones, from the relative obscurity of Bangor Cathedral in North Wales, an icon of the boy soprano almost as significant as Ernest Lough. Aled is popularly associated with a staple piece from the boys’ crossover repertoire, Walking in the Air. This accompanies the cartoon film of Raymond Brigg’s picture book, The Snowman though it was in fact Peter Auty (b. 1969) who recorded the original track for the film. Aled Jones’s 1985 version was simply one in a long succession of boy crossover recordings of the piece of which Joseph MacManners or The Choirboys have been more recent exponents. Another recent media success has been Anthony Way (b. 1982). Although Anthony has a creditable string of recordings in his discography, it is his role as Henry in the TV production of Joanna Trollope’s The Choir that has won him a unique place in this historical summary of boys’ singing. It is in these successes, however, that we identify the most fundamental of problems that confront boys’ singing today. The annual Christmas screening of The Snowman testifies to the continuance of a traditional association of ‘good boys’ with families which has made the boy treble singer the darling of the ‘granny’ audience. The consequences of this are catastrophic for the boy’s status amongst his own peers who are of an age to be inspired by the rebellion against grannies and mothering of rock music. Aled Jones’s infamous bow tie demonstrates that this was not a matter of concern amongst image makers in the early 1980s. Things have moved on considerably since then, as the smart, dark designer suits of the 2005 Choirboys testify. The clothes (though not the voices) seem to meet the approval of most of the young people with whom I have conducted research, though the most common view is that they should be allowed to wear ‘smart casual clothes of their own choosing’. This is reflected by this twelve year old who is referring to his image on his cathedral’s choral outreach website. The boys had been asked to wear what they liked for a recording featured on the site: I’d just want to wear cool, casual clothes, they’ll think ‘he’s cool’. If young people see cool casual clothes, they’ll think ‘cool dude’. I like the one [of me] on the website. We look normal.

38

How High Should Boys Sing?

This is far from insignificant or coincidental. It is part of the pattern of power shift in which young people now expect to dress themselves rather than wear the outfits prescribed by adults. If adults resist this in favour of their own tastes, they are being ‘uncool’. Moral Panics, Young Audiences and the End of Childhood? It was Cohen (1987) who gave us the term ‘moral panic’ and, not insignificantly, he did so in writing about the mods and rockers, successors to the Teddy boys. Boys have frequently been the subject of moral panics since then, the most protracted and substantial of these being the one of underachievement to which I referred in the previous chapter. Another moral panic of more recent origin has been the socalled ‘toxic childhood’ discourse (Palmer, 2006) which has attracted much support from those who yearn for a nostalgic childhood uncontaminated by those aspects of youth culture they seem to have difficulty in understanding or adjusting to. Much is written about a breakdown between generations that is said to have followed the golden decade. That relations between young people and adults have changed is beyond dispute. A halt might be called, however, to the demonization of youth that I referred to in the previous chapter. Madge (2006) provides evidence that questions Palmer’s view of childhood in terminal decline. The process of evidence gathering for this book has inclined me in this direction rather than the former. As we shall see in later chapters, there is plenty of evidence that boys are still boys and expect to have a childhood. I suspect that those of a gloomy disposition may be attracted to the now discredited pessimism of the cultural theorist Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s view, which saw young audiences as passive consumers and victims of mass manipulation, was conditioned according to Negus (1996) by his unfortunate experiences of Nazi propaganda. It is a view which will undoubtedly appeal to those who see youth music as a form of ‘dumbing down’ in relation to the classical canon. Later theorists have progressively given more respect and credibility to young people, as Bennett (2000) accounts. The Robinson Report All Our Futures, (Robinson et al., 1999) offers the following observation: these are the languages of commercial culture as spoken to young people. An adult view sees them as an ever-increasing mountain of goods and waste which require effort to manage. For young people, they are important as a means of communication of the identities they are busy creating. Seen in this way, the products of commercial culture should be much less frightening to us. Anything can be sold, but how it is used is another matter. Young people select and discard a huge range of available material, ideas, words and images with impressive speed. The past and other contemporary culture provide them with the material to create an individual style. (Roger Hill, 1997 quoted on p. 49)

Singing as Social Control of Boyhood

39

This quotation, which recognizes the significance of identity creation, captures admirably the creative energy of youth that has been so obvious to me throughout my research. What has gone is not childhood but the old assumption that children are ‘empty vessels’ ready to reflect the cultural norms of adults. We now recognize childhood as a heightened time of creativity and indeed spirituality (Dillon, 2000). What is required from adults is not resistance but adaptation. We have not yet learned to accommodate the boys’ high voice within youth creativity. I suspect that an innate conservatism, lack of imagination and fear of change exists amongst many of the adults who do value the boys’ high voice. Progress is held back because nostalgia for boyhood is part of the process which drives adults to value boys’ singing and admire the performers. I shall resume this theme in Chapter 5. First, I think we need to understand better the technicalities of the instrument I am proposing we exploit better. References Arnold, M. (1932), Culture and Anarchy, John Dover Wilson edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beet, S. (2005), The Better Land: In search of the lost boy sopranos, Waterford: Rectory Press. Bennett, A. (2000), Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, identity and place, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21), Volume VI, The Drama to 1642, Part Two, Chapter XI, Section 1, available on-line at http://www.bartleby.com/216/1101.html. Cohen, S. (1987), Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The creation of mods and rockers, Oxford: Blackwell. Cope, J. (1974), ‘Marlowe’s Dido and the Titillating Children’, English Literary Renaissance, 4, 315–25. Davidoff, L. and Hall, C. (2002), Family Fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class 1780–1850, London: Routledge. Dillon, J. (2000), ‘The Spiritual Child: Appreciating children’s transformative effects on adults’, Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice, 13 (4), 4–18. Foucault, M. (1978), The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An introduction, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freke, M. (2006), ‘An Examination of the Dynamics and Demography of Organists 1950–1999, with particular reference to the effects of the Organ Reform Movement and liturgical change within the Anglican Church’, PhD edn, Bristol: University of the West of England. Furedi, F. (2002), Paranoid Parenting: Why ignoring the experts may be best for your child, Chicago IL: Chicago Review Press. Gittens, D. (1998), The Child in Question, London: Macmillan.

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Graham, D. (undated), ‘The Story of the Methodist Church’, available at http:// www.seekinggod.org.uk/Main/preacher/douglas.htm#method (accessed 14 May 2008). Hughes, T. (1857), Tom Brown’s Schooldays, November 2005 edn, Charleston SC: BookSurge. Jenks, C. (2005), Childhood, London: Routledge. Kincaid, J. (1992), Child-loving: The erotic child and Victorian culture, New York: Routledge. Langfeldt, T. (1981), ‘Sexual Development in Children’, in Cook, M. and Howells, K. (eds), Adult Sexual Interest in Children, London/New York: Academic Press. Ledes, A. (1995), ‘Gender in Children’s Portraits’, Magazine Antiques, (August). Lee, E. (1982), Folksong and Music Hall, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Longhurst, B. (2007), Popular Music and Society, Cambridge: Polity. Madge, N. (2006), Children These Days, Bristol: Policy Press. Mangan, J. and Walvin, J. (1987), Manliness and Morality: Middle class masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mould, A. (2007), The English Chorister: A history, London: Continuum. Negus, K. (1996), Popular Music in Theory, Cambridge: Polity. Oakley, A. (1994), ‘Women and Children First and Last: Parallels and differences between women and children’s studies’, in Mayall, B. (ed.), Children’s Childhoods Observed and Experienced, London: Routledge Falmer. Orme, N. (2001), Medieval Children, New York/London: Yale University Press. Palmer, S. (2006), Toxic Childhood: How the modern world is damaging our children and what we can do about it, London: Orion. Robinson, K. et al. (National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education) (1999), All Our Futures: Creativity, culture and education (The Robinson Report), Sudbury: DfEE. Shapiro, M. (1994), Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy heroines and female pages, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Tosh, J. (2005), Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Harlow: Longman/Pearson. Willis, P. (1977), Learning to Labour, Aldershot: Saxon House.

Chapter 3

Physiology of the Young Male Voice Introduction In the previous chapter, we dwelt at some length on the notion of identity and the boy singer. Whilst not dismissing the orthodoxy that boys are discouraged from singing for fear of ‘sounding like girls’, we established that this is only one part of a larger and more complex picture. We established that the generation a person belongs to is at least as important as their gender and with this the need to explore in future chapters the profound effects of a generational split between performers, conductors and audiences. In this chapter, we shall explore the physiology and potential of the young male voice as it changes from that of a child to that of a young adult. We shall see that different ways of producing tone lead to differing understandings of how high a boy ought to sing. These can account for much of the cultural rift between younger and older people that will occupy later chapters. The chapter is in two main sections. First, we look at the significance of the speaking voice in determining the pitch of the singing voice. The two are closely related and in constant change during that period when the young male might sing, not as a child, but as what is loosely referred to in common parlance as a ‘boy’ with an ‘unbroken’ voice. The second section of the chapter looks at how the range or compass of the voice can be extended beyond the octave or so that is available when the vocal folds are in their normal speech configuration – the modal voice. This section of the chapter introduces the controversies that are to concern us for the rest of the book for it shows that deep cultural rifts prevent the full exploitation of the voice for all but a very small number of boys. The Speaking Voice and Physical Growth At first sight, voice appears to offer an easy solution to the lexical conundrum of ‘boy’. For the layman, it is an established fact that boys’ voices ‘break’. It might then follow that young males with ‘unbroken’ voices are ‘boys’ and young males with ‘broken’ voices are – well, something else. We shall see that no such simple explanation can be offered once the facts are examined. Many people (not least young singers) are surprised to learn that the fully adult male voice is not available to the majority of young men until their early twenties. There is, furthermore, a popular misconception that the ‘breaking’ of a boy’s voice is a simple event that indicates that puberty has begun. In fact, perceptual changes to a boy’s speaking voice occur at the very onset of puberty, usually around the age of about ten, and

42

How High Should Boys Sing?

the voice changes considerably before the point is reached at which a boy will no longer sing treble. We need to understand that for as long as boys are increasing in height and weight (or more correctly, mass) as a consequence of physical growth from infancy to manhood their voices are changing. To hear an eight-year-old boy speak is not to hear a twelve-year-old boy speak, yet neither has what might be called a ‘broken’ voice. This has been confirmed experimentally by Sederholm (1998) who identifies ten as the age at which untrained listeners begin to identify a masculinity in the speaking voice that was not present in the child voice. The perceptual clues are not only falling pitch but greater hoarseness, roughness, hyperfunctionality, pitch instability and glottal attack. Complementary to this finding is that of Welch et al. (1997) in which the voices of younger children were increasingly androgynous (six-and-a-half being the age of greatest androgyny in this study). This period, before the age of ten, might therefore be referred to as the period of the child voice rather than the period of the boy voice. It is possible to determine what is called a speaking pitch centre. The pitch of speech is not, of course, a constant musical tone, but it does vary between only a few semitones. Experienced singing teachers can often pick out the modal point in the variation of these tones by ear – the speaking pitch centre. It is nowadays possible to determine this more accurately by use of pitch display software such as Sing and See which provides both a graphic and keyboard display of pitch. Crucially, the lowest note any singer can produce is usually between four and six semitones below the speaking pitch centre and, for the untrained voice, the range extends to between a sixth and a ninth above this. The speaking pitch centre of a boys’ voice falls steadily as he grows. At the most basic level, this is because the vocal mechanism, which includes the larynx and vocal folds and the main resonators, the pharynx and oral cavity, grow as the rest of the body grows. Thus as the boy increases in height, his vocal folds increase in length and his resonating cavities increase in volume. As the rest of the boy’s body increases in mass, so also do his vocal folds. Other changes, such as an increase in rigidity of the folds keep pace with changes in the musculature of the body. These changes all contribute to significantly perceptible changes in the sound of the voice, the most noticeable of these being the fall in pitch which might logically be expected as a correlate of the increase in length of vibrating matter. Similar changes happen to girls as well as boys, though for reasons not entirely understood, the effect is significantly greater in boys. Between the ages of eleven or twelve and the attainment of adulthood, the speaking pitch centre of a boy’s voice will usually fall by a good octave and is explained most readily by an approximate doubling of the length of the vocal folds. Figure 3.1, which uses data from Titze (1992), shows this. Those familiar with how growth chart curves steepen during puberty will immediately appreciate the similar and corresponding changes in the steepness of the pitch curve. Four vocal periods during growth from infancy to young adulthood can actually be identified. Between ages one and three there is a very rapid fall in pitch from approx 500 Hz

Physiology of the Young Male Voice

43

to 300 Hz as the infant voice mutates to the child voice. This coincides with the period of by far the most rapid height gain in the life of any individual. Thereafter until approximately age ten, the speaking pitch centre goes through a period of relative stability when the gradient is slighter. This is the period I have called the child voice. At around age ten or eleven the gradient steepens again until it levels off at approximately fifteen or sixteen. This, of course, coincides with the period of accelerated growth and sexual development of puberty. If there is truly such a thing as a boy voice as opposed to either child or youth voice, it is during this phase of life that it is found. It is arguably during this period that the most interesting singing by boys is done.

Figure 3.1  Speaking fundamental frequency (Hz) against age (yrs) From about fifteen or sixteen, the gradient again levels off and a period of timbral maturation occurs as the immature adolescent baritone mutates into an adult tenor or bass. More detailed figures are shown in Table 3.1, which indicates the mean values of height, mass, vocal fold length and speaking pitch centre, together with the annual increments in these quantities for a boy in the fiftieth centile of development. It needs to be reiterated that there is, in practice, wide variation in when these events occur, a fact that can create social difficulty as boys of similar age can be at very different stages in their progress to manhood. If Table 3.1 is referred to, it will be seen that the typical twelve year old has a pitch centre of 220 Hz as against the ten year old’s 261 Hz. This makes for a clear audible difference when the two are heard side by side. The twelve year old’s speaking voice clearly sounds boyish rather than childish, though most listeners would not say that it has ‘broken’.

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How High Should Boys Sing?

This was confirmed in the author’s own study by the computer morphing of a boy’s voice to represent mean speaking pitch centres of ages eight, ten, twelve, fourteen and sixteen. The twelve year old pitch was almost invariably identified as a ‘boy with an unbroken voice’. The fourteen year old pitch was most commonly described as a boy whose voice is breaking, whilst the eight and ten year old pitches, as might be expected from the study by Welch et al. (1997), were indistinguishable by sex for the statistically significant majority of listeners. It will be seen in Table 3.1 that it is between mean ages thirteen and fourteen that there is a doubling of the annual mass or weight increment. The shading shows where growth spurts occur. The fastest growth of the folds is between ages seven and fourteen, whereas a small height spurt occurs between ages three and five and again between fourteen and fifteen. The doubling of the annual increment in weight at age fourteen has been particularly significant in my own study and may merit further investigation. Another value not shown in this table is that of lung volume and the weight spurt has been found to coincide with a sudden and marked increase in lung volume, typically from a value of approximately 2,500cc that has remained stable for some time to a value of about 3,600cc (about 75 per cent of adult value). For all of the boys in the author’s own study whose growth was regularly monitored, it was this rapid increase in lung volume and weight (indicative of changes in muscle mass affecting in turn the mass of the vocal folds) that most closely coincided with the end of the treble career, most commonly at the age of fourteen. We shall see later, however, that this factor was of less immediate significance than a social decision about how to sing – the boy’s vocal agency. The column on the far right refers to a series of normative ‘stages’ devised by John Cooksey. John Cooksey’s studies of adolescent boys were seminal and are referred to frequently by singing teachers, including the voice coaches increasingly employed by cathedral choirs. Though some doubt might be raised about the arbitrariness of dividing a process of continuous growth into stages, they are likely to remain the most comprehensive single assessment of pubertal growth and vocal development for the foreseeable future and a significant reference work. Cooksey built on earlier studies by Naidr et al. (1965) and Frank and Sparber (1970). The latter was a particularly large, ten-year longitudinal study of 5,000 boys aged between seven and fourteen. Cooksey claimed that these studies gave clear support for the principle of mutational changes rather than a sudden break, but sought to obtain significantly more detail in order to test a series of hypotheses on voice classification he had put forward in 1977 (Cooksey, 1993). The main empirical work was conducted between 1977 and 1980. Extensive measurements were made over three years of eighty-six boys recruited at the age of twelve to thirteen. Forty-one of the boys were choir members, the remaining forty-five had no singing experience.

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45

Table 3.1  Boys’ growth (50th centile) for membranous fold length, standing height, body mass and speaking fundamental frequency (annual increments shown to right of each column) Age

Incr.

Ht cm

1

Folds mm 2.50

Incr.

Wt kg

Incr.

2

3.90

1.40

86

3

4.10

0.20

94

8

15

2

4

4.40

0.30

102

8

16

1

5

4.60

0.20

109

7

18

2

6

5.10

0.50

115

6

20

2

7

6.00

0.90

120

5

22

2

8

6.80

0.80

126

6

25

3

9

7.60

0.80

131

5

27

2

10

8.40

0.80

137

6

30

11

9.30

0.90

142

5

12

10.20

0.90

147

13

11.05

0.85

14

11.90

15

13

Pitch Hz

Incr.

Stage

350

300

50

280

20

3

261

19

0

33

3

246

15

0–1

5

37

4

220

26

1–2

152

5

41

4

196

24

2–3

0.85

161

9

49

8

178

18

3

12.50

0.60

169

8

56

7

145

33

3–4

16

13.00

0.50

172

3

61

5

123

22

4–5

17

13.60

0.60

18

14.10

0.50

19

15.0

0.9

Cooksey claimed that this study confirmed the existence of six mutational stages he had proposed. However, a significant inter-disciplinary study by Harries et al. (1997) found only five stages. This study compared accurate measurements of Tanner’s pubertal stages (termed G stages) with accurate electrolaryngograph measurements of Cooksey’s vocal stages (termed C stages). The research team included medically qualified paediatricians who were able to carry out intimate physical examinations of twenty-six boys in order to assess Tanner’s pubertal criteria of penile and testicular growth and the five stages of pubic hair development (Tanner, 1978: 198). Height, weight and testosterone concentrations were also measured. Vocal measurements included speaking and singing fundamental frequencies and the speaking and singing ranges of the voices.

46

How High Should Boys Sing?

Whilst this study largely validated key aspects of Cooksey’s work, it also suggested that Cooksey may have been keen to indicate a more linear profile of voice change than is the case. Harries et al. highlight that during the first two G stages, there is only a small fall in voice pitch, but that a large fall occurs between G stages 3 and 4 where Cooksey has inserted an extra stage. It is during this large fall between G3 and 4 that the majority of English boys are likely to conclude that their days as trebles are over. Thus, rather than a gradual mutation through cambiata, a majority of English boys will sing treble for longer than many singing teachers would feel is advisable and then suddenly stop altogether. Another particularly significant finding of Cooksey’s work was that spectrographic analysis revealed that the unchanged voices produced the greatest number and the most intense harmonics, whilst new and settling baritones produced the fewest and least intense harmonics. Generally, the number of upper harmonics decreased and perceived vocal richness diminished. It was concluded that adultlike quality is not present in any stage of male adolescent transformation and that male adolescent voices cannot be expected to produce a sound comparable to any of the established adult voices unless inefficient laryngeal or vocal tract coordinations are employed (Cooksey, 1993). Cooksey did not regard this given fact of nature as unduly significant. However, this would be a judgement made in the pedagogical context of American high school singing during the late twentieth century. The ramifications for young male vocal performance are rather different. First, an acoustically dull voice, deficient in upper partials and lacking the formants of the accomplished singer is unlikely to render a satisfying performance in any context other than, perhaps, electronically amplified commercial music. This would in part explain the practice in professional cathedral choirs of employing adult male singers in preference to the retention of former treble choristers whose voices have changed. What we might refer to as ‘schoolboy bass’ simply does not generally produce the rich, professional sound desired by cathedral musicians, though there can be exceptions of fine, early maturing voices. Of even greater significance, however, is the fact that it is the treble voice that contains the formant frequencies that make for interest and satisfaction for both listener and performer (see next chapter). This puts a particularly high premium on the voices of boys aged between eleven and thirteen or fourteen. By the age of eleven, a boy who may have entered a choir at the age of eight or nine will have developed enough experience to begin to perform usefully. Equally importantly, he will have entered the earlier stages of puberty that transform the voice from that of a child to what is generally recognized as the highly prized and short lived boy chorister sound. To refer to such boys as ‘pre-pubescent’ is therefore erroneous. By the criterion of speaking pitch, every boy in my own study had commenced puberty, the highest recorded pitch being 220 Hz for a twelve year old, as compared with the 300 Hz for a child voice given by Titze (1992). This was confirmed by measures of the boys’ growth velocity in which height and weight gain conformed to the steepened curves of early puberty.

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47

Speaking Pitch and Adolescent Singing Table 3.2 relates the speaking voice pitch that was discussed earlier in the chapter to Cooksey’s proposed stages. Table 3.2  Speaking pitch and Cooksey stages Note range

Pitch range

Stage

D4 – E4 A3 – C4 A3 – B3 G3 – A3 F3 – F3 C3 – E3 A2 – C3

294–329 Hz 220–61 Hz 220–47 Hz 196–233 Hz 174–85 Hz 131–65 Hz 110–39 Hz

Child I II III IV V VI

Age <11–11 11–12 12–13 13–14 13–14 13–15 14–15

It should be appreciated that, whilst speaking pitch falls steadily in step with growth, the ranges of songs that might be sung do not. Generally, songs that a boy might sing are written for either the soprano or alto ranges. It follows that if a boy is to maintain the same singing pitch range to fit a written part whilst his speaking pitch is falling, he must be making constant (usually subconscious) adjustments to his singing technique. This is a matter of fine muscular control. There is little doubt that many (though not all) boys experience increasing muscular difficulty in controlling their voices at around age thirteen or fourteen. This is fundamentally no different to general adolescent clumsiness and the difficulty some boys have at the same age of controlling limbs that have suddenly changed length. The vocal folds at this stage become quite rapidly more massive, stiffer and rectangular in shape and this change outpaces the boy’s ability to adjust the way he controls their movement. The result is not infrequently a flip between child and emergent adolescent pitch during speech, the ‘cracking’ or ‘squeaky’ voice that can embarrass boys at this age. If there is to be a ‘breaking’ of the voice, this is probably it, though almost all contemporary texts prefer the term ‘change’ to ‘break’ as it more accurately reflects the above processes. Surprisingly little attention has been paid in the UK to the problem of finding songs pitched in ranges that follow the gradual fall in pitch of the speaking voice, though this is not the case in the United States where the work of John Cooksey seems to be better known. The tradition of boys’ singing in the UK has been one of forcing the changing voice to fit the range of traditional adult vocal parts – soprano, alto, tenor or bass. This has been sometimes less the case in the United States where the work of Cooksey and other educators such as Irvin Cooper has been more influential. Cooper was professor of music at Florida State University from 1950 to 1970, having been born in England and graduated from the University of Manchester. On moving to Montreal, where he rose to become supervisor of music for the Montreal education system, he developed a particular interest in the non-participation of adolescent boys

48

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in singing classes. The research he conducted led him to formulate the cambiata voice concept. The term derives from the musical term ‘cambiata’, meaning changing note. It is a clever play on the idea that notes and voices change. The fundamental precept of cambiata singing is that the song should fit the voice, not the voice the song. This, of course, detaches boys from conventional choral repertoire and Cooper tackled this through the publication of many songbooks specifically for young adolescent voices, often in four (non conventional) parts based upon the recognition of three principal voice categories: soprano, cambiata and new baritone (see Table 3.3). He believed a soprano part to be too high for a voice in the first stages of cambiata and an alto part too low. Cooper’s suggested cambiata range was from F below middle C to the C an octave above for the early stage of voice change. A further stage too high for tenor and too low for alto was recognized. Cooper was strongly against unison and octave singing for precisely the reason that it took boys (and girls) out of their tessitura. Importantly, Cooper and Wikstrom (1962) claimed that the cambiata voice is: Rich, undeniably masculine almost to the point of belligerency, and truly beautiful if the sound is controlled in volume and not permitted to become strident from sheer vocal exuberance. (p. 149)

A voice said by Cooper to be a perfect example of cambiata is that of the Virginian singer Wayne Newton (b. 1942) who achieved popular acclaim as a boy singer during the 1950s. Cooper visited the UK in 1963 on a study tour and was intrigued with what he found. On the one hand, he was in awe of the public schools and cathedrals where he found choral singing ‘among the finest in the world’ (Cooper, 1964). He was also impressed by the enthusiasm and exuberance of the new baritone singing in the public school chapels. He did not agree, however, with the cathedral organists and public school masters he met who declared the boy voice to be ‘useless’ from the time it ‘broke’ until maturation in the early twenties. He noted that some boys who had been trained in good voice production from an early age retained a very beautiful alto voice during change, but that these were a very small minority of elite boys. In the state maintained schools he found what he considered widespread ignorance of the adolescent boy voice. Different teachers held wildly differing conceptions of what the ranges of such voices might be and there was little understanding as to why unison singing with boys and girls at the same pitch was inappropriate and traditional school song books therefore useless (ibid.: 119). Teachers often misheard voices and did not understand what was happening with cambiata voices that gave the illusion of being an octave lower than they were. When Cooper was allowed to work with boys and demonstrate the cambiate en masse, many teachers were apparently then thrilled with the result, but Cooper was distressed by the apparent lack of systematic co-operation and inservice training in the UK that might allow these teachers to develop the idea.

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Table 3.3  Male vocal development during adolescence (simplified from Cooksey, 1993) Age phase

Cooksey stages with age span

Speaking pitch

Vocal quality

7–11 Primary school

0 Age 7–11 1 Age 11–12

220–61 Hz Soprano phase Child-like. Boys and girls very similar in 220–47 Hz speech and singing. Boy’s singing voice can be ‘Full, rich soprano-like quality, reaches its pinnacle of beauty, power and intensity’ (Cooksey).

11–14 Lower secondary school

1 Age 11–12 2 Age 12–13 3 Age 13–15 4 Age 13–15+

220–47 Hz Cambiata phase Boy and girl voices begin to diverge. Both 196–233 Hz sexes lose child-like quality. Untrained listeners increasingly successful at 174–85 Hz identifying sex of speaking voice. Late maturing boys retain high singing voice 131–65 Hz throughout this period. Trained singers can produce powerful soprano up to end of stage 3 but most boys would give up singing in woman’s range as speaking pitch falls below 185 Hz during this stage. Early maturers sound low but very immature tone compared to adult voice.

15–18 Upper school

3 Age 13–15 4 Age 13–15+ 5 Age 14–15+

174–85 Hz New baritone phase Most boys now have speaking voice 131–65 Hz clearly different to girl or child. Singing voice roughly in baritone range 110–39 Hz but not yet settled and sounds weak and adolescent-like compared to adult voice. Exceptionally, late maturing boys may still sing soprano. Early maturing boys may begin to develop some qualities of the full adult voice.

If, as Cooper and current day supporters of cambiata such as Collins (2006) suggest, it is unhelpful to force boys’ changing voices into conventional adult parts, it may not be entirely fair to lay all the blame at teachers’ doors. There are other factors we might consider. We might certainly include the tradition in English cathedral choral singing to exploit a boy’s soprano voice for as long as possible and then simply dismiss the boy from the choir when he is no longer of any use. This practice has come under increasing scrutiny as singing teachers and voice coaches, drawing on Cooksey’s work, have become more vocal in their criticism of cathedral organists. The view that seems to have emerged is that many choristers are singing too high for too long. It is a view sometimes linked to

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increasing concern for child welfare as well as one which is clearly in tune with the current opinions and feelings of the vast majority of young people. We might equally consider the effects of adult audiences who place great value upon the ‘sound of angels’ but little value on the immature baritone voice. If what we have said in previous chapters about the close and intimate association between voice, body and soul is true, then this amounts to a curt dismissal of young men. It is certainly a strong form of cultural conditioning that has detracted from appreciation of the ‘rich, undeniably masculine’ tone which Cooper valued. Indeed, the almost complete absence of such young masculine tone on choral lines in the experience of most English boys today may be more than a little significant in youth rejection of choral singing. We return to this important theme in later chapters. First, however, we must consider how it is that choristers and other ‘classical’ boy singers do sing so high. Extending the Range Taken as a whole, the male voice is incredibly versatile. Rachmaninov’s Liturgies of St John of Chrystostom require bass voices to descend to within a tone and a half of the bottom of the range of the double bass, a feat regularly accomplished by practiced Russian choral basses. At the other end of the range, the boy Robin Schlotz athletically hits the stunningly high F6 of Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria from the Magic Flute with the apparent ease of an accomplished coloratura soprano. This alone is a range of about two and a half octaves and represents what the trained voice can do. For most boys, however, a singing range of one octave would be an accomplishment. In this section of the chapter, I first explain the physical reasons for this before moving on to consider the social and cultural constraints that are uniquely faced by boys in developing the full range of their voices in the next chapter. In the previous section, we considered the voice in its modal range. The modal range, it was explained, runs from about four to six semitones below the speaking pitch centre to between a sixth and a ninth above this. For an average twelve year old, this would give a tessitura or comfortable singing range of about A3 (the A just below middle C) to between G or at most B4. Beyond that range, the voice begins to weaken and strain. When the voice is in this modal range, the full mass, thickness and length of the vocal folds are vibrating and this is how we normally speak. It is not how choristers sing. To reach a high G5, the boy singer must employ his vocal folds in a way that is different to that used in normal speech. The vocal folds are not a simple organ but composed of several tissues. At the edge are the ligaments, composed of hard, string like collagen fibres. Deeper into the body of the folds are the more muscular thyroarytenoid fibres which have the ability to contract. The modal voice employs the whole tissue of the vocal folds over their whole length in a complex form of vibration in which the thickness of the folds curves. This produces tones rich in upper harmonics, but to

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reach the second octave of the range, the singer will increasingly employ only the ligaments in vibration. For lower notes of this high range, the ligaments vibrate over their whole length, but for the highest notes of all they will vibrate only towards the forward end as there is an insufficient period for full length vibration. The subsequent tone is less rich in harmonics, being nearer in wave form to a simple sine wave. This ‘thin’ vocal fold configuration is very commonly referred to as the ‘head voice’ but this is a term without scientific foundation which can be very misleading. It came about because of the physical sensation that the voice is being produced and resonated ‘in the head’. The modal voice, for similarly erroneous reasons, is often referred to as the ‘chest voice’. As long ago as 1935, it was pointed out that these terms have minimal correspondence to the actual process of resonance, the consequences of the use of metaphor rather than science being obvious (Drew, 1935). To be clear, the principal resonators are the pharynx (the tube immediately above the larynx) and the oral cavity, regardless of what octave is being sung or by whom. The larynx itself is also a resonator, believed to play a significant role in the production of the singer’s formant, a 25 to 30 kHz waveband that gives the trained voice carrying power. The nasal cavities have a minor role to play (more as chambers that detect sensations than as resonators) but few authorities regard the chest as a resonator of any significance at all (however, see Clayne Robison for a discussion of tracheal resonance in the ‘Pavarobotti’ singing computer; Robison, undated). It is still common, nevertheless, to talk about singing registers and much of the business of training good voices is concerned with cultivating the ability to pass between the registers without an obvious break in tone, commonly referred to as passagio. A time honoured method of achieving this in boys has been to start with the thin fold configuration and extend it downwards, usually through exercises based on descending scales in successively higher pitches. This is a process more akin to folk art than science, though none the less effective for that. Classic texts include those of Curwen (1899) or Howard (1895). This has led to the belief, at least in classical choral circles, that ‘good’ singing by boys is in the ‘head voice’, whilst crude, harsh or untrained ‘pop’ singing is in the so-called ‘chest voice’. An even more venerable alternative, which seeks to cultivate a so-called ‘voix mixte’ in the boys’ classical voice is the Tito Schipa Bel Canto tradition (see Chapter 7). This tradition does not make a virtue of high coloratura but develops the voice outwards from the middle register. It is common to speak of just two registers for the boys’ voice: the ‘chest’ and the ‘head’. This omits mention of the falsetto voice, a cause of some controversy as we shall shortly see. According to Chapman (2006) there are in fact not two or even three, but four possible configurations of the male vocal folds that give rise to the different registers of singing. These are available to boys as well as mature adults, though at obviously different pitches. They are set out in Table 3.4, which compares Chapman’s nomenclature with that of Henrich (2006). It will be seen that although she is describing largely the same thing, Henrich has tried to avoid altogether the misleading terms ‘head’ and ‘chest’, preferring a simple numerical identifier.

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Table 3.4  Correspondence of current quantitative and qualitative nomenclature Henrich

Chapman and Morris

MO Short, thick folds, slack and pliant, minimal vocalis, cricothyroid and interarytenoid activity, long closure quotient

Fry

Folds in loose closure, air bubbles through

Low frequency ‘popping sound’ not much used in classical singing

M1

Thick folds vibrating over whole length, vocalis muscle dominant, still relatively long closed quotient

Modal

Folds vibrate along full length, medial compression through vocalis and cricothyroid

Most common technique for low to mid range, normal register for speaking and much singing

M2

Reduced mass and amplitude of vibrating mass, all vocal fold layers stretched. Open quotient now longer than closed

Head

Vibrating mass thinner with less vertical closure, though still full length. Cricothyroid and vocalis give way to thyroarytenoid

Commonly employed by male and female singers for mid to high parts of ranges

M3

Not well understood. Thin, tense folds, reduced amplitude and long open quotient, possibly no fold closure at all

Falsetto

Only vocal fold margins vibrate, closed phase very short or non-existent

Chapman describes as female quality, but also characteristic sound of male countertenor

Source Data from Henrich (2006) and Chapman and Morris in Chapman (2006)

These descriptions clearly focus attention on the fact that it is not only the length of a vibrating body that determines pitch but also tension and mass. The analogy with a stringed instrument in this particular instance is not entirely unhelpful. Thus the lowest of all registers, generally termed ‘vocal fry’, is produced by very loose vocal folds which allow cycles of air to pass through in gulps or bubbles producing a low frequency sound in which each individual cycle of the folds is perceptible. Vocal fry belongs more to the category of special vocal effects and is hardly ever employed in traditional singing. The same cannot be said of falsetto. Various explanations are offered for how this highest register is actually produced, including those given in the table above. High tension and vibration only at the margin of the folds, the actual collagen fibres or ‘cords’ themselves, is almost certainly part of the technique. Some authorities claim that during falsetto, there is no actual closure of the vocal folds, but this seems unlikely as pitch would not

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then register on the electrolaryngograph. It is probably safest to acknowledge, as does Henrich, that the process is not yet entirely understood. Chapman maintains that falsetto is a legitimate technique available to any male voice, in spite of its literal meaning of ‘voix faute’ or false voice. Various musical cultures including the operatic falsettist, the choral counter tenor and a variety of rock and pop artists such as Justin Timberlake or Mika employ this register to considerable effect. A particularly striking example is the performance of Britten’s Corpus Christi Carol by the late rock singer, Jeff Buckley. Though a legitimate technique for all these adult singers, a large question mark hangs over its use by boys. This is partly because too many expert teachers raise questions about whether prolonged falsetto harms the immature voice but also because, as Chapman states, the falsetto voice ‘sounds to the listener to have a female quality’ (2006: 68). Whether we like it or not, a female quality to the voice will frighten most boys off singing. The issue might be relatively straightforward were it not for the fact that there is considerable confusion caused by the fact that the so-called ‘head voice’ and falsetto voice overlap considerably. Much ‘head voice’ singing by choristers is likely to be falsetto, particularly in the case of older boys who have passed from Cooksey’s second to third stage without giving up the treble register. It is quite possible that when other boys jeer that choristers ‘sound like girls’, they are simply in agreement with the expert judgement of Chapman. Paradoxically, advances in modern voice science have led to less rather than more confident claims about register and passagio than those that are found in texts dating from what we have called the golden century. Manuel Garcia was one of the first to observe the vocal folds in 1847 with his laryngoscope. This was in reality little more than a simple mirror but it did allow Garcia to identify that the vocal folds appeared in different configurations according to register. It led Garcia to claim that there were three registers, a contra-basse, a ‘chest’ and a ‘falsettohead’. The lack of clear distinction between head and falsetto is significant. It might be imagined that this question has by now been resolved. However, modern instruments employing fibre optic photography linked to stroboscopic lighting that freezes movement, whilst allowing much more detailed observation of the fold configurations, have not yet advanced to three dimensional slow motion views that might resolve the question. Collins (2006) is amongst the growing numbers 

 This is the instrument currently used for accurate measurement of pitch through electrodes attached to the singer’s neck. It operates by means of detecting the small changes of electrical conductivity that occur when the vocal folds are closed or opened. It is thus possible to obtain two important readings. The more obvious is the frequency of the singing fundamental (i.e. perceived pitch of the note sung). The less obvious but equally useful measurement is that of the folds closed quotient, that is to say the ratio between the period when the vocal folds are open, allowing air to pass and the period when the folds are in physical contact with one another and no air passes (glottal closure).    For example, Dierdre Trundle (2005) maintains that the constant air flow associated with the low closure quotient dries the folds out.

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who draw from currently available images the conclusion that the two terms ‘head voice’ and ‘falsetto’ are to all intents and purposes synonymous in young males. It would be unwise in view of the current state of scientific knowledge to make any absolute pronouncement on the subject of register or passagio. Instead, we might usefully concentrate on some of the polemic and folk wisdom that has been expended on the issue. This we do in the next chapter. References Chapman, J. (2006), Singing and Teaching Singing: A holistic approach to classical voice, San Diego, CA/Oxford: Plural. Collins, D. (2006), ‘Preferred Practices in Teaching Boys Whose Voices Are Changing’, Choral Journal, (November), 119–20. Cooksey, J. (1993), ‘Do Adolescent Voices “Break” or Do They “Transform”?’, Voice, 2 (1), 15–39. Cooper, I. (1964), ‘A Study of Boys’ Changing Voices in Great Britain’, Music Educators Journal, (November–December), 110–18. Cooper, I. and Wikstrom, T. (1962), ‘Changing Voices’, Music Educators Journal, 48 (4), 148–51. Curwen, J. (1899), The Boys’ Voice: A book of practical information on the training of boys’ voices for church choirs, 3rd edn, London: J. Curwen. Drew, W. (1935), ‘Acoustics and Singing’, The Musical Times, 75 (1109), 593–7. Frank, F. and Sparber, M. (1970), ‘New Evidence of Voice Ranges in Children’, Folia Phoniatr Logop, 22, 397–402. Harries, M., Walker, J., Williams, D., Hawkins, S. and Hughes, A., (1997), ‘Changes in the Male Voice at Puberty’, British Medical Journal, 77 (5). Henrich, N. (2006), ‘Mirroring the Voice from Garcia to the Present Day: Some insights into singing voice registers’, Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology, 31, 3–14. Howard, F. (1895), The Child-Voice in Singing: Treated from a physiological and a practical standpoint and especially adapted to schools and boy choirs, New York: H.W. Gray/Novello. Naidr, J., Zboril, M. and Sevcik, K. (1965), ‘Pubertal Change in the Voice of Young Boys over a Five Year Period’, Folia Phoniatr (Basel), 17, 1–18. Robison, C. (undated), ‘The Hidden Factor in Really Beautiful Singing: Tracheal resonance’, available at http://beautifulsinging.com/singing/tracheal.php (accessed 15 August 2008). Sederholm, E. (1998), ‘Perception of Gender in Ten Year Old Children’s Voices’, Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology, 23 (2), 65–8. Tanner, J. (1978), Foetus into Man: Physical growth from conception to maturity, London: Open Books. Titze, I. (1992), ‘Critical Periods of Vocal Change: Early childhood’, Journal of the National Association of Teachers of Singing, (November/December).

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Trundle, D. (2005), Changing Voices: An approach to adolescent voice training, Milton Keynes: Voicesource. Welch, G., Sergeant, D. and White, P. (1997), ‘Age, Sex and Vocal Task as Factors in Singing In-tune during the First Years of Schooling’, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 127, 155–62.

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Chapter 4

Subjectivity and Agency in the Young Male Voice This chapter draws on perceptual data to analyse critically competing claims about what a boys’ voice is or should be actually like, and how it differs from a girls’ voice – if, indeed, it does. The first section of the chapter will show that adults have widely diverging views that are almost totally subjective whilst boys are seldom, if ever, consulted about the matter. The chapter concludes with a section on how boys exercise vocal agency, i.e. the will to control their own voices, during puberty. This is shown to be of far more significance than often imagined and fundamental to the arguments that are developed in the remainder of the book. The Subjective and the Natural In the previous chapter we established that, though authorities such as Chapman identify four possible singing registers in the male voice, there are, to all intents and purposes, two main registers that concern the everyday reality of boys’ singing. We can refer to these as thick fold (modal) and thin fold, though it is doubtful that we shall get through a chapter without recourse to the more vernacular terms chest voice and head/falsetto voice. The question of how high boys should sing can in many ways be reframed as should boys sing in the thick fold or the thin fold register, or a combination of the two? My task in this section of the chapter is to establish the role of subjectivity and cultural taste in pursuing answers to this question. I shall need also to establish the relationship between subjectivity and taste and what is claimed to be natural in boys’ singing. My starting point is a rather extraordinary piece of polemic that was undoubtedly typical of its era. It is from an American text and represents a view of what is ‘good’ and ‘natural’ singing by boys that was frequently advanced in both the UK and the United States in the late 1800s early 1900s – midway through what I have called the ‘golden century’ (see Chapter 2). It will be generally admitted by those who are able to judge, that the singing of children is more often disagreeable than pleasant … this tolerance of rough, strident singing by children is as strange as the singing. It cannot be right for children to sing with the harsh tone that is common, and it is not right, although there is a prevalent idea that such singing is natural, that is, unavoidable. (Howard, 1895)

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The claim of this writer is that children are not able to use the chest voice because the chest voice of the child is an ‘abnormal product of a weak, growing, undeveloped organ’. It is ‘only embryonic’ and ‘cannot be musical’. The appeal to a nineteenthcentury medicalism is clear in the way what is ‘right’ and ‘natural’ is derived from a naturalistic model of growth based upon what we would today probably regard as a lack of scientific humility. Howard continues to derive from his arguments a whole system of vocal training in which it is confidently asserted that boys must be trained to sing only in the thin fold voice because the source of rough, strident and disagreeable singing is the thick fold voice. Given that boys (even in 1895) use the thick fold voice constantly every day to produce normal speech, we are left to work out for ourselves whether talking by boys is ‘unnatural’. Perhaps in an era where children should be seen but not heard, it was. A text contemporary with that of Howard is John Curwen’s influential treatise. In it, he gives the following advice: Shew him, first of all, that he has, as it were, two voices, and point out that he is required to use the voice that is most like a girl’s. (Curwen, 1899)

Another author of the period who understands what nature wants confidently asserts: What is the boy’s voice from the trainer’s standpoint? It is the Woman’s Voice. It would be a blessing if the term ‘boy voice’ could be abolished entirely. It insensibly tends to foster the idea that Nature fully intended the boy to have a singing-voice perfectly unique … (Stubbs, 1894, quoted by Beet, 2005b, emphasis added)

A counter-argument that we shall have to consider is that it is not natural for boys to sing like women or girls. This is more a sociological than physiological argument and doubtless a good argument could be mounted that any such appeal to the ‘natural’ is also mounted from a platform of subjectivity and taste. We have, after all, already considered the role of hegemonic masculinity in creating the idea that sounding like a girl is in any case a terrible thing. Nevertheless, whatever the reasons might be it is undeniable that for most ten- to fourteen-year-old boys, a degree of socio-cultural distance from girls is about as fundamental an element of young male identity as there can be. Why did the writers of the ‘golden century’ then see no problem with asking boys to sing like women? It is unlikely that that there has been any fundamental biological evolution in the way boys’ brains operate over the last 100 years. The ways in which masculinity is socially constructed and enacted have undoubtedly evolved and it is possible that womanhood was held in less disrespect by hegemonic forms of masculinity than it is now. Nevertheless the strongest and most satisfactory single explanation is the one I have offered in this text. Boys in the early 1900s had a much more deferential relationship to adults and would not

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question the order to sound like a woman in the way that boys would today. We are dealing with boys who have been liberated (if that is the right word) by the golden decade, the rise in youth cultural taste and the children’s rights movement. It may not have been entirely coincidence that a controversy and minor revolution flared up in cathedral music during the golden decade. So-called ‘continental tone’ was popularized by the choir of Westminster Cathedral under the direction of George Malcolm. The term refers to a hard edged, ‘reedy’ sound and contrasted with what was then a more traditional, softer and flutier ‘English’ sound. The Malcolm sound has been much admired by some, though reviled by others. Another enthusiast was the late George Guest who introduced the sound at St John’s College, Cambridge where the choir acquired a formidable reputation allowing it to rival the world famous Kings College Choir. Guest himself was a highly influential teacher whose organ scholars have included such notable choral directors as John Scott, Sir David Lumsden and Stephen Cleobury. David Hill and Andrew Nethsingha are both former scholars of Guest to have succeeded him at St John’s. David Hill has described what Malcolm was trying to do, to achieve a more masculine sound, worthy of boys. This was to be not an ‘insipid head-voice’ but a ‘strong, resonant chest sound that they produce naturally’ (Hill, quoted by McVicker, 1990, my emphasis). Here we have a claim for what is natural that competes directly with the suggestion that it is the ‘head voice’ that is natural, though it is doubtful that the sound truly was produced only by the modal voice. According to an interview with David Hill by William McVicker (McVicker, 1990) one of Malcolm’s most famous claims is that ‘good singing is a form of shouting’. If, as is claimed, Malcolm was concerned to develop a more authentic young male sound than the allegedly ‘emasculated fluty sound’ he sought to replace, then evidence from the present study indicates that there may be some grounds for the Malcolm approach: They like shouting instead of singing. [boy’s comment] Boys don’t do singing. They have more gruff voices. [girl’s comment] (Ashley, 2006: 29)

McVicker continues to quote Hill: If you listen to children playing in a playground, they don’t shout in an insipid head-voice: it is a strong resonant chest-sound that they produce naturally. And if you do the same with boys’ singing voices they begin to sound like the parts behind them – their adult counterparts – and that’s what singing is about. (McVicker, 1990)

The Malcolm revolution was significant, according to Luff (1969) because of Benjamin Britten’s clearly stated preference for it and the possibility that England, with its ‘oomoon’ style of emasculated flutiness had strayed waywardly from the

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true Western European tradition of full bodied boy sound. It is worth quoting Malcolm himself: Boys will be boys! – and in most parts of the world this applies to boy choristers too. When they sing, they are expected to sound like boys, and are not taught to produce an uncharacteristic quality of tone, remotely unlike that of the voices with which they talk, or laugh, or cheer at a football match … (Malcolm, 1967)

Malcolm continued to make the point that the so-called English tradition was a Victorian product, the work of organists who knew nothing about singing but set out systematically to ‘render harmless’ the natural exuberance of boyhood. This they did by robbing the voices of their strength and colour and thereby depriving them of any real power of musical expression. In so doing, they robbed boys of any ability to ‘cause trouble’ or take musical risks. This, of course, is a weighty charge indeed against present day discourses of masculinity which position boys as risk takers. Malcolm was less certain than he has been credited with of how these pre-war choirmasters destroyed boyishness. It was not simply a matter of ‘head tone’ and Malcolm was well aware that this terminology was used loosely and inaccurately then as it is now. What he was more confident of was that the rendering harmless was achieved by the ‘exclusion of those resonating-agents which function … to amplify the human voice, to colour it, and to give clarity and definition to its vowel-sounds’ (ibid.: 25). This might be reassessed in the light of what is now known about singing. Williams (2001, 2006) does not believe that there really is such a thing as ‘continental tone’. She is critical of the ‘waffle and vague terminology’ spoken by organists who, she suggests, continue to be ignorant of singing and prefers the idea that there is simply good singing and bad singing. One thing that might be learned from the ‘continental tone’ era is that the association of thin fold or head/falsetto tone with ‘good’ singing is almost entirely a matter of subjective taste, even within the narrow cultural boundaries of the sacred choral world. Experience since the 1950s has not borne out the confident claims of the Victorian and Edwardian era that the chest voice is ‘unnatural’ and harmful to development. Indeed, cultural tastes have changed so much that it is now often the thin fold ‘head voice’ that is considered unnatural, or ‘weird’ as many young people will say. Whether or not the Malcolm claim that his sound, the result of ‘shoutiness’, was more ‘boyish’ is true is harder to establish. Three recent pieces of empirical work might be referred to here. Enthusiasts of boys’ voices such as Pehrson (2002) have traditionally held the view that the ‘clear, cold, piercing and transparent … disembodied, ethereal and ghostly … enchanted, naïve and guileless’ nature of the boy voice is inimitable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the arrival of cathedral girls’ choirs promoted much speculation as to whether this was really true. A number of often poorly constructed perceptual studies and seemingly endless media speculation (for example, Stewart, 2006) set out to settle this question. Bernard Haunch has

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not unreasonably drawn attention, not only to the methodological flimsiness of some of these studies, but the obvious ideological basis of at least one in crude forms of recuperative feminism (Haunch, 2003). However, a well constructed, properly scientific study that draws on previous studies and has come to be the reference work for the time being was undertaken by Welch and Howard (2002). These researchers demonstrated that, for individual voices, differences between boys and girls did increase with age, the implication being that masculinity of voice is also a factor of age. In spite of this, many listeners performed less well in perceptual tests than they imagined they would do. The boy choral sound was not as inimitable as traditionally thought. Where it is desired that girls produce the same traditional sound as boys, a trainer working in a certain way is likely to achieve this in a way that will convince significant numbers of listeners. Girls were more likely to be mislabelled as boys in this study than boys as girls. This work recalls Phillips’ (1980) professed astonishment that the same girls’ choir could on one occasion make the ‘usual chesty sound which girls’-school choirs make’ yet on another they could ‘imitate … the head-sound associated with cathedrals’ (p. 18). Welch et al. (1997) add to this the finding that if the trainer is male, listeners tend to judge the choir itself as boys only. In choral singing, Welch and Howard give emphasis to the acoustic environment and repertoire where individual voice characteristics are lost. There is little doubt that the acoustic environment of a cathedral is a significant part of the overall sound picture that contributes much to the perception of voices. In a similar way, choral singing homogenizes individual voices and when choir trainers talk of ‘blend’ in their boys it is as likely as not that they are referring to what is an acoustically bland sound that derives from the use of thin fold configuration. The acoustic spectrum of thin fold configuration is a much simpler and more sine wave-like one than that of the thick fold configuration, particularly in the case of children whose vocal folds are less massive than those of adult women. The cumulative effect of this bland acoustic spectrum and the smoothing or fudging of a reverberant acoustic is the blended ‘sound of angels’ and the argument that this can only be produced by boys can be in danger of becoming an unduly academic one. These considerations are less likely to apply in the case of individual or small groups of voices in drier acoustics, including those of recording studios. Solo albums by boy artists provide the opportunity to listen to individual voice characteristics and the possibility of empirical investigation into boyishness in sound is of a different order. Beet (2005a) makes an interesting claim about boys trained in the pre-Malcolm era that was attentive to texts and practices urging particular regimes based upon the thin fold configuration. The old head tone (and there were several variations) was so unmistakeable and distinctive that there could be no doubt that it was produced by a boy. This sound, capable of filling a large building, does not fade at the onset of puberty: and this is perhaps the most convincing explanation for the fact that many boys in those days sang on well into their teens.

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I shall consider the question of longevity shortly. My immediate concern is with the claim that ‘there could be no doubt that it was produced by a boy’. There are theoretical reasons to treat this claim with some scepticism. First, if the boy is singing in ‘head tone’ he will be producing a relatively simple acoustic spectrum with consequently less vocal print data than would be the case were he singing in full, modal voice. Second, if (as was usually the case) he were an older boy well into his teens, production would be toward the falsetto end of the thin or ‘head/falsetto’ configuration. The claim that the sound is undoubtedly boy-like would not then square with Chapman’s contention that male falsetto has a ‘female like quality’. To test this empirically, I selected some boy artist recordings to play to some 400 school pupils of similar age to the boy artists. The pupils were drawn from a wide range of schools where experience of boys’ singing ranged from considerable (three cathedral choir schools were visited) to non-existent (an inner-city comprehensive with no singing tradition). The pupils were asked to assess the voices on scales of one to ten where one equalled ‘flute like’ and ‘dainty’ and ten equalled ‘reedy/ brassy’ and ‘shouty’. These terms were discussed with the pupils beforehand with the aid of a singing teacher who was able to demonstrate their meaning. The results of this investigation are reported in full elsewhere (Ashley, 2008). Four singers emerged as particularly significant and in many ways representative of discrete categories that illustrate different kinds of colouration that would be much harder to detect amongst voices in chorus (see Table 4.1). Table 4.1 

Representative vocal colours in perceptual tests

Joseph McManners

Aged twelve, a naive, child-like sound across the whole compass from a boy small for his age

Declan Galbraith

Aged eleven, a ‘funky’ modal voice with ‘twang’ or belt like quality, also from quite a small boy

Patrick Aspbury

Aged twelve, thin fold configuration in the high register from an experienced cathedral chorister

Robert Harris

Aged fourteen, thin fold configuration across whole compass from a teenage boy soprano

The two scales of fluty-brassy and dainty-shouty correlated very closely, indicating some degree of internal validity and there were no significant differences in results from different schools, indicating some degree of reliability. Overall, there was clearly some consistency in recognition of individual vocal colour. Listeners were also invited to record qualitative comments and of the four singers above, the two who attracted the most comment were Joseph and Robert. The pupils reflected the general perception of adult judges that Joseph McManners sang with an innocent, child-like voice ‘unspoiled by ecclesiastical choirmasters’ (Thompson, 2006). Joseph’s singing was regarded as acceptable for a young boy because it sounded like a young boy. Significantly, however, this was only the judgement of

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secondary age pupils. Surprisingly few pupils of primary age considered it possible for a boy to sing so well and many imagined it must be a girl, less because of a high register than the apparent belief that ‘boys cannot sing’. Full analysis of the qualitative comments revealed that, of the four, Declan’s voice was considered the most boy-like (as opposed to child like) and Patrick’s the most girl-like. Robert’s was the most positively disliked, with pupils frequently making comments such as ‘he sounds like an old woman’. When the quantitative data are used to list in rank order of shoutiness, the following is the result: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Declan Robert Joseph Patrick

The positions of Declan and Patrick are consistent with the qualitative data and support the position that the thin fold register is more likely to be perceived as girllike whereas a richer, more colourful modal sound is perceived as masculine, even within the lower treble register. However, the position of Robert requires more explanation. When the same test was given to an experienced singing teacher, she rated Robert as the ‘daintiest’ of all voices, noting that he ‘sounded like an old castrato’. The school audiences would not, of course, have this level of knowledge of singing. When they employ terms such as ‘old woman’ they are recognizing a female quality, but also an adult quality. The voice is not perceived, as was apparently Patrick’s, as that of a delicate little girl lacking any masculine strength. It is perceived as that of an older person who has the power to shout. This is intriguing and leads us to consider Beet’s other claim about the training of boys prior to the 1950s, that they produced a much more powerful sound such that a relatively small number of them were capable of filling a large building. Beet has logic on his side here in that a fourteen or fifteen year old has, as we have seen in the previous chapter, significantly bigger lungs than an eleven or twelve year old. It is also the case that the vocal folds have become more like those of a woman than a child, as reflected in the significant weight gain associated with increased muscle mass. Beet is in agreement with modern day young audiences that voices such as that of Joseph McManners are those of small boys that do not endure into teenage. He goes further to assert that the skill of producing the ‘pure head tone’ has been lost by contemporary singers and their trainers thus: What we hear today from boys is not the pure head-tone boy soprano voice of the past, but a harsh incisive sound produced from the chest register, the voice of a small boy that fades quickly at the first sign of puberty. (Beet 1999)

I am inclined to agree with Beet on some of these issues. It is certainly my experience that large fourteen and fifteen year olds, if they are still singing treble,

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produce vastly greater power than eleven and twelve year olds. The question, however, is that of whether they should. In the previous chapter we referred to the work of Cooksey in producing normative tables for vocal development that correlate well with the normative stages of pubertal development of Tanner. Has the technique of the teenage boy soprano, like that of the adult castrato, passed irrevocably into history, or should it, as Beet appears to desire, be revived? Should we develop a thin fold singing register that extends the soprano life of a boy even though his modal range is falling? If we do so, are we simply replicating with boys a procedure that is quite acceptable for adult male falsettists, or are we pushing a little further into the greyer realms of unacceptable techniques of which castration is the most extreme? The final piece of empirical work I report sets out to provide some answers to these kinds of question. It concerns a listening experiment to compare Denis Barthel, a pre-war boy soprano with two present day choir trebles. Denis Barthel was born in May 1916 and became a probationer at the Temple Church under George Thalben-Ball in November 1927. He reached fame on Armistice Day 1931 when he sang O Valiant Hearts in front of King George V and Queen Mary. He became principal soloist of the Temple choir upon Ernest Lough’s departure and Head Boy in 1932 when, at the age of fifteen he recorded Vaughan Williams’ tune Christmas Carol (the alternative to the better known Forest Green for O Little Town of Bethlehem) and a much celebrated version of He Was Despised from the Messiah. The 78 rpm discs were recorded in the Temple Church by HMV and were very well regarded in their day as this 1932 quotation from The Gramophone testifies: ‘He was despised is by far the best boy’s recording I can remember hearing … O little town of Bethlehem is a notably good record for anyone who cares for emotional singing from a boy’ (Beet, 1999). Two of the boys taking part in my own study were asked to re-record Barthel’s disc. The boys had been profiled throughout the period of voice change, regular two monthly measurements of their heights, weights, lung volumes and speaking pitch centres being recorded over a period of approximately three years until the point at which they ceased to sing treble. Both had singing lessons from an early age and performed in a variety of contexts, their biggest single commitment being to the all male choir of a major city church which performed a full choral repertoire at three services every Sunday. At the time of the recording the boys were aged twelve years nine months and thirteen years six months. Both were amongst the strongest voices in the choir and both had featured as soloists on a CD recorded by the choir six or so months earlier. Subsequently both boys became head choristers and recorded a CD album together. The data on their physical growth were used to make a judgement as to whether they were ‘small boys whose voices fade at the first sign of puberty’. Reference to Tanner’s clinical growth standards (Tanner, 1978) revealed that both could be regarded as representative of the mean for boys’ stature in relation to age. The twelve year old was marginally above the fiftieth centile of clinical height/ weight and had a speaking pitch centre in the range of 220–230 Hz. The thirteen

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year old was slightly below the same centile with a speaking pitch centre also approximating 230 Hz. Titze gives 300Hz for pre-pubescent boys and the pitch ranges of Cooksey’s Stage 1 are 220–247 Hz and Stage 2 196–233 Hz. Whether or not twelve and thirteen year olds of average stature are ‘small boys’ is a subjective and relative matter, but the speaking pitch indicates that the ‘first sign of puberty’ has already passed. The recordings were made in a small studio with a digital organ accompaniment and subsequently processed to create as nearly as possible an exact match with the acoustic environment and organ registration of the Temple Church in which Barthel recorded. The original HMV and the new recordings were edited together into a single audio file that allowed immediate comparison of all three voices over short passages. They were then played in the National Early Music Centre in York (a converted church) to an expert audience of singing teachers and voice scientists gathered for an international conference. The audience was asked to give its reaction. This reaction was consistent and unambiguous. Before the question was asked or the suggestion made, a member of the audience was moved to cry out ‘falsetto!’ In the ensuing discussion, there was unanimous agreement that the Barthel recording undoubtedly made much use of the falsetto voice. It was also a much admired voice and several members of the audience commented on its power and presence as well as echoing the 1932 Gramophone review that commented about ‘emotional singing for a boy’. These were typical comments: • • • •

beautifully produced crafted amazingly rich and powerful imagine a choir of sixteen of them

However, significant reservations about Barthel’s performance also began to emerge, two leading vocal coaches being moved to fulminate at length on the damage done to boys by choir trainers who desired an ‘angelic sound’ produced at the expense of ignorance of vocal health. No member of the audience disputed the assessment that the two present day boys were in an early stage of puberty and at Stage 1 or possibly 2 in Cooksey’s scheme. Although the term ‘small boys whose voices fade at the first sign of puberty’ was not used, it was clear that the audience, whilst approving of the performances, considered them unremarkable in comparison to Barthel and fairly representative of present day choristers. Typical comments were: • • • •

nice ordinary boys some talent great to hear that boys still sing like that there must be only about 150 of them left in the country!

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The superior power, maturity and musical excitement of Barthel’s voice was undeniable. Repeated listening to the files over a period of time has convinced me that in Barthel’s singing (and that of some of his contemporaries) there was indeed something special that we do not hear today. It would be absurd to dismiss it as ‘emasculated flutiness’ for it greatly excited the discriminating audience in York. However on Williams’ point that there is no ‘continental tone’, just good and bad singing, the York audience is very clearly divided. Comments such as ‘beautifully produced’, ‘crafted’, ‘amazingly rich and powerful’ clearly imply that the audience believes that they are hearing ‘good singing’. However, the audience does not regard what they consider to be the technique of extended falsetto soprano by a fifteen-year-old boy as ‘good’. Indeed, the dominant view is that it is somehow harmful. By slightly extended analogy, the heroic reception given to a Handelian castrato would represent ‘good singing’ but very few would argue that it is not produced by a harmful technique. The question of potential harm that so concerns the singing teachers has much to do with the future career a boy might pursue as an adult singer. Barthel did not have such a career and I can only reflect the number of comments that have been made to me by respected singing teachers concerning the time that is expended on putting right damage they perceive to have been done during chorister years. For a book entitled ‘How high should boys sing?’ this has to be significant. It is certainly currently the dominant view within the voice community that a boy should desist from singing in the soprano range once Stage 2 is reached. Not all boys, of course, reach Stage 2 at the same time and here there is another problem. I want to move on now to discuss in the final section of the chapter the great variation in the timing of puberty and the role played by socially constructed factors in determining the time when a boy will decide for himself when to sing in a lower register. I have called this ‘vocal agency’. Vocal Agency The careers of the two boys in the Barthel experiment have, as with other boys in the author’s own study, been followed until the time each has indicated the desire to give up singing treble by leaving the choir. For the twelve year old, this occurred at the age of fourteen years and seven months and for the thirteen year old, at fifteen years and three months. Both boys therefore elected to carry on singing longer than they would have done had they been compelled to leave a cathedral choir on reaching the age of thirteen, which is the highest grade year in the majority of English choir schools. It is almost beyond question that a lot of good singing by thirteen- to fourteen-year-old English boys is lost by virtue of the fact that they are compelled to leave their cathedral choir because they come to the end of their time in the choir school, not because their voices have mutated or they no longer wish to sing. The beneficiaries of this can be the public schools to which many of these boys proceed. Strong treble lines of thirteen to fourteen/fifteen year

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olds can be found in the chapel choirs of such schools, but this is a phenomenon that is confined to only a small and privileged section of the population. At the same time, some earlier maturing boys may sing for what many teachers might consider to be too long as Stage 2 or even, in exceptional cases, Stage 4 mutation can come upon a twelve year old. Practices vary here according to circumstance. There has been growing speculation that puberty is coming earlier and this belief is not infrequently employed as an explanation for boys being both harder to recruit and giving up singing sooner. Williams et al. (2005), citing a text by Gackle (1990) on female voice mutation, have suggested that the average age of the onset of adolescent male voice mutation has changed from fourteen in the 1940s to twelve at the present time. This is an extremely abrupt change and the evidence from other studies does not confirm that it is robust. For example, a more recent study of boys by Fuchs et al. (2007) appears to contradict Gackle. It found that the average age at beginning of mutation of twenty-one boys studied in depth by phoniatricians and paediatricians between 1992 and 1995 was 14.2, with a range from 13.0–15.9. It is important to draw a distinction between stature and pubertal onset. There is little doubt that, on average, today’s choristers are not ‘small boys’ but are larger than their pre-war forbears. This does not, however, necessarily mean that voice change is similarly earlier. A literature review by Albertsson Wickland et al. (2002) suggests that the secular trend to greater stature is not strongly correlated with the earlier onset of puberty. Juul et al. (2006), drawing on data from Denmark and the United States, provide recent empirical confirmation of this and conclude that whilst Danish boys and girls are now significantly taller than in 1964, there has been no corresponding earlier timing of puberty, although Reiter and Lee suggest otherwise (2001). Albertsson Wickland et al.’s findings accord with an explanation offered by Tanner (1978) that a secular trend dating back to 1845 is associated with clearly demonstrable changes in nutrition which have also resulted in a general increase in height and weight of the population irrespective of the age of puberty. A further complication is that obesity, a problem of the 2000s but not of the 1920s, has been shown to be linked to a pathologically early onset of puberty that does not affect healthy boys. Mills et al. (1986) excluded obese boys from their study and were confident that average onset of puberty has not changed much, though their study importantly confirmed an earlier one of James and Simpson (1964) that puberty is likely to commence earlier in healthy fourteen-year-old boys who were taller than average in earlier childhood (i.e. around six years of age). This early advantage in stature is a naturally occurring genetic variation and unlikely to be the result of ‘increased hormones in the meat’ as some speculative commentators have suggested. It suggests that a naturally small boy may have a longer career as a treble than a naturally large boy and though the sample size has not been big enough for a statistical proof, this has been the case for all the boys whose growth, development and singing careers I have studied in depth.

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The point is that the time of onset of puberty is highly variable, as is the rate of progression through puberty, the only invariable quantity being the actual sequence of events. We have to note that, when the constraints of educational transition points are removed, the two boys in my Barthel experiment had a career comparable in length to many of the pre-war boy sopranos whose recordings have been reissued by the Better Land series. They recorded together a CD album when they were aged respectively fourteen years and eleven months and fifteen years and one month. The diary of interviews with these boys confirms that a combination of their enjoyment of their singing, the social support of their choir and their reluctance to give up a repertoire they had come to take pleasure in were all contributory factors in continuing to sing in spite of the knowledge that by the age of fourteen increasing questions might be asked about ‘manhood’. I have come across this phenomenon quite regularly. Boys who have learned a good repertoire as trebles can be reluctant to give it up and can choose to sing in the high register for as long as possible, whilst boys who have not been in choirs will try to sing lower than their voices are really ready for. These are some of the grounds for my own contention that there is little doubt that the will of a boy to continue to sing prolongs the voice. The change of voice from the soprano range to the new baritone is a psycho-social event as much as a physical one and if a boy enjoys his singing, the age at which it is most likely to occur is fourteen. This is actually remarkably consistent with a 1597 source quoted by Beet (1999) as saying ‘boyes are apt to change their voice about fourteene yeeres of age’. Table 4.2, compiled from the longitudinal records of other boys in my study, tends to confirm this. There is other evidence to confirm that cultural norms, social constructions of voice and personal agency all affect singing pitch. In the United States, Collins (2006), echoing the advice of the earlier writers, advises that boys up to the age of twelve should sing in the thin fold configuration for as much as possible of their range. He does so partly through the inspiration of Henry Leck and the Indianapolis Children’s Choir. Leck has adopted, with great apparent success, the technique of bringing thin fold or ‘head voice’ downwards through the passagio. However, Collins recognizes both that this will create problems with peers and that boys with experience of singing themselves exercise agency with regard to it. He suggests that the thin fold is an approach that works well in a closed community such as a boys choir outside the influence of other boys who do not sing. He also notes an increase in popularity in the United States with the adult male falsetto, initially through groups such as the King’s Singers and Chanticleer, but more recently through the increasing use of falsetto by rock singers. It is other young people outside this community who will say that the higher voices ‘sound like girls’ and, in such circumstances, Collins’s recommendation is that a limited tessitura based upon modal range should be adapted (ibid.: 120).

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Table 4.2  Boys’ vocal agency at fourteen years of age Singer

Speaking pitch centre / voice at age fourteen

Career decision at fourteen

Ex-cathedral chorister, left 170 Hz. Retrained in choir to pursue solo career, music theatre and singing album and several singles in modal register

Continue recordings during voice change, repertoire moving from crossover to rock. Resume rock band career after GCSE Cathedral chorister, 180 Hz. Continuing to Extend concert and recording chorister of the year, major sing celebrated treble after career as treble. Period of recording contract in leaving cathedral choir uncertainty due to major ‘crossover’ market recording contract Choral scholarship, 175 Hz. Sang in cambiata chorister of the year, two voice on Radio 3 albums of classical song in treble voice

Rest voice ‘I just knew it was finished’. May pursue career in e.g. law after Oxbridge choral scholarship

Singer in a world famous boys’ choir

171 Hz. Singing alto in choir, choosing to sing soprano in solo work

Music scholarship at English public school with view to career as classical singer

Parish chorister / freelance performer

200 Hz. Strong treble. Keep expecting to finish, but keep going on!

Starred in Turn of the Screw. Looking for other opera and ‘show’ work whilst voice lasts

Head chorister, all male parish church

170 Hz. Stage 3 came early. By fourteen voice had split into two registers. Did not want to leave choir as all his friends were in it 165 Hz. Sang treble for a year in public school chapel, now alto with a youth choir

Give up singing and try air cadets

Former royal chapel chorister

Very keen to pursue professional music career and anxious to record treble voice in a studio before it is altogether gone

This, I think, is the absolute crux of the matter. Not only do Collins’ findings accord almost exactly with my own but I think I would also have reluctantly to give the same advice. Such have been the changes in social constructions of boyhood, masculinity and voice since the end of the ‘golden century’ that the modal range has undoubtedly become the hegemony of singing. There are of course alternative cultures of singing just as there are alternative masculinities, but they have to fight for acceptance in a hostile world and issues such as social class and religion that get in the way need to be tackled thoughtfully and imaginatively. Where I think I would differ from the golden century writers is in condemnation of the modal voice. Boys can actually sing very well in it, indeed creating uniquely boyish sounds that perhaps need to be heard more. The prejudice of writers such

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as Francis Howard has to be seen for what it is. We will never win the respect of boys or open their minds to the possibilities of a fuller exploitation of their voices if we approach the task with such an attitude. An interesting illustration of this resulted from the reality TV show The Choir: Boys don’t sing (Twenty Twenty Television, 2008). The programme was recorded in a single sex school with a specialism in sport. The young male animateur who was the central figure of the series put himself on the line by performing classical song to a school hall filled with boys greatly conditioned by images of sport and masculinity and won respect from many of them for doing so. We shall see in later chapters that boys are more open minded with regard to repertoire and taste than is often imagined, but it is the presentation that matters. Once they have left primary school, indeed, towards the end of primary schooling, few boys are now possessed of the conditioned deference of earlier ages and need to feel that what they listen to and sing is their choice. Choral style singing is most likely to be rejected if it is presented by a ‘bossy’ type adult who does not win respect through an appreciation of this. When I visited the school at which The Choir: Boys don’t sing had been recorded some six months after the programme was broadcast, I was intrigued to talk to a large fourteen year old who really enjoyed singing alto. He had no particular desire to move to a lower voice and I found other boys too who, contrary to the case in many other schools, saw no reason to adopt the lowest possible voice as early as possible. This is perhaps another illustration of the effects of simple familiarity with what voices do and I no longer believe that there is some essential drive in a boy to become outwardly manly through voice as soon as possible. If they sing, most boys of eleven, twelve or thirteen know and accept the sound of the unchanged modal voice and boys who sing in an environment where the thin fold voice is used regularly will accept that too. It is just that such environments are rare and often carry an enormous amount of cultural baggage that is alienating to the vast majority of boys. A final illustration of the socio-cultural effects of vocal hegemony appears to be emerging through the evaluation of the UK’s National Singing Programme for primary schools. Although it is at the time of writing very much work in progress (Welch, 2008a, 2008b) it has emerged that the mean speaking pitch centre of primary school children is lower than base line data taken from sources such as Titze (1992). Welch has been unable to explain this finding in terms of earlier puberty since the primary school children are nearly all pre-pubescent. He resorts, therefore, to speculation that the effect may be due to a cultural shift in which children reflect dominant vocal role models to speak in a slightly lower pitch than that of the base line data taken from earlier years. It is probably too early to absorb such a finding or suggestion into the general literature, but I think this and the other examples I have given may be illustrative of the need to look more to the prevailing sociological conditions under which boys sing than to search for explanations such as earlier puberty. These may be comforting but the ideas upon which they are founded are often speculative or

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pseudo-scientific. I have already recorded my scepticism with regard to essentialist explanations of the situation in boys’ singing. Accordingly, in the next few chapters we move to consider in much greater depth the sociological factors that contribute to our understanding of how high boys should and do sing. References Albertsson Wickland, K., Zuo, Z., Niklasson, A. and Karlber, J. (2002), ‘Swedish Population-based Longitudinal Reference Values from Birth to 18 Years of Age for Height, Weight and Head Circumference’, Acta Paediatrica, 91 (7), 739–54. Ashley, M. (2006), Singing High, Aiming High, London: National Foundation for Youth Music. — (2008), Teaching Singing to Boys and Teenagers: The young male voice and the problem of masculinity, Lampeter: Mellen. Beet S. (1999), The Better Land Volume One, Recorded 1914–1944, CD sleeve notes, Amphion PHI CD 158. — (2005a), The Better Land: In search of the lost boy sopranos, Waterford: Rectory Press. — (2005b), personal communication. Collins, D. (2006), ‘Preferred Practices in Teaching Boys Whose Voices Are Changing’, Choral Journal, (November), 119–20. Curwen, J. (1899), The Boys’ Voice: A book of practical information on the training of boys’ voices for church choirs, 3rd edn, London: J. Curwen. Fuchs, M., Froehlich, M., Hentschel, B., Stuermer, I., Kruse, E. and Knauft, D. (2007), ‘Predicting Mutational Change in the Speaking Voice of Boys’, Journal of Voice, 21 (2), 169–78. Gackle, L. (1990) ‘The adolescent female voice: characteristics of change and stages of development’, Choral Journal, 31(8), 17–25. Haunch, B. (2003), ‘Reading the Runes or Rueing the Ruins?’ Spring 2003 newsletter of the Campaign for the Defence of the Traditional Cathedral Choir, available at http://www.ctcc.org.uk/rue.htm edn (accessed 3 July 2005). Howard, F. (1895), The Child-Voice in Singing: Treated from a physiological and a practical standpoint and especially adapted to schools and boy choir, New York: H.W. Gray/Novello. James, W. and Simpson, H. (1964), ‘Height in Relation to Puberty, Family Size and Social Class: A longitudinal study’, The Millbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 42 (3 pt 1), 20–34. Juul, A., Teilmann, G., Scheike, T., Hertel, N., Holm, K., Laursen, E., Main, K. and Skakkebaek, N. (2006), ‘Pubertal Development in Danish Children: Comparison of recent European and US data’, International Journal of Andrology, 29 (1), 247–55. Luff, A. (1969), ‘The Authentic Sound?’, Musical Times, 110 (1513), 308.

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Malcolm, G. (1967), ‘Boys’ Voices’, English Church Music, 24–7. McVicker, W. (1990), ‘David Hill on Choir Training’, Musical Times, 31 (1766), 215–19. Mills, J., Shiono, P., Shapiro, L., Crawford, P. and Rhoads, G. (1986), ‘Early Growth Predicts Timing of Puberty in Boys: Results of a 14-year nutrition and growth study, Journal of Pediatrics, 109 (3), 543–7. Pehrson, B. (2002-last update), ‘Recent History: Equality and boy choir’ available at www.boychoirs.org/history/hist003p.html (accessed 5 July 2005). Phillips, P. (1980), ‘The Golden Age Regained: 2’, Early Music, (April), 180–91. Reiter, E. and Lee, P. (2001), ‘Have the Onset and Tempo of Puberty Changed?’, Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 155, 988–9. Stewart, A. (2006), ‘Girls Allowed’, BBC Music Magazine, December, 24–8. Tanner, J. (1978), Foetus into Man: Physical growth from conception to maturity, London: Open Books. Thompson, M. (2006-last update), ‘Joseph McManners: In Dreams’, available at http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3LQE09KR9QMKL?ASIN=B000ATJYQ 2&nodeID= (accessed 15 August 2008). Titze, I. (1992), ‘Critical Periods of Vocal Change: Early childhood’, Journal of the National Association of Teachers of Singing, (November/December). Twenty Twenty Television (2008), The Choir: Boys don’t sing, prod. Jamie Isaacs, London: BBC. Welch, G. (2008a), ‘The SingUp Survey’, Sing Up: The magazine for the Music Manifesto National Singing Programme, (Summer), 14–15. — (2008b), personal communication. Welch, G. and Howard, D. (2002), ‘Gendered Voice in the Cathedral Choir’, Psychology of Music, 30, 102–20. Welch, G., Sergeant, D. and White, P. (1997), ‘Age, Sex and Vocal Task as Factors in Singing In-tune during the First Years of Schooling’, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 127, 155–62. Williams, J. (2001), ‘Chorister Training: Education or exploitation?’, Journal of the Association of Teachers of Singing, 41. — (2006), personal communication. Williams, J., Welch, G. and Howard, D. (2005), ‘An Exploratory Baseline Study of Boy Chorister Vocal Behaviour and Development in an Intensive Professional Context’, Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology, 30 (3–4), 158–62.

Chapter 5

Admiration of the Boy In 1997, an interesting spat broke out between Peter Phillips (of the Tallis Scholars) and Edwin Higginbottom (of New College Oxford). Higginbottom felt compelled to defend boys’ singing against a sustained attack by Phillips in The Spectator (Phillips, 1997). Phillips had argued that boys were less accurate, less mature or polished in performance and incapable of taking the repertoire from the safe acoustic of the cathedral to the more challenging context of the concert hall. Higginbottom’s defence, whilst predictably covering (and largely dismissing) such matters as historical authenticity and composer’s original intention, came to rest on the value that springs from boys’ ‘very childishness’. Higginbottom perhaps accurately identified that many ‘punters’ find something more ‘alive’ and ‘stylish’ (in a certain way) in this than the ‘polished’ and ‘secure’ performances of professional sopranos (Higginbottom, 1997). Children, in other words, are performers now of a particular type, not inferior versions of their future adult selves. There is a discriminating audience which recognizes and appreciates this. Who the performer is matters greatly and it is not simply a question of creating a disembodied, perfect sound on a CD. Though cathedral girls’ choirs had been established by 1997, Higginbottom passed rather lightly over the obvious question of why boy rather than child? Here we go yet further in our exploration of performers and audiences. For some audiences girls will not do even if they, like boys, sing with the ‘voice of an angel’. This is precisely the kind of issue I had in mind when, in Chapter 1, I perhaps unkindly asked why anybody should want to hear a small boy squeaking Tears in Heaven in a treble voice when they could listen to the performance of Eric Clapton. There are adult audiences who do very much want to hear such performances. Such audiences give these performances value and without them they would not exist. In this chapter, I endeavour to unpick what is going on. A feminist reading of the issue will lead us towards the contention that if there is one thing that unites boys’ singing across all genres and answers the Tears in Heaven question, it is that the boys who perform are admired by their supporters because they are boys. That is indeed the conclusion I reach by the end of the chapter. Nostalgia and Fantasy I have already made the crucial point that whilst there is an adult audience for boys’ singing, there is almost no peer group audience for the boy who sings in the high ‘head voice’. We shall see later that this is more so of boy audiences

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than girl audiences. There are certain circumstances and conditions that lead to young teenage girls admiring young teenage boy singers of similar age. Very often these are associated with a heightened hostility by boys toward other boys who are singers. Adults are less likely to have such a reaction. They will be either indifferent or enthusiastic. If, as we established in the previous two chapters, a majority of adults overestimate their capability of telling boys’ and girls’ singing voices apart, what in reality motivates this liking for boys? The first answer I am going to give is that it has much to do with nostalgia. It is sometimes said that childhood is wasted on children. There are times when I could not agree more. If only I could now have my own childhood again, but only of course the childhood I would retrospectively design as an adult. For most people the world is experienced with a freshness and intensity of colour and sensation by the child in a way that is never repeated in adult life, but we cannot of course know that as children. Childhood is possibly the most precious thing we have and that is one reason why the abuse of children is such a heinous crime. Schindler and Holbrook (2003) have reviewed the evidence for a link between early experience and adult consumer preferences and conclude that a process not dissimilar to imprinting during critical life periods does indeed explain a tendency for adults to prefer the music they enjoyed in their early to mid-teens. This tendency, which can extend to a range of aesthetic objects other than music, is significantly more likely to be found in men than in women. It is possible, then, that intense attachments to singing that were experienced during the emotionally turbulent time of around thirteen or fourteen years of age when a boy loses his treble voice (as well as much of the more carefree experiences of boyhood) will develop in certain adults, particularly males. This desire in adults to design retrospectively the ideal childhood or relive a boyhood increasingly romanticized by the mists of time can lead seamlessly to the creation of adult fantasies about boyhood. In these fantasies, the pain and reality of quarrels with siblings or parents, bullying or trouble with schoolwork are displaced by a kind of sanitized Peter Pan world in which beautiful children glide through the ether and nobody really needs to worry about pricking the bubble of escapism. That at least is the impression created by the boy band Libera. Libera are an unusual phenomenon that has successfully captured a world market and has particularly strong followings in the United States and Japan. Though the term ‘boy band’ is good for marketing, Libera might more accurately be described as a choir, in fact as two choirs for on Sundays they are a traditional parish church men and boys’ choir, Libera at other times. There is no doubt that what Libera do, a kind of ‘new age’ choral style rooted in Christian liturgy, is original, imaginative and creative, but its appeal is to adult audiences. Libera videos I have shared with boys the same age as the Libera boys almost invariably elicit either indifference or hostility. Their white, hooded robes can be regarded as extremely ‘uncool’, their high ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ singing very girly and their elaborately staged videos contrived and insincere. The danger, as

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this eleven-year-old choir member explains, is that they might be a disincentive for other boys to sing: Well, old people and grannies will love them and they might appeal to very young boys, but no way to me!

Interestingly, the boy refers to grannies but not older men. We shall see later that this is absolutely consistent with many interviews I have done, particularly with boy performers who refer regularly to mothers or grannies as their audience, never fathers. Perhaps males are simply ‘old people’ but it seems strangely to be an axiom amongst boys that men have no interest in their singing and as far as I can tell most are genuinely innocent with regard to the possibility of a homoerotic following. There is one Libera video I find particularly challenging. The extremely slow motion, gliding close-ups of what can only be described as blue eyed, fair haired, cherubically beautiful children leaves me with an uncomfortable feeling. Should we be imaging boys in this way? I have my doubts not only because it is a turn-off for other boys but because I wonder how such images are consumed by adults. Consumed they are, however, for Libera are a great commercial success. Perhaps it is harmless and perhaps it is good that we can escape from a humdrum world in this timeless manner. It is difficult to know what to think in a world where there is such heightened sensitivity toward the photography of children. If the alternative is a ban on pictures of the choir at weddings or a demand that children face away from the camera or have their faces pixelated out, I think I prefer the Libera approach. My main point remains though that if we want more boys to sing, we have to be prepared to see things more from the boy point of view and this means that we do not have as our principal motive the use of boys to gratify adult fantasy or nostalgia. I have certainly found strong connections between adult tastes and boyhood memories in cathedral or church choirs where it is generally the exception if an adult male singer has not been a boy chorister, much in the way that Schindler and Holbrook (2003) would expect. This is perhaps a different kind of nostalgia to the sentimentality of Libera and one which leads to the existence of another kind of adult audience which was recognized by a small number of the boys I spoke to. I have called this the cognoscenti audience, a word I have introduced to the vocabulary of some choristers who clearly knew the concept but had no word for it. This can lead to enthusiastic collecting of CDs and passionate defences of boys’ singing. Mould (2007) records how, on the introduction of girls at Lichfield in 1997, ‘defenders of the male tradition were virtually in tears, some shaking with anger’ (p. 268). Why a small section of the community should react with such intensity to a perceived threat to boys’ singing requires some explanation. It may partly be the case that there is a recognition that the arrival of girls has so often led to the loss of boys, but the question then simply has to be repeated, if girls can do the job anyway,

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why are boys so special? For older men with fond memories of boys’ singing, they undoubtedly are to a passionate degree. This, however, is again an adult viewpoint driven by a perspective on the past, fear of loss and sometimes the nostalgic desire to bring the past back because ‘things were better then’. Most boys born into the era of parallel boys’ and girls’ choirs (as all now are) accept this new status quo as though things had never been otherwise and anybody who understands boys will appreciate how much old men going on about the ‘old days’ can be a turn-off. To penetrate further into this question of what is so special for adult audiences about the boy, I now need to consider women and men separately. Boys and Women Germaine Greer, in her recent book The Boy claims to have broken the taboo on admiration of the boy. More specifically, she states her mission as ‘to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short-lived beauty of boys’ (Greer, 2003). Greer’s use of the word ‘beauty’ applies principally to the depiction of boys in art and photography, though a television documentary contemporary with the publication of The Boy offered a similar treatment of the boy band Westlife. These are ‘nice clean boys, with hair on the chest obscured’, (London Weekend Television, 2003) marketed exclusively to girls and women, ‘eager for a sexually charged video performance’ (ibid.). Historically, we might trace this process to the teen idol phenomenon which perhaps began with Frank Sinatra back in the 1940s. By the 1950s, it had become clear that the reasons for admiration of the boy were shifting rapidly from the appreciation of precocious talent and future manhood to a new gaze on the sexual body. The question of who may appreciate this thus raised questions which were probably of little concern in the pre-Sinatra era of Ernest Lough. Of Elvis Presley, Steve Binder is recorded as saying: I’m straight as an arrow and I got to tell you, you stop, whether you’re male or female, to look at him. He was that good looking. And if you never knew he was a superstar, it wouldn’t make any difference; if he’d walked in the room, you’d know somebody special was in your presence. (Elvis Australia, 2005)

Whiteley (2006) similarly quotes Clarence Worley from the film True Romance: Man, Elvis looked good. Yeah, I ain’t no fag, but Elvis, he was prettier than most women … I always said if I had to fuck a guy – had to if my life depended on it – I’d fuck Elvis. (Clarence Worley [Christian Slater] in True Romance, dir. Tony Scott, 1993)

The connections here with the history of boys’ singing in Chapter 2, and the definitions of ‘boy’ given in Chapter 1 should, I hope, be obvious. Though patriarchy retains the upper hand, not least through the control of the music

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industry by older men, younger men have subtly become diminished to the status of ‘boy’ through their public sexualization for women. The meaning of words constantly evolves. I believe that it is no coincidence that Ernest Lough’s 1927 recording was marketed by HMV as ‘the most sublime record ever made’. Winston (2006) makes an interesting point that the word beauty is gendered. The masculine word, he suggests, is not beautiful but sublime. Yet now we have Elvis who is not just beautiful, but a pretty boy. There could hardly be a stronger statement about changing notions of masculinity associated with the new possibilities of a female gaze on the male. If ‘boys’ of Elvis’s age are to be diminished to the status of ‘beautiful’ or even ‘pretty’ as gaze objects for women, what of boys of Lough’s age? These, it seems, are to be diminished further in proportion. Whilst older teenagers and young men are diminished by the commercial music industry to the status of sex objects for young women, younger teenagers are to be diminished in proportion to the status of teeny romance objects for ten year old girls or substitute grandchildren for what a singing teacher colleague has unkindly called ‘menopausal women’. Most boys I interview tend, as I have said, just to call them ‘grannies’. An example of the former would be the thirteen-year-old Stevie Brock and an example of the latter might be the twelve-year-old Joseph McManners. I address these matters in greater depth in later chapters. For the present, this has to be seen for what it is. The commercial music industry has found it profitable to allow one small section of the male population, young male singers of popular appeal, to be subjugated to women. It is hardly surprising that most boys instinctively react against this and opt for the territories of sport or computing where conventional patriarchal power structures are still more likely to be found. This, however, is not the whole story. There is a special relationship between younger boys and women which is not accessible to men and which is a source of boys’ privilege in singing. Feminist critics such as Reay (2001) lament how the young boy has always been historically favoured over the potentially corruptible girl. ‘Boys will be boys’ when they are mischievous, but girls are ‘little bitches’ if they behave in the same way. Jackson (2006) illustrates how, for women teachers, boys are often ‘loveable rogues’: I think if you ask most teachers I think they would be able to rattle off ten names – of the loveable rogue. [Mrs Byatt, Firtrees] Some of the girls can be really quite vicious. Now you very rarely see that unpleasant side in lads. You do, there’s the odd ones who flip, you do see it, but not as much as the girls. [Mrs Brian, Beechwood] (Jackson, 2006: 21)

Holland (1992) explores a Christmas card image of a sweet, angel-faced choirboy with a catapult hanging prominently from his back pocket. This, she argues, is an image of boys that is strongly defended against sexuality and feminization.

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It is, she claims, related to advertisements that frequently call on all the symbols of power that render sexuality invisible and reassert male dominance. For women who are more likely than men to possess religious sentimentality (Kay et al., 1996), the choirboy is thus uniquely attractive. He is not too good, for his catapult indicates a safe hint of masculinity that perversely renders him more attractive than a girl in the same position. This idealized mother–son relationship is a unique one in which the young boy, who can represent male eroticism without threat of sexual predation on women, is privileged in this relationship over the young girl. During the years of puberty that are so crucial to boys’ treble singing, there are of course significant tensions between the mother–son relationship and the growing boy’s bids for independence and the respect of older males. I now turn, therefore, to consider the performer–audience relationship between boys and men in singing. Boys and Men The previous section of the chapter has suggested that there is a special relationship between boys and women which is not accessible to men and which is a source of boys’ privilege in singing. The point I am going to argue in this section is that there are men who would like to be in some way part of this special relationship but are in danger of exclusion from it by the cultural norms which assume all men to be potentially violent and abusive and all women to be natural nurturers. These men are potentially important in boys’ singing for they are the men who can assure boys that singing is a perfectly masculine thing to do and who can show boys that they have naturally high voices that will in due course transform into low, manly voices. Adrienne Rich is the originator of the term ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ which describes so well the need that is so strongly felt by boys to assert that they are not gay. In a much quoted passage she identifies that there is a fundamental difference between the way males and females relate to children: Biologically, men have only one innate orientation – a sexual one that draws them toward women, – while women have two innate orientations, sexual toward men and reproductive toward their young. (Rich, 1993: 227)

Coming from an author who has been so frequently cited within the feminist movement, I find this slightly extraordinary. I do not think it is accurate and I perceive this particular passage as a frankly crude form of biological essentialism – the very quality that is so disliked by most feminist and pro-feminist writers who prefer social-constructivist explanations. A better account, I think, is furnished by Joan Roughgarden in her book Evolution’s Rainbow (Roughgarden, 2005). In this account, we are not invited to make a simplistic choice between reproduction and nurture. We are not presented with an essentialist view in which only women can nurture children. I think it is worth quoting from Paddy Doyle’s biography in which a young boy is sexually abused, not by a Christian Brother, but by a nun:

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Lie over on your back, she said. I turned slowly and looked into her flushed face. She held my limp penis in her hand and drew back the foreskin. It hurt slightly but I was too frightened to say anything … she moved the skin backwards and forwards until I had an erection … I sobbed uncontrollably, frightened at what had happened. (Doyle, 1988: 55)

The point of this is that it indicates, I think, at least two important points. The first and more obvious is that it is not only men who sexually abuse boys. Women do too. The second and more subtle is that women are permitted the privilege of an intimate gaze and intimate touch that is increasingly denied to men by a society that has become paranoid about paedophilia. I am not in any way going to defend paedophilia. I believe it to be one of the most abhorrent things there is. However, I am going to suggest that the tendency to abuse children is a socially constructed behaviour and we are wrong to assume that it is a biologically essential quality possessed only by men. The point is that some men too have the gift or vocation of nurture. There is, as Roughgarden painstakingly argues, a rainbow of possible sexualities and relationships that explains this. It is possible that repression and policing of the nurturing instinct and discrimination against men may increase rather than decrease the likelihood of violence of any sort against children. Some comparison might be drawn between the permitted gaze of women on the beautiful body of the boy that was described in the previous section and the increasingly paranoid censure of the male gaze. There has been a tendency in recent times to label Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouts, as a paedophile (or, more accurately, a pederast). By today’s standards, he undoubtedly was. Jeal’s (1989) biography includes an episode where Baden-Powell records in his diary ‘Tod’s photos of naked boys and trees etc. Excellent’ (p. 93). ‘Tod’ was a bachelor housemaster with a large collection of naked boy photos and with whom Baden-Powell spent some time. Elsewhere Jeal records how BadenPowell would often watch the boys swimming naked at Gilwell Park and heartily disapproved of the police banning such acts in the Serpentine in 1934 (ibid.: 92). It is, however, by today’s standards that we judge this as the behaviour of a paedophile. Baden-Powell lived in an era when hegemonic masculinity was constructed quite differently from the way it is today. Homosexuality was prohibited and there is little doubt that Baden-Powell not only abhorred it but was paranoid about the contamination of his boy scouts by onanism (the kind of act that excited Paddy Doyle’s nun would have been unthinkable): The result of self abuse is always – mind you, always – that the boy becomes weak and nervous and shy, he gets headaches and palpitations of the heart and if he carries it on too far he very often goes out of his mind and becomes an idiot. A very large number of the lunatics in our asylums … were sensible, cheery boys like any one of you … if a boy mis-uses his parts, he will not be able to use them as a man. They will not work then. (Ibid.: 107)

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Baden-Powell’s fear of weak, degraded, effeminate and unclean men who would fail to maintain the Empire may have been quite genuine. Having grown up during the era of clean, muscular Christianity and the idealization of the classics, it is quite possible that Baden-Powell’s gaze was on the lithe, athletic, warrior body, not the potential sex partner. An analysis of pre-war popular culture by Dennis (2007) confirms the existence of the ‘homo-romantic’, an intense form of adventure driven young male bonding that never crossed the line into homosexual acts. Mechling (2008) describes a tradition of ‘hazing’ in which male friends could be nude in front of each other precisely because they are confidently not sex objects to each other. All this resonates with Ibson’s (2007) photographic study of a significant change in boys’ consciousness during the 1950s. His photographs show a retreat from the close contact, ‘heartiness’ and ‘chumminess’ of which Baden Powell would probably have approved to an increasing desire for personal space. This is exactly mirrored by a photograph of Ernest Lough, Douglas Horton and Ronald Mallet (head chorister at the Temple Church), taken when Lough was in his early teens. The boys are in a physical embrace that would now be considered ‘gay’. A comparable photograph of the 2005 Choirboys shows clear physical space and a forward macho pose by Patrick Aspbury. The illegal status of homosexuality and the public abhorrence of it thus allowed ‘innocent’ boys to go about such business as homo-romantic adventure or singing without the present day risk of being thought homosexual. The word ‘gay’, of course did not have its current meaning, otherwise children could hardly have sung the words I am a gay musician I come from far away I play so gaily He plays so gaily (chorus) Upon my trumpet Upon his trumpet (chorus) … (German folksong, tr. Swinyard, in Appleby and Fowler, 1967)

The problems faced by men who have felt in recent times called to nurture children were admirably documented by James King in his book Uncommon Caring (King, 1998). Many other writers since then, myself included, have simply reached largely the same conclusions on the basis of interviews with young men, mainly those in training to become primary teachers (Ashley and Lee, 2003; Thornton and Bricheno, 2006). Their plight is echoed by Neslund (2002) who laments: Now we are down to the truly few: the brave, the well-trained, the caring male, to take the role of boychoirmaster. Into what world does this putative director walk? Into a hostile arena of child-savers who regard such men as probable child abusers, and who consider them to be incapable of adult relationships, and who

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will be quick to label such brave souls as questionable at best of being a positive force in the life of a child.

Those adult males who do appreciate boys’ singing and, in the cautious words of one of my adult interviewees, ‘nothing more’ may feel marginalized or constrained by public assumptions that interest in boys must always have a homoerotic component. Neslund continues to express a conviction that the lack of male role models, fathers or father figures in boys’ lives is problematic. Undoubtedly, there are many tens of thousands of boy–father relationships which are enriching and fulfilling for both parties. Unfortunately, I cannot give my wholehearted assent to Neslund for two reasons. First, he fails to take account of the fact that there are many, many different kinds of man. Some are good fathers, some are not. Some are inspirational, some are boring. Some are gifted in the nurture of the young, some are brutal tyrants. Overall, the hard evidence does not and never has supported the assertion that fathers are essential in boys’ lives. The evidence is less certain with regard to the necessity for other forms of contact with mature males. It would seem that boys who have such contact may be advantaged, but it is harder to answer the question of what good male role models are than is commonly supposed. When it comes to teaching and choir directing, the evidence is similar. Some men can be brilliant at it. I myself as a young student was privileged to learn the organ from Allan Wicks and even more privileged to observe him rehearsing the choristers of Canterbury Cathedral. Few could fail to be captured by his magic spell and few have ever come more inspirational than he. Against this, I have witnessed so much indifferent choir training by men and we have the evidence from Button’s (2006) study that boys aged between eleven and fourteen actually prefer the ‘nurturing style of women’ to the ‘command and control’ style of men. Some of the most successful boys’ singing I have seen during this study has been directed by women, women who were charismatic, inspirational, nurturing and hugely respected by the boys. We have to consider that when male trainers match or exceed this, they draw more on some of the qualities of nurture associated with females than on the qualities of hard machismo. We inhabit a rainbow world of socially developed possibilities. My second reason for holding back from unqualified support for Neslund is that, tragically, there are from time to time cases of sexual abuse of boys by male choir directors. It is notable how often these are associated with perverted notions of fathering. These abusers may be only a very small proportion of those dedicated males who work with boys, but their effects upon the lives of the boys and their families and upon the reputation of boys’ singing is devastatingly catastrophic and out of all proportion to their numbers. A distressing and damaging example concerned a very well known boys’ choir in the North West of England. An article in the Musical Times (Beale, 1991) had extolled the virtues of that choir and its director. Twelve years later, a report of the director’s conviction for sex offences against boys appeared (Pugh, 2003). The initial charge was that of rape of a thirteen-year-old boy in the choir. This was subsequently dropped, but the director was convicted for eight charges of indecent

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assault on the same boy between 1996 and 2002. By tragic coincidence, this story was almost exactly mirrored at around the same time by a similar choir in the South West where the director was sentenced to four and a half years for sexual assault on one of the boys. Police found over 10,000 images of naked boys on his computer (Times, 2003). Features common to both cases included: • • •

the directors’ extreme charisma and popularity with the boys and their refusal to believe their guilt; the abuse of one boy in particular, who had been ‘groomed’ over a protracted period; the abuse of power, the directors’ ‘high standards’ being the excuse for total control over the choirs and all their affairs.

The UK Home Office guidelines for child protection, far from being a ‘hostile arena of child savers’ are a set of good practice recommendations which would have addressed these three crucial points had they been properly implemented. Yet there has been a surprising reluctance, particularly in the churches, to implement these principles. Perhaps this evidences naivety rather than the hostility Neslund finds. This naivety was distressingly repeated in 2007 when it came to light that a known abuser had been employed by a church music organization on its residential courses. There were reports of boys being invited to go on holiday with the abuser and his family, one victim significantly reporting that he had been invited to call him ‘Daddy’ (Morris, 2007). The organization concerned claimed in the press that it had not been informed by the church of his known record which, given the clear duty to make proper enquiries spelled out in the Home Office guidance, might be seen as a little disingenuous. Claims are made that the church now has ‘robust policies’, yet as recently as 2005 a choirboy was sexually abused by a vicar. Again the priest was reported as a ‘father figure’ and the boy had been taken on holiday to Malta and had slept at the vicarage. One alarming point is that complaints had been made in the early 1980s and again in 2001 but the appropriate action not taken. This assumption in favour of an adult male priest would seem to confirm the argument that boys, like women, are positioned as the non-powerful in a society that is still based on patriarchal hierarchy. Another alarming aspect is the perverted desire to ‘father’ the boys and we shall return to this very shortly when we discuss Benjamin Britten’s similar desires to ‘father’ boys and take them on holiday. So, there is a homoerotic interest in boys’ singing and men unable to exercise the necessary self-control can and do abuse boys. This being the case, we have these abusers to thank for the hyper-sensitivity now shown to child protection, the break-down of trust and a suspicion in the back of the public mind that appreciating the singing of boys might be a bit iffy. But there is nothing essentially inherent in male biology that makes men violent abusers. Women can and do also commit acts of physical and sexual abuse against boys yet nearly all women are privileged over men in the social permission they have to gaze on the innocent beauty of boys.

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Countless numbers of men, whatever their private feelings, have been inspirational in boys’ lives over the years without any harm. It is the sad fact that we have no way of telling apart the genuine from the abuser and are thus saddled with child protection laws in the form of a blunt instrument that has culled much that was good in an effort to target that which is undoubtedly evil. The Nostalgic Fantasies of Benjamin Britten No book such as this could be written without a section on a composer of timeless, international standing who occupies such a unique and commanding position in the history of boys’ singing. As Long (1972) notes with simple approval, Britten possessed a ‘… profound understanding of boys and boyhood … probably no composer in history has written for boys’ voices with such rare sensitivity and insight’ (p. 431). Why boys? Why such admiration of the boy? Why not girls or young women who might sing the parts more accurately and with greater insight? One answer to this which I explore at the end of this final section is that Britten did not want such insight. I take an empirical approach to Britten’s theme of corrupted innocence to reach a final conclusion on how boys relate to adult fantasies and what the ethics of exploiting innocence might be. Before looking at this, I delve a little into what is known about Britten’s personality. Two features of this are particularly salient. The first is his desire actually to be a thirteen-year-old boy. The second is his desire to father boys and take them on holiday. A striking piece of evidence of the former is provided by Bridcut (2006a) who notes one particularly pertinent piece of evidence, the fact that Britten recorded his own life in a Lett’s schoolboy diary. In the one that corresponded to his fortieth year, Britten had recorded his personal details as though he were thirteen, including ‘height: 5′ 2″, weight: 7 st 9 and bus to school: 07.55’ (Bridcut, 2006a: 2). Thirteen, the age of mid-puberty and the final, mature flowering of the treble voice was a magic, obsessive and fixated age for Britten. Some obscurity still surrounds Britten’s own schooldays and what allegedly happened between him and a master. What is much clearer is that, as a young man, Britten enjoyed a rich variety of relationships with one thirteen-year-old boy after another. It is possible that an incident early on in Britten’s life served as a warning for the need for greater caution in future years. It concerned a thirteen-year-old chorister from Hampstead by the name of Harry Morris. Britten himself was aged only twenty-three at the time and determined to take the boy on a family holiday to Cornwall. Other members of the family, including Britten’s older brother Robert and his wife Marjorie, were not at all happy about the arrangements. These included the boy sleeping in Britten’s room and it is recorded that ‘Ben was apparently horrified on the first night when the boy took the pyjamas he’d supplied and put them on over his underclothes’ (Bridcut, 2006a: 53). Things came to a head when the boy screamed in the night and hit Britten with a chair. Bridcut is cautious to avoid a direct claim that this was the result of a sexual advance, but we

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must consider that the following day a thirteen-year-old boy took to put himself on the train for London. We must also consider that Bridcut records that Harry, though married and with children of his own, died in 2002, ‘still distressed’ by the incident and disturbed by the prospect of revisiting the location. Concerning the second issue of fathering, this is something that became more important as Britten’s life progressed. It is troubling because of the extent to which a perverted desire to father boys and take them on holiday was such a feature in the abuse cases reported above. The orthodox version of Britten and his boys is that he was a ‘deeply considerate father figure’ who exercised a ‘gentlemanly restraint’. Much of the evidence for the ‘gentlemanly restraint’ orthodoxy comes from one of the most important boys in Britten’s life, David Hemmings. Later to become an adult film actor of some note, the young Hemmings (b. 1941) began his career as a boy soprano and was to be recruited by Britten to create the role of Miles in Turn of the Screw. According to Humphrey Carpenter, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Hemmings was not a particularly wonderful singer: It was the personality that got him the job because it had an enormous effect on Benjamin Britten who fell in love with him. He’d had a difficult father/son relationship, so when Britten took up with him and fathered him in a very intense way, he actually welcomed this sort of attention … (Carpenter, 2003)

The boy Hemmings stayed, unchaperoned, at Britten’s house in Aldeburgh for extended periods and it is a moot point as to whether present day child protection guidance might be subverted to allow the repetition of such an arrangement. According to another biographer, Christopher Headington, Hemmings was aware of Britten’s affection but felt no sexual threat whatsoever. This is the source of the ‘gentleman’ and ‘deeply considerate father figure’ orthodoxy, and though it is recorded that Britten kissed the twelve-year-old Hemmings and allowed him to sleep with him during production of Turn of the Screw, Hemmings maintained that in all of the time that I spent with him he never abused that trust … Did he kiss me? Yes he did. But that was more my need as a young boy alone in his house than it was any threat. I slept in his bed when I was frightened, and I still felt no sexual threat whatsoever. (Headington, 1992: 92)

This episode, nevertheless, apparently alarmed Peter Pears who ‘took steps to calm matters down’. Opinions about this incident are divided. According to Raymond Leppard, Pear’s version was that Britten had become quite distracted and that it had been necessary to take him away by train before it escalated into a major scandal. Carpenter continued on Front Row:

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Some people who’d been Britten’s boy performers had been embarrassed when talking to me about the attentions Britten’d given them that didn’t go as far as actual sex but went very, very close … (Carpenter, 2003)

Importantly, it is quite clear that Hemmings himself was clearly heterosexual and knew it from at least the age of twelve, relating in a newspaper interview that he was ‘more heterosexual than Genghis Kahn’ (Bridcut, 2006b). The boy was certainly wise to the ways of the world. He had been warned by his own father that Britten ‘was a homo’ and had successfully rejected the advances of a man who had tried to molest him on a bus. The available evidence would appear to support the proposition that it was the boy Hemmings’s own strong self-identification as heterosexual that allowed him to lap up Britten’s affections as a ‘father’ and ‘friend’ who was overwhelmingly generous and kind and could be loved dearly – in an entirely unsexual way. It would seem that, in the case of Hemmings, Britten was not insensitive to the important, subtle signals sent out by a boy that he was not available for sex. The relationship persisted in spite of this until the inevitable ‘unceremonial dumping in favour of a new munchkin’ (Gill, 1995: 14) when the voice went at age fourteen during the big Malo aria of Turn of the Screw. Perhaps an important point that is overlooked here is the significance of the boy’s own heterosexuality and awareness. Langfeldt (1981) makes the unpopular but necessary point that acts between boys and men, when they occur, usually do involve an element of mutual consent. The idea of a totally innocent boy being seduced by a ‘stranger in the park’ probably exists only in the minds of those who create stories for tabloid newspapers. The reality is that the paedophilic choirmaster who preys on boys to groom is looking for two particular forms of vulnerability. He may be looking for a boy who lacks secure fathering, typically a boy whose own father is absent and who is for some additional reason emotionally vulnerable. ‘Fathering’ in such cases, seems to amount to a form of possession, a prize to be added to the collection. He may also be looking for a boy who is trying to come to terms with his own emergent gay sexuality, for such a boy is likely to be less resistant. The relationship is propelled in both cases by a passing fantasy of equality, the belief that the boy will enjoy the act in an adult way. This is probably the most dangerous of all adult fantasies and the one we can be certain of the need to draw a line under. The issue is that of the abuse of power and the unwarranted invasion by the predatory older man of the private world of boys. Mark Behr’s epic novel Embrace (Behr, 2000), which is set in the Drakensberg Choir School at which Behr was a pupil, tells an important story. The thirteen-year-old Karl de Man, an indifferent singer who is coming to terms with his gay sexuality, is torn between his relationship with another musically gifted boy, Dominic, the choir’s conductor, Jaques Cilliers, and his own father whose extremes of bigotry and heterosexuality might lead him to ‘kill the boy’ if he ever discovered in him homosexual tendencies. The acts which eventually occur between Karl and Cilliers have the outward appearance of being

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consensual, but the story is one of tragic betrayal and confusion which captures perfectly the inequality of a boy–man power relationship. We can only conjecture how much thoughts on such matters were in Britten’s mind as he composed his final opera Death in Venice, which, unusually, has no singing part for a boy. In this, the hero Aschenbach sits in his chair on the Lido beach, watching the boy Tadzio and his friends play. His thoughts are those of classical Greece and Tadzio’s lithe, aesthetically beautiful body comprehensively beats other boys in an enactment of the classical sports of running, long jump, discus, javelin and wrestling. Aschenbach determines to communicate the truth to the boy, ‘I love you’ but is unable to bring himself to do so and dies a figure of tragedy. As Gill (1995) speculates, Aschenbach may have been in this case the seduced, not the seducer. Perhaps, then, there is a parallel with the principles of reciprocity (or not) seen in the cases of David Hemmings and Harry Morris. Consummation of a boy relationship required seduction or at least availability by both parties and neither Harry nor David were willing. So, are boys innocent or not, and should the degree to which an inevitable ambiguity and uncertainty with regard to this question be allowed as a creative force in boys’ singing? I had the following conversation recently with a twelveyear-old non-singer with whose class I had been discussing issues of boys and girls singing at school: I hate girls! Really? Do you think you will always hate them? No, because I’m not going to be gay when I’m grown up.

I think this captures rather well the state of innocence characteristic of a twelve-yearold boy. The word ‘gay’ is typically used as part of the compulsory heterosexuality discourse and the boy is obviously aware that same sex relationships exist between adults. What is more revealing is first that the boy admits that the age of twelve is a transitory phase when girls are hateful but second that he imagines he has control of his sexuality – to be gay or not is a simple consumer choice. That is undoubtedly a form of innocence. I received a fairly unambiguous answer when I asked a thirteen-year-old member of a well known treble boy band to reflect on the moral panic of ‘toxic childhood’. Did he feel that the pressures of TV appearances and designer clothes were forcing him to grow up too quickly? I don’t feel pressured, I love being a kid, rolling around in the mud, free to do what you like, playing in the paddling pool and getting all your clothes soaked. Getting in trouble with the teachers is the best part! (said with a broadening grin). Messing about and annoying the ones who can’t shout properly …

This again is innocence, it is part of the ‘loveable rogue’ syndrome, the choirboy with the catapult in his back pocket who, because of boys’ special status, is

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allowed to be naughtier than the equivalent girl. Of course, as Renold (2005) or Martinson (1994) explain, he like any other boy has a sexuality but it is a different sexuality that sets him apart from adults, private, and closed to the adult world. What is at fault here is our understanding of innocence. The next interview is more challenging and helps to illustrate this. It is with a fourteen year old who was playing the part of Miles in Turn of the Screw. Um, now, you talk about a show. Is Turn of the Screw a show? Um, in, well it’s not a sh, er, um, mm, it’s a performance, so I thought I meant kind of performance, shows really, like play, or opera or musical really. But the Turn of the Screw is more of, it’s not really a show, um, it’s more of a story I think. Mmm. I mean, what genre would you classify it as? Do you know that word, genre? No. Well genre is, oh golly, mmm, quick definition of genre, Um, genre is the kind of thing, like opera, or musical, or, I mean … what would you call it? Is it a show, is it an opera? Opera. It is an opera, isn’t it? And would you classify it as pop music, classical music, serious music … … Serious music. Right, it is a pretty serious, quite heavyweight opera, isn’t it? Yeah, it is very, digs deep and often what I’m singing about, what I sung about, has two different meanings. Mmm. You don’t know. Either that or that. It often has double meaning. Did the producer explain much about that to you? Um, actually, my singing teacher was the one, um, who explained what she thought about it, um, but the producer did also tell me why he had certain props because maybe this was going on or maybe that was going on … you know what I mean?

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Yeah. ‘Cos it’s quite an adult story isn’t it? Yeh, much, we the venues, most venues wouldn’t really accept it because it’s such a deep story.

What, precisely, is so deep? What is unmentionable in this conversation constrained by my respect for my interviewee, to say nothing of my wariness of the watchfulness of ethics committees? Brett (2006) suggests that in choosing Myfanwy Piper’s libretto, Britten played out the drama of anti-onanism in secret code. Thus the ‘injury to others’ that Miles had caused at school was code for passing on the mutual masturbation that had been learned at the hands of Quint – an affront to the dominant discourse of moral purity as appalling as it was dangerous (Brett, 2006: 90). This was not a conversation I was going to have. Why should I? Instead I turned to the anonymized voice samples the boy had kindly recorded for my research. Extracts of his singing a verse of the well know hymn Amazing Grace had been played to classes of boys and girls his own age in a variety of schools. The pupils had been asked to identify the gender of and comment on the voice samples, all of which were male, but representative of different voice qualities and different stages of mutation. To a strongly statistically significant degree, the ‘peer audiences’ preferred the high voices but imagined them to be female (Ashley, 2008). The voice of the boy who had played Miles particularly was liked and elicited judgements by girls his own age such as: The sound was good and the sound was sweet. It was very gentle and it sounded better. It sounded sweet and innocent (my emphasis). I liked this one because it’s very nice and subtle and I just really liked it.

During a subsequent interview, I shared the data with the boy. He stared at the graphs for some time: Well, I can see a big smile. (Laughs nervously) Does it surprise you that they thought your voice was sweet and soft? Yeah. How do you think they would have thought it?

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Gay. (said confidently) Gay? What, in the sort of gay boy sense? High.

During another interview when we had discussed various male singers, this boy had been alarmed by the fact that Boy George was openly gay. The several comments he had made to assert that he was not gay were very similar to those made by boys in other studies, such as Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli (2003), where there is an anxiety to be perceived as conforming to compulsory heterosexuality. His earlier desire to assert that he was not gay, combined with this revelation that he expected his peers to associate a high voice with gay is quite revealing about how he sees himself, vocally, in relation to other boys. It suggests a certain independence of mind combined with a valuing of music that I frequently encounter when talking to boys of twelve to fourteen who defy peer proscription to sing in a high voice. It leaves us in little doubt about the kind of social environment in which boys currently construct their notions of identity. This has not been an easy chapter to write, but I think it has been a necessary one and the reader may need to fill certain gaps in his or her own mind. I have refrained from any concluding judgement about Britten and his boys, moral or artistic, but I think I have arrived at a position on how innocent boy singers are. Much is written by feminists about the notorious ‘male gaze’, which has for long been felt to be a source of oppression for women (Burman, 1998). The exponential increase in the possibilities for gazing brought about by new media requires us to consider that it is entirely reasonable to suggest that if women find it oppressive to be the subjects of a gaze, boys might too. The issue is that boys’ consciousness has not been raised and championed in the way than women’s has. I have some doubts as to where the boundaries might be drawn in any such process, but it is clear that boys aged between ten and fourteen or so have a certain kind of innocence still and I would wish to preserve that. They are entitled to the particular privacy of childhood that keeps it a world apart from adulthood. I proceed to subsequent chapters, therefore with an increased scepticism or at least caution toward the process of using boys as the means of gratifying adult fantasy. References Appleby, W. and Fowler, F. (1967), Sing Together! 100 songs for unison singing, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ashley, M. (2008), Teaching Singing to Boys and Teenagers: The young male voice and the problem of masculinity, Lampeter: Mellen. Ashley, M. and Lee, J. (2003), Women Teaching Boys: Caring and working in the primary school, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham.

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Beale, R. (1991), ‘Keeping Boys Singing’, Musical Times, 132, 314–18. Behr, M. (2000), Embrace, London: Abacus. Brett, J. (2006), Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected essays, Los Angeles, CA/London: University of California Press. Bridcut, J. (2006a), Britten’s Children, London: Faber & Faber. — (2006b), ‘The Arts: The end of innocence’, The Independent, (5 June). Burman, E. (1998), Deconstructing Feminist Psychology, London: Sage. Button, S. (2006), ‘Key Stage 3 Pupils’ Perception of Music’, Music Education Research, 8 (3), 417–31. Carpenter, H. (1992), Benjamin Britten: A biography, London: Faber & Faber. — (2003), Tribute to David Hemmings, Radio Four Front Row, Thursday 4 December, London: BBC. Dennis, J. (2007), We Boys Together: Teenagers in love before girl craziness, Nashville TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Doyle, P. (1988), The God Squad, London: Corgi Books. Elvis Australia, (8 July 2005-last update), interview with Steve Binder, director of Elvis ’68 comeback special, available at http://www.elvis.com.au/presley/ interview_steve_binder.shtml (accessed 3 February 2008). Gill, J. (1995), Queer Noises: Male and female homosexuality in twentieth century music, London: Cassell. Greer, G. (2003), The Boy, London: Thames & Hudson. Headington, C. (1992), Britten (The Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers), London: Omnibus. Higginbottom, E. (1997), ‘Laudate Pueri (arguments for the retention of all-male choirs)’, Musical Times, 138 (1858), 3–4. Holland, P. (1992), What Is a Child? Popular images of childhood, London: Virago. Ibson, J. (2007), ‘Picturing Boys: Found photographs and the transformation of boyhood in 1950s America’, THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, 1 (1), 68–83. Jackson, C. (2006), Lads and Ladettes in School, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Jeal, T. (1989), Baden-Powell, London: Hutchinson. Kay, W., Francis, L. and Gibson, H. (1996), ‘Attitude toward Christianity and the Transition to Formal Operational Thinking’, British Journal of Religious Education, 19 (1), 45–55. King, J. (1998), Uncommon Caring: Learning from men who teach children, New York: Teachers College Press. Langfeldt, T. (1981), ‘Sexual Development in Children’, in Cook, M. and Howells, K. (eds), Adult Sexual Interest in Children, London/New York: Academic Press. London Weekend Television (2003), The South Bank Show, no. 612, 19 October edn, London: London Weekend Television.

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Long, K. (1972), The Music of the English Church, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Martino, W. and Pallotta-Chiarolli, M. (2003), So What’s a Boy? Addressing issues of masculinity and schooling, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Martinson, F. (1994), The Sexual Life of Children, Westport, CO: Greenwood Press. Mechling, J. (2008), ‘Paddling and the Repression of the Feminine in Male Hazing’, THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, 2 (1), 60–72. Morris, J. (2007), ‘Church Choirmaster Jailed for Child Sex Abuse’, The Guardian. Mould, A. (2007), The English Chorister: A history, London: Continuum. Neslund, D. (2002-last update), ‘IS There a Future for Boychoir?’, available at http://boychoirs.org/library/future/future001.html (accessed 10 October 2006). Phillips, P. (1997), ‘Let the Women Sing’, The Spectator, (12 July). Pugh, R. (2003), ‘Can’t Stop the Music’, Times Educational Supplement, (28 March). Reay, D. (2001), ‘The Paradox of Contemporary Femininities’, in Francis, B. and Skelton, C. (eds), Investigating Gender: Contemporary perspectives in education, Buckingham: Open University Press. Renold, E. (2005), Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities: Exploring differences in gender and sexual relationships in the primary school, London: Routledge. Rich, A. (1993), Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, London: Routledge. Roughgarden, J. (2005), Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, gender and sexuality in nature and people, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schindler, R. and Holbrook, M. (2003), ‘Nostalgia for Early Experience as a Determinant of Consumer Preferences’, Psychology and Marketing, 20 (4), 275–302. Thornton, M. and Bricheno, P. (2006), Missing Men in Education, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. Times (2003), ‘Choir Director Jailed for Assault’, The Times, Saturday 4 January, 5. Whiteley, S. (2006), ‘Popular Music and the Dynamics of Desire’, in Whiteley, S. and Rygenga, J. (eds), Queering the Popular Pitch, London: Routledge. Winston, J. (2006), ‘Beauty, Goodness and Education: The arts beyond utility’, Journal of Moral Education, 35 (3), 285–300.

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Chapter 6

A Child Doing a Man’s Work in a Man’s World Introduction This chapter is about boys who sing the classical, mostly sacred, choral repertoire. Most of these are the choristers who sing the services each weekend and most days of the week in the cathedrals and some collegiate chapels of England because this small number of boys has an influence on boys’ singing out of all proportion. It is often to such boys that conductors, promoters of opera and classical concerts or television producers will turn for one-off roles because they know that they will find the developed sense of musicianship that they are looking for. I have also included towards the end work with a major and prestigious youth choir, one of the few organizations I have worked with in which a standard of boys’ singing comparable to the best cathedrals is found in an entirely secular context. The cathedral boy chorister tradition was once underpinned by a widespread tradition of boys’ singing in parish churches. Old black and white photographs showing choirs of thirty or more boys adorn the vestry walls of many a church the length and breadth of Britain, but these for the reasons explored throughout this book have now nearly all disappeared. Mould (2007) makes a distinction between this parish ‘choirboy’ and the ‘chorister’ who is a boy under some kind of contract to sing regularly in a cathedral or collegiate chapel. Such a boy is likely to attend a choir school attached to the cathedral for there are great difficulties in transporting boys on a daily basis from a range of ordinary schools across a city, though some cathedrals do manage to do this. It is perhaps unfortunate that Mould makes his distinction between choirboy and chorister for it is open to interpretation as a haughtiness that displays unhelpful social class allegiances. A more charitable explanation which I prefer is that ‘choristers’ are professionals and we shall see the significance of this during the chapter. This chorister tradition is an almost uniquely English phenomenon. Alone in Europe, a quirky history that includes the Reformation, the English Civil War, the Restoration of the Monarchy and the Oxford Movement seems to have permitted 

 There were a reported 950 boys and girls in full membership of the Choir Schools Association during 2008.   In the past, some parish churches maintained professional choirs of men and boys. At the time of writing, only St James’ Grimsby continues to do so. See Mould (2007) for a full account of this.

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the survival of choral establishments until a time when their value is recognized well outside the boundaries of the Church that nurtured them. There are other choirs and choir schools in the world, the Vienna Boys Choir being an obvious example. The Tolzer Knabenchor similarly maintains world class standards, but was founded only in 1956, so lacks the centuries old tradition of the Vienna boys or a UK choral establishment. Neither is it based on a choir school. St Thomas, Fifth Avenue, New York, founded in 1919, is modelled on the UK choral system with a choir school and claims to be the only such establishment in the United States. Some space will need to be devoted in this chapter to explaining the life of an English chorister, and, importantly, exploring the kind of boy who becomes a chorister. As far as is possible, this chapter is not only about choristers but by choristers for I have taken considerable pains to obtain the main material through extensive contact with choristers in an effort to give them a ‘voice’ in the literature. Where I have been unsure of something, I have consulted boys for the answer. What Kind of Boy? The life of a chorister is by no means suited to everyone and the decision a family takes to put a small boy forward for a voice trial is not, or should not be, one that is taken lightly. The commitment is absolute. The family will need, for example, to get used to the idea of a double Christmas. Christmas day itself may be celebrated without the youngster (though there may be an invitation to a special tea at the choir school), then a second family Christmas when the boy returns home. It is unfortunate if the impression is ever given that becoming a chorister is a way of achieving a private school education on the cheap. If that is the motive, the boy is unlikely to look back on his days as a chorister as the happiest of his life. As we shall see, the ‘right kind of boy’ can absolutely thrive as a chorister but it is not a position for a boy who is merely fulfilling a parental ambition or financial need. During the 1980s I taught in a choir school and I have subsequently been a chorister parent (albeit of a girl chorister!) My duties included running the rugby XV and a good proportion of my best players were regularly choristers. This ought to dispel any myth that choristers might be of a wimp-like, retiring disposition. Most enjoy sport, play fighting and the kinds of scrape that most boys get into. Many are also academically able, articulate and socially highly capable. School inspectors minded to criticize the extremely heavy work load faced by these boys are often hard put to explain how it is that they cope so well with school work alongside chorister duties. A typical chorister’s weekday might include a rehearsal at 8.00 in the morning before school starts, a hard day at school, another rehearsal, then an evensong at 5.30, followed by perhaps an hour’s supervised homework (‘prep’) and very likely some scheduled instrumental practice. On Sundays, they may spend the best part of the day in rehearsals and up to three choral services, grabbing a quick break-time drink between Matins and Eucharist. Then there are weddings, funerals, special services, CD recordings, concerts, tours and duties

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such as visiting primary schools to sing to the children on government funded outreach work. The commitment is absolute. Although I got to know the boys I taught and cared for in the 1980s very well in some ways, I never entered into any deep conversations with them about the ‘meaning of life’, about how or why they had become choristers and what, if anything, their music meant to them at a deep level. When I left the choir school, I started a boys’ choir in the church I took an organist’s post at. I well remember visiting primary schools with promises of football teams, swimming and camping trips, free pizzas and … oh, a bit of singing too. We had a great time, but I can’t say we ever won Choir of the Year. My epiphany moment came many years and several choirs later when I undertook a highly detailed ethnographic study of the men and boys’ choir of a major city centre parish church. The boys attended two weekly rehearsals and sung a full choral repertoire at three services every Sunday. There was no choir school. The boys came from ordinary state schools all over the city. I imagined the motivating role of football teams, swimming, camping trips and free pizzas. I could not have been more wrong. The boys came because, in their words, they ‘loved’ the music. Here are some of the things they said to me in the deeper conversations I was now able to have: I really enjoy it. I consider it (the choir) something that’s a major part of me. I’d always go to choir. Choir is more of a commitment. Rugby is more fun, but I won’t be able to sing soprano when I’m twenty. The Durufle Requiem was boring at first but it grew on me. Now I’ve had it on my brain all week. It makes me feel happy, Howells’s Here is the Little Door makes me feel different. It makes me feel better, especially if it’s Greater Love by Ireland, – it makes me in tears because I like it so much. It’s deep down inside, it’s a feeling you can’t put into words.

Perhaps eleven-year-old Michael speaks simply for many of us: The first time I heard the choir, it just sounded so amazing, you wouldn’t believe what it sounds like.

A few years later still, I was struck by the similarity of Michael’s perception with that of Jack, a twelve-year-old full-time cathedral chorister I was interviewing:

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It was when I discovered that I could fill that place with sound, that it made my voice so big. And you could go in special places in the cathedral that other people couldn’t go to.

Michael and Jack are suited to this life. They are what we might call the ‘right kind of boy’. The interesting question is, how many ‘right kinds of boy’ are out there? How many boys would come to love music through singing but are never identified or given the opportunity? Choristers and Work It should be clear from the above that choristers are both extremely hard working and remarkably proficient musically. They can sight read music that would take an adult ‘note bashing’ choir several weeks to learn and bring off a performance on the same day. This has, in the eyes of many people, earned them the right to call themselves ‘professionals’. Those unfamiliar with the tradition these boys represent and who expect the sound and behaviour of a children’s choir are often amazed and impressed by what they see and hear when they encounter it for the first time. There is no excitement and parental jostling for weeks ahead of Christmas about who is going to sing the Once in Royal solo. The boy doing it may be told five minutes before the performance because that’s his job and he’s expected to do it as a true professional. This chapter takes its title from a quote attributed to a former Dean of Lincoln (Fiennes in Woodward, 1984) who sums up very well the historic status of the chorister as a worker, a boy labouring alongside men. Work is a very important consideration in the construction of masculinity and their status as workers or professional musicians is very important to the choristers. It can justify, in the hostile world of hegemonic masculinity, what they do. They are not singing to ‘please mummy’, they are singing because they are professional co-workers with the choir men, they are paid, and they must reach the same exacting standards. This work ethic inadvertently slips out in a telling way in this conversation with Chris, a winner of Chorister of the Year, to whom we return in the next chapter: If you met some girls your age that you didn’t know well, would you tell them that you were a singer? Would you be absolutely truthful and say ‘I’m a chorister and I sing in church’? The more I’ve told girls the more they, they don’t seem to mind. Um, erm, and they seem to, they seem to even respect me more … I wouldn’t say I was a chorister and I wear a frilly frock, but I would say I am a singer and I work professionally.

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There is one complication that we are now compelled to address. In 1991 Salisbury Cathedral introduced a parallel girls’ choir that alternated with the boys in singing the same repertoire with the same adult men. This pattern has been copied at Wells and a growing number of other cathedrals and is rapidly becoming the orthodox position. 1991 was not the first time that girls had sung in a cathedral choir. Harrison Oxley introduced girls to his choir at Bury St Edmund’s during the 1970s, an event which resulted in heated speculation in the musical press and did much, according to Phillips (1980), to reveal ignorance amongst cathedral organists at the time about the structure and function of the vocal apparatus. This is not our primary concern here. The point which is in danger of being overlooked is that the arrival of girls has disrupted the traditional relationship between masculinity and work. Girls too can lay claim to being ‘children doing men’s work in a men’s world’. That this can now apply to girls should alert us to the degree to which masculinity has changed since 1984 when assumptions such as that of Dean Fiennes could still be made. The world of work has, of course, for some time ceased to be the world of men and much of what is now written about the ‘crisis of masculinity’ has to do with the degree to which various categories of males are adapting to the fact (Willis, 2004). This is clearly more an issue of social class than gender. A study by Connolly (2006) shows that middle-class boys are coping well and clearly outperforming working-class girls at school and my own work shows clearly that middle-class boys are more able than working-class boys to choose activities (including singing) that defy peer pressure. In the previous chapter, we devoted some space to the special relationship between boys and women, and this will concern us in subsequent chapters too. There is a danger that the work defence of boys’ singing may be compromised if boys are seen to be doing ‘women’s work’ for women. Boys from middle-class homes are significantly less likely than boys from working-class homes to perceive singing as ‘women’s work’ and this undoubtedly affects choristers. Manchester Cathedral is unique amongst English cathedrals in that it has maintained for some time a mixed gender choir of choristers educated at a choir school. My observations there demonstrated very clearly that boys and girls had no difficulty with recognizing each other as professional colleagues during rehearsals where the professional status of choristers was consistently emphasized. There has been much speculation over whether the introduction of girls will lead to the loss of boys from choirs, and with good reason. Mould’s (2007) analysis of the situation seems not only optimistic but perhaps comes tainted by an apparent lack of awareness of what happens when girls are introduced to boys’ choirs outside the privileged position of the choir school. There is no doubt that it is quite common in the majority of circumstances for boys to leave choirs in large numbers once girls are introduced, but the degree to which this happens is dependent upon the gender awareness of the choir director and the director’s skill in promoting mutual respect between boys and girls (Ashley, 2008). The following is interesting because it comes from a piece of research conducted by a boy with his own peers. It is not an exercise designed or mediated by adults.

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To the question, ‘How do you feel about having a girl choir here?’ 100 per cent of boys said ‘no’. Written responses included ‘girls are yucky’, ‘they giggle and scream too much’, ‘girls can’t sing’ and ‘I will leave if girls are allowed to join the choir’. These, it has to be said, are the kinds of response boys will give in a situation unmediated by adults concerned to promote equitable gender relationships. The lesson that can be learned from Manchester is that if boys and girls are treated equally as professionals, they will behave as such. We should remember that the present day boy is used to seeing women as professionals in the work place and finds it much less of an issue than some of his more misogynistic forbears. The attitude and expectations of the adults the boys work with is critical here and we are reminded by Connolly (2004: 225) to identify and address the regimes of masculinity that develop in the absence of vigilance. Nevertheless, when the same survey asked the boys why they didn’t want girl choristers, it found that the two most frequently given reasons were (a) embarrassment and (b) the camaraderie of a boy-only activity. These are answers that have cropped up repeatedly in my own research and there are some very challenging questions about how far adults should take their agenda of gender equality. The question of embarrassment might be overcome through better voice education and more skilled, gender-aware teaching. The question of camaraderie, however, is profound indeed. At a practical level, there is little doubt that the majority of boys need a sense of male solidarity if they are to overcome their fears and inhibitions about singing. At the level of cultural and social theory, there are enormous questions about whether changing the patterns of childhood through the task of breaking up boy-only groupings should be undertaken. Interestingly, the Scout Association has decided that it should. There is the further question of whether boys’ choirs should continue to be recognized as legitimate cultural artefacts. We return to these troubling questions later. Choristers’ Views of Singing The insights into choristers’ views of singing that are described here began, as I indicated above, with an ethnographic study of one choir in particular with which I became associated for some ten years as a singer. At the time the study was conducted, I had not been in the choir that long and was known to most of the boys simply as ‘the man who drove the minibus on the last tour’. This was an interesting exercise in ‘gate keeping’ (the process of gaining access to children in research) and allowed me to question the boys about behaviour and events I had observed as an ‘insider’ in the naturalistic setting of normal choir rehearsals, services, concerts, recordings and tours. Drawing upon various techniques developed from my earlier PhD for approaching difficult questions from an oblique angle, I visited most of the boys twice in their own homes. At the first visit, a narrative account or ‘vignette’ of each boy was constructed, focusing upon background and character, social, musical

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and spiritual matters and worldview. An activity diary, a personal history timeline, pictures to talk about, a book to discuss and a card-sorting game proved the most effective means of stimulating talk. Few questions were asked directly. Each vignette was then analysed and second order questions derived from this analysis. At the second interview, each boy was asked to read and validate his vignette, and to respond to the second order questions. This proved extremely powerful. The boys were very interested in their vignettes and most were frank and open in their criticisms and amendments of them. Personal areas that were largely taboo at the first interview were often opened up as a result. The validated vignettes were assembled into a corporate account and meetings were arranged with the boys in groups to amend, validate and approve this account as a true picture of their life in the choir. Key findings were identified and articulated as a result of these meetings, and the boys were asked to comment on the degree to which they thought the findings were justified. Two things were particularly notable about this process. When in groups, the boys were noticeably more guarded in their responses – less likely to reveal ‘deep’ insights and more likely to conform to stereotypical images of masculinity and adolescent group behaviour. In spite of this, certain findings, including those shortly to be discussed, proved to be extremely robust when subjected to group validation. I later drew on this methodology when interviewing boys who had won the Chorister of the Year award. Certain themes constantly recurred and there is a concept in the social sciences, known as data saturation, in which the same answers recur after only a few interviews and little is to be gained by asking the questions to larger and larger samples. This concept was identified by Glaser and Strauss (1967) who described criteria for when large-scale statistical sampling might or might not be appropriate. Greg et al. (2006), with the suspicions of researchers grounded in medical science, set out to systematically document the degree of saturation in a study of sixty African women. They found that saturation occurred after the first twelve interviews. I had found a similar situation with my chorister interviews. After only a few interviews, I found that, much as I enjoyed talking to them, successive boys were not telling me anything new. Saturation had occurred at the point where it appeared that the following themes could be distilled to characterize the opinions and feelings of boys who performed classical sacred music: • • • •

they enjoy performing the music, but find listening to the performances of other boys boring; many of them will admit to actually ‘loving’ the music they sing, at least while they sing it; they are not, in general, that keen on rock music, though there are exceptions; they really do like singing, it’s something deep inside them that they find hard to express;

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• • •

they find the music spiritually moving, though they are not necessarily religious and may even be atheist; they lead double lives, they have a choir self and a ‘normal boy’ self; they recognize that the audience for classical sacred music is mostly ‘elderly people’ and feel safer with such audiences than audiences their own age.

Nevertheless, in an effort to do a thorough job, I devised a survey of choristers that consisted essentially of a validation exercise in which statements made to me by boys in private interview were reproduced on a questionnaire with a Likert scale of agreement ranging from 1 = ‘Disagree strongly; definitely not true for me’ to 5 = ‘Agree strongly; very true for me too’. This questionnaire was completed by the choristers at six cathedrals, chosen to represent a variety of types from the small ‘parish church’ cathedral to the nationally prestigious, with and without choir schools. It had an element of chain letter to it in that the boys were invited to add additional statements of their own at the bottom of the form. In later iterations, these replaced statements which had fairly consistently scored 3 (= Neutral; I have little or no experience of this). The data now reported are updated from Ashley (2008). The statement ‘I like the singing, but I wouldn’t generally listen to other choirs. I’d prefer an Arctic Monkeys or Red Hot Chili Peppers album for Christmas’ was actually made by Chris, whom we shall meet shortly. I felt that it upheld an earlier hypothesis of mine that boys might enjoy their singing but prefer to socialize through more mainstream teen culture. In practice it turned out not only to be false but also to be quite contentious. Fifty-two per cent of boy choristers expressed some level of agreement with it, averaging out at 3.2. There was strong polarization, however, with similar numbers expressing either the strongest agreement or disagreement. It was complemented by the statement ‘When my voice changes, I’d quite like to form a rock band with my friends’, made by a parish choirboy but also reflecting what had happened to Tom, an ex-cathedral chorister we shall meet in Chapter 8. Here, there was a far less ambiguous result. Only 14 per cent of cathedral choristers expressed any level of agreement with this statement. The mean of 1.9 shows a clear and consistent level of disagreement. Choristers are not impressed by one of their number’s defection to rock and few have similar ambitions. Taking the two statements together, the interpretation could be that once boys have learned to enjoy classical singing, rock band singing holds no attraction. This carries over into their leisure. Some choristers do like to be ‘normal teenagers’ at leisure whilst maintaining a professional interest in classical singing, whilst others go the whole distance. Either way, choristers differ from the general population of boys by virtue of a much higher prevalence of interest in the performance of classical choral music. Fundamental to this is a deeply rooted love of the act of singing itself. I have to confess that this is something I find difficult to put into words myself. I am not a good singer, but certain choir directors have tolerated me over the years and the effects of participating in a thrilling choral service (that perhaps includes a ‘white

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knuckle ride’ of risking a difficult, unrehearsed passage) are felt in revived spirits for several days after the event. Several boys have struggled in interview to find the words to express similar feelings and we arrived at the statement ‘I’ve always liked singing. Can’t say why. I just have’ in an attempt to quantify the prevalence of the feeling. Here there was for choristers a result as unambiguous as the rejection of rock bands. Eighty-five per cent of boy choristers agreed with the statement and none disagreed (there being a neutral option of 3). The mean level of agreement was 4.4. This unusually high level of agreement gives robust support to the claim that there is a ‘right kind of boy’ who can benefit hugely from being in a choir. In an attempt to nurture more singing, the UK government committed £40m to a national ‘SingUp’ campaign, launched in 2007. Cathedral choristers increasingly come into contact with primary school children through the programme of outreach initiated by the Choir Schools Association but absorbed into this campaign in 2008. Unsurprisingly, there is a significant clash of cultures which has revealed that choristers do not like what they perceive to be childish or banal songs. At the same time, their professionalism rises to the fore and most endure outreach visits stoically. I had a revealing conversation with one cathedral deputy head chorister who had been involved in an outreach concert with primary school pupils. I witnessed the choirs coming off the platform and noticed that he was looking distinctly uncomfortable. My reward for a brief enquiry after his welfare was the hissed response ‘it was so embarrassing’. Some months later, I was able to ask him to recall this incident in formal interview and was told that the main reason for his embarrassment was not the wearing of ‘frilly frocks’ but that ‘the piece was childish’. I have put this incident to choristers from other cathedrals engaged in outreach. Robert is from a particularly prestigious cathedral: When we go into primary schools, sometimes they laugh. The headmaster asks them what they think and they say it sounds like girls. They think we’re weird. But do you mind? A bit, but it’s really important.

There is some loyalty emerging here. Outreach is not entirely pleasant, but its importance is recognized. This is made clearer by James from another cathedral choir: Tell me your honest opinion of doing it. Um, my honest opinion? It’s a good thing. Do you have any opinion about the kind of music primary kids sing?

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How High Should Boys Sing? Um, I think those songs are right for younger children. Supposing you were made to sing them, at the age of thirteen, as your main job in choir? I’d be happy to do it a couple of times, but then it might get a bit of a low standard.

An interesting difference between boy and girl choristers involved in outreach work came to light recently. I have been left in no doubt that, in the case of the chorister outreach scheme I manage myself, the boys are at the limits of what is acceptable when requests are made for extra outreach duties. The boys, nevertheless, are content to go out to primary schools and sing ‘childish songs’ as long as the lesson they are missing is not double sport. This contrasts with a comment made by a twelve-year-old girl chorister elsewhere: It’s such a waste of time. The songs are so trivial and it’s really annoying missing lessons. I can’t catch up my work because somebody else has the book.

Vincent is a boy who was on the receiving end of outreach and who later joined a choir. He had used the same word ‘weird’ that was used by Robert above and also validated Robert’s observation that many children sniggered. Some months later, I asked him in a formal interview to recall what he had meant: You said it was ‘weird’. Can you tell me what ‘weird’ meant? Er, well, I can’t remember that, but, um, I know when I first heard it, I probably thought, this, I can’t sing like this, it’s just not how boys sing.

Nevertheless, that kind of high singing has become a significant part of Vincent’s life and he has come greatly to enjoy it. In most other ways, Vincent, who is very sporty, scores distinctly towards the ‘non-geek’ side of masculinity. For all these boys, clear water between themselves and ‘childish music’ seems to be absolutely necessary to their sense of self. Seventy-four per cent of all cathedral boy choristers surveyed were in agreement with the statement: ‘I love the music I sing in choir. Sometimes it can move me almost to tears.’ The mean level of agreement was 3.7. (There were in this case significant differences between choirs, the only time this happened. Two returned 100 per cent agreement, whilst in one there was actually disagreement overall with a figure of only 38 per cent.) Quite what it is that so moves all these boys and has come to be ‘spiritual’ in the musical sense first and theological sense (if at all) second I have published in an analysis elsewhere (Ashley, 2002b). The admission of being moved to tears, however, is one that transgresses the bounds of hegemonic masculinity. Boys are not supposed to express feelings. Thompson

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et al. (2001) have commented on how girls both despise boys for their emotional immaturity yet also consider ‘emotionally leaky’ boys to be wimps. Interestingly, however, Phillips (2003) described how adult men admitted to being moved, sometimes to tears, by music in the privacy of their car stereo systems. The point I wish to develop here is that the cathedral repertoire is a safe one for the musically able boy who enjoys singing in the high voice. Every boy interviewed in this study has been asked who they think the main audience for their singing is. Fairly early on, a cathedral chorister told me ‘I’m quite happy with an audience of elderly people because it’s more embarrassing to sing in front of teenagers’. When this was put to all subsequently surveyed choristers for validation, 80 per cent were in agreement with a mean level of 4.4. For the boys, then, the elderly audience and absence of peers is the equivalent of the safety of the car stereo system. Parish church choirboys often tell me how they lead double lives. It seems important to them to keep their choir activities separate from school. My friends, some people from my old school know, but not the whole class. … I don’t think I’m teased, it’s just something I’d not like to tell everyone. (Twelve year old)

Their need to be ‘a different person at school’, which is felt to varying degrees, is something I have previously regarded as a sign of intelligence and social competence (Ashley, 2002a). Bullying of parish choirboys at school, though not unknown, seems relatively uncommon because the majority of such boys are socially competent and do lead double lives. An interesting example of ‘coming out’ occurred during the making of the reality TV show The Choir: Boys don’t sing. This was recorded at a boys’ only comprehensive school in the East Midlands. In spite of being a sports specialist school the enthusiasm of its head of music, anxious to bolster its struggling boys’ singing tradition, resulted in its selection for the programme. Two boys ‘came out’ on TV during the process, one a cathedral chorister, the other a member of a well known all male parish choir. A visit to the school during which I spoke to the latter confirmed that the thing that had changed was mainly the attitude of the adults and the degree of importance attached to the boys’ singing. A significant part of this was the school’s decision to keep Thursdays as ‘choir night’, free of organized sports practices. This bold and unusual decision for a period of time at least placed a sports specialist comprehensive school on some kind of a par with a choir school and I well recall the frustrations I had in my own choir schooldays when I wanted choristers for rugby practice but choir had first call on their time. It is more the adults that have the problem here than the boys and there is a simple and very important lesson. Boys will sing provided they are not asked to choose between choir and sport, an unfair choice that youngsters should not have to make. Choristers attending choir schools of course know they are a captive audience and other children at the school can be more likely to know of their activity. The

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statement ‘I enjoy using my head voice at choir, but I wouldn’t use it for singing at school. I’d only use my low chest voice’ actually came from a parish choirboy, but I put it to the cathedral choristers for validation. Fifty-one per cent agreed with it, with a mean level of 3.5. This is not a strong level of agreement and respondents were quite polarized. From a cathedral boy came the statement ‘I’m happy to sing a solo at evensong. Just don’t ask me to do it in front of the school – especially not the girls’. Fifty-eight per cent agreed with this at a mean level of 3.6. This was another case in which there was some variance, some boys boasting that they’d be proud to sing to ‘anyone, anywhere’, others appearing to be horrified at the thought. Obviously there is a need for great sensitivity and wise judgement here. The live singing of choristers might be one of the best ways of stimulating an interest in other children, but as we shall see shortly and in Chapter 9, a lot of careful thought needs to be given to which register it is done in. For those sensitive enough to appreciate it, the vignette below (from Ashley, 2008) probably conveys better than any analysis the fragility of the safety that lies in the defence that choir singing is work. It is possible that clergy who try to ‘liven up’ services do so at their peril, at least as far as choristers are concerned. They are not there as Sunday School children, and if they did not have their ‘job’ to do in choir, many of them might not be there at all. Daffodils are for Sunday School kids This occurred during a Mothering Sunday. Mothering Sunday can be a culturally incongruous event at a church such as Holy Trinity by the Bar. The normal pattern of formal liturgy and ‘high art’ music sung by boys and men to a mature adult congregation is uncomfortably perturbed by the presence of Sunday school children, cubs, brownies and such like, whose attendance at the service is thought desirable by the authorities. There are thus boys in the choir, and similarly aged girls and a few ‘other boys’ present under sufferance in the congregation. During the service, there was infant baptism and the normal adult sermon was replaced by an address conceived as appealing to children and delivered in what was judged by the associate vicar to be an appropriate style. It was based upon a childish pun of planting light bulbs to grow daffodils. It was very noticeable that this elicited much giggling from brownies in the congregation whilst all the choirboys remained po-faced and aloof. Towards the end of the service, the associate vicar invited all the children present to come forward and collect a daffodil to take home to their mothers. A steady stream of children came forward from the congregation. The associate vicar turned round and looked appealingly at the choirboys but they turned away and avoided eye contact with him, and all remained firmly in their seats. Going down the vestry steps after the service, the choirmaster called the boys back and said humorously to Tom ‘Go on, she’ll love you more!’ Dutifully, Tom went back and secretly collected one of the remaining daffodils. Stephen noticeably did not, so I asked him shouldn’t he also go and get one for his mother? His reply was: ‘No! It’s my sister’s job!’

Finally, there is a considerable poignancy added by the fact that, again early on in the survey, a boy added the statement: ‘I would like to show younger people

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that classical isn’t that bad.’ This produced 92 per cent agreement at a level of 4.5 which gives a clear message. Most of these boys do, then, genuinely love their singing and this is clearly a vocation or enjoyment they would like others to have the opportunity of sharing. There is considerable doubt as to how to go about this, however. Outreach activities are undertaken with some trepidation and for over half the sample, singing to non-chorister peers is clearly an ordeal. There is a really big question to be answered about how high these boys should sing. The Thorny Question of How High Choristers Should Sing There is one obvious answer to this question, of course. They have to sing as high as the repertoire of classical sacred music demands – a top C in the case of Allegri’s setting of the Miserere. As ‘professionals’ that is both their job and an issue over which they really have no choice. Music of the kind sung in cathedrals, or indeed by bands such as Libera or The Choirboys, requires boys of some maturity and experience. Most of the twelve and thirteen year olds who will really bear the brunt of leadership and demanding solos will be well into puberty. In Chapter 3 I discussed the technical issues and it will be recalled that they are not uncontroversial, there being some tension between choir directors who value experience and musicianship and voice specialists who worry about the dangers of singing too long into puberty. We have also seen that boys who really enjoy their singing can be more likely to side with the former than the latter. Ever the risk takers, boys will sometimes carry on with their soprano voices even after they have left their choirs and in spite of much head shaking by singing teachers. We will hear more from some such boys in the next two chapters. These, however, are the boys who have learned to enjoy the experience of singing in ‘head voice’. They are a very small minority and most boys who have not had this experience think the sound ‘weird’ and ‘girly’. What is interesting is the response of boys who do understand the ‘head voice’ to the question how high should boys sing? How much do these boys really understand what they are asked to do when they sing in ‘head voice’? Such boys are seldom asked to reflect on this question, but I would like to conclude this chapter by reporting the response of a group of boys put directly on the spot in connection with an outreach project. They were asked to advise on a repertoire that would appeal to boys in the top two years of primary school and which could be continued in the lower forms of secondary school. The question had real meaning for it was in connection with a recording they would be making for the purposes of outreach. Specifically they were asked for: Songs chosen by boys, that are fun for boys to sing, that boys think other boys will enjoy and which sound very ‘boyish’ in performance.

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The boys and young men were aged between fourteen and eighteen and all members of the intermediate section of a youth choir which sang the classical repertoire to a very high standard. A minority were ex-cathedral choristers and nearly all attended independent schools where boys’ singing was more part of the school ethos than would be the case in most state maintained schools. One eighteen year old had been a Truro chorister and recalled generally good memories of outreach. He felt that he had often been admired and looked up to by the younger primary school pupils but stressed that this reaction was more likely to come from the younger than older primary children. Some of the older ones, he recalled, did snigger, but he felt that not all children would enjoy singing and a minority who might look for distractions to hide their boredom would be inevitable. Generally, he felt that outreach was a positive thing and he had enjoyed doing it, but that it would be counterproductive for choristers to sing mainly in ‘head voice’ outside their normal cathedral environment. All the other boys agreed with this. They suggested and agreed that their own style of singing was highly specialized and that the only way that new boys might come to access it would be through songs that were already familiar to them and sung in the lower register. They drew up the following list of criteria for repertoire: • • • • • •

fun, enjoyable to sing mostly already known (current but perennial) not ‘classical’ not ‘little boys trying to be rock stars’ easily singable in chorus, i.e. fairly square/metric rhythms (with drum kit?) not idiosyncratic solo vocal extended chest register? Well, not choirboy head voice, whatever that means!

This was later put to the treble section (ages nine to fourteen) of the same choir for validation and all agreed with it wholeheartedly. These boys knew that they would actually be recording this repertoire to show off boys’ voices to other boys in the hope of encouraging them to sing, so getting it right really mattered to them. One ten year old spoke with some passion on what a wonderful thing singing was for a boy to do: As I said, singing is an absolutely great opportunity to have, and a great talent to have … you follow your dream and chase it and chase it.

None of these boys was in any doubt that boys should not sing too high when performing anywhere other than to the adult audiences with which we have become so familiar in this book. One fourteen year old in this group had been involved in one of the choirs that had recorded material for the National Song Bank (a resource of downloadable songs and backing tracks for primary school children to sing with

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that has been created as part of the UK’s National Singing Programme). He had also been out with his mother, a teacher, to sing to primary school children. He was clear on three points. First, he himself had hugely enjoyed his career as a treble. Second, like the ex-Truro boy above, he felt that the outreach he had done with his mother had been more successful when directed towards the younger primary children. Third, any such singing should be in the lower register because the high register would not be understood and would be considered girly. Most of them were also of the view that boys should not continue to sing in the high register once their speaking voices begin to fall noticeably in pitch. This may well be a reflection of the fact that all of them had singing lessons with leading and expert teachers and were subjected to an annual review of the voice which could lead to a summary termination of their treble careers. However, I was able to probe beyond this through conducting a formal test of their understandings and perceptions of the two key physiological parameters that most affect boys’ voice pitch: the lengthening of the vocal folds during puberty and the use of thin fold figuration to produce the high register often referred to as ‘head voice’. Thirty-four boys in total, aged between nine and fourteen, took part in this experiment. They visited a room in groups of three where they were shown two specially constructed video clips. The first was a montage of the singer ‘Tom’ (see Chapter 8) which showed how his voice and imaging had changed in recordings made between the ages of twelve and fifteen. All three songs were in the modal register but showed a very clear progression from treble through cambiata to emergent new baritone (see Chapter 3). The second was of the singer ‘Chris’ (Chapter 7) who had recorded at the age of fourteen a song which very clearly demonstrated his two registers, a rich, low modal voice with a flip to a high, thin fold (‘head’) voice. After the boys had seen the clips they were placed in front of a video camera and asked to discuss the voices they had heard. No adult was present during this discussion but the boys were left with prompt questions that encouraged them to give their views on the quality of the voices and to try to explain what was happening in the clips. The boys also completed short questionnaires in which statements about the development and progression of the voices could be ticked. There was first of all a significant consensus that Tom’s voice progressively improved as it got lower. These boys, themselves well trained to use the head voice in complex choral music and generally of above average intelligence, were therefore in agreement with the untrained school audiences who also thought the voice became better and ‘more like a boy’ as it got lower (see Chapter 8). Four out of the thirty-four boys (12 per cent) recorded on their questionnaires that the voice got worse as it got older whilst 88 per cent felt it got better. Analysis of the video revealed that most of the boys had a good understanding that the voice was getting lower because the larynx and vocal folds were growing as a result of puberty. For Chris’s voice, there was less agreement with the untrained school audiences that the low, modal range was preferable. Only one boy recorded on his questionnaire that he was ‘not that impressed’ with the voice. Forty-three per cent liked the ‘whole voice’, whilst 33 per cent preferred the high voice and 20

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per cent the low voice. Analysis of the tape demonstrated a tendency to think that Chris was too old to sing in the high register, that he had clearly had a very good ‘choirboy’ voice but was attempting to prolong it too long. Two boys specifically stated this. The tape also revealed that the boys understood the change of register far less well than they understood the gradual deepening of the voice. Some used terms such as ‘head voice’ but stated explicitly that they did not really understand what Chris was doing and ticked boxes on their questionnaires to request that their singing teachers explained it to them. So the answer to the thorny question of how high choristers should sing will vary according to context and has to be given with several provisos. When choristers sing to other boys of similar age or younger age than themselves, they need most of the time to sing in a range of A below middle C to the A above, extended perhaps to probably no higher than the treble C. When they sing to adult audiences in cathedrals, they can sing in the range from top G to even high C and this will be ‘angelic’. Such a voice can also be appreciated and liked by other boys who sing in a similar way but virtually no others. This, however, is only for a very brief period of flowering when the peaking of the pre-mutational voice coincides with the attainment of sufficient musical expertise fully to exploit it. Boys other than cathedral choristers who sing classical repertoire to a high standard tended to agree with their singing teachers who feel that some choristers are either forced, or choose of their own volition, to sing too high for too long. Choristers’ high singing is thus a very specialized technique employed by only a very small number of boys for a short period in their lives and we will need to bear this in mind when we discuss the idea of ‘ambassadors for singing’ in Chapter 9. References Ashley, M. (2002a), ‘Singing, Gender and Health: Perspectives from boys singing in a church choir’, Health Education, 102 (4), 180–87. — (2002b), ‘The Spiritual, the Cultural and the Religious: What can we learn from a study of boy choristers?’, International Journal of Children’s Spirituality, 7 (3), 258–72. — (2008), Teaching Singing to Boys and Teenagers: The young male voice and the problem of masculinity, Lampeter: Mellen. Connolly, P. (2004), Boys and Schooling in the Early Years, London: Routledge. — (2006), ‘The Effects of Social Class and Ethnicity on Gender Differences in GCSE Attainment: A secondary analysis of the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales 1997–2001’, British Educational Research Journal, 32 (1), 3–21. Glaser, B. and Strauss, A. (1967), The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for qualitative research, Edison, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Greg, G., Bunce, A. and Johnson, L. (2006), ‘How Many Interviews Are Enough? An experiment with data saturation and variability’, Field Methods, 18 (1), 59–82.

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Mould, A. (2007), The English Chorister: A history, London: Continuum. Phillips, A. (2003), The Trouble with Boys: A wise and sympathetic guide to the risky business of raising sons, London: Basic/Pandora. Phillips, P. (1980), ‘The Golden Age Regained: 2’, Early Music, (April), 180–91. Thompson, R., McGrellis, S., Holland, J., Henderson, S. and Sharpe, S. (2001), ‘From “Peter Andre’s Six Pack” to “I Do Knees”: The body in young people’s moral discourse’, in Milburn Brackett, K. and McKie, L. (eds), Constructing Gendered Bodies, Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 141–61. Willis, P. (2004), ‘Twenty Five Years On, Old Books, New Times’, in Dolby, N., Dimitriadis, G. and Willis, P. (eds), Learning to Labour in New Times, London: Routledge. Woodward, R. (1984), Boy on a Hill: Memories of childhood and youth in Lincoln between the wars, Grantham: Woodward.

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Chapter 7

Angels in the Market Place Introduction In this chapter, I want to examine the notion of ‘angel’ in more depth, drawing mainly on some of the interviews I have been privileged to conduct with – angels. Not every author can claim to have interviewed live angels to obtain his material. What, though, is an ‘angel’? We have seen that it was the Christian church that probably first hit on the idea that boys, when they sang, resembled ‘angels’ and it is difficult to say where boys’ singing would be today without those thousand plus years of history. Boys do not have to sing in cathedral choirs, however, to be ‘angels’. The concept transcends the Christian idea and there is another understanding of ‘angel’ that has grown in importance in an increasingly secular world. We shall see that this kind of angel is rooted more in a kind of folk lore that not infrequently crosses boundaries to become part of popular folk religion somewhat at odds with the angels of orthodox Christian theology. The feature that binds boys to the angel of folk religion is their cuteness and this in turn introduces a degree of sentimentality. The boys in this chapter who recount their experiences of recording the voices of angels consistently refer to their audiences as ‘grannies’. I want it to be clear that when I use this term, I am using it because that is the term the boys use and I think, without exception, that is how they see their audiences. If there are men who become sentimental about cute little angel boys, they keep a low profile and there is no need to repeat the discussion of Chapter 5. Instead, I begin with a review of the ‘spirituality’ of boys’ singing. This will lead us from orthodox Christianity to folk religion and popular sentimentality, leading to the next chapter where I consider what happens when boys with unchanged voices try to perform rock music with its anti-sentimental themes of aggressive, shouted masculinity. Spirituality and Boys’ Singing Terry Wogan once remarked that ‘everybody who wants to be Aled Jones’s girlfriend is over sixty’ (Jones with Henley, 2005: 98). He was referring to a genre epitomized by the sentimentalized presentations of popular religious songs that are so often featured on the BBC’s Songs of Praise. The one time association with that programme of the actress Thora Hird as the archetypical religiously sentimental granny rather confirms this. Probably most of us possess some degree of sentimentality. Religious sentimentality has often been attributed to women,

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particularly in nineteenth-century America. Conventionally, women are permitted to be sentimental, men are not. In spite of this, Aled Jones confesses to sentimentality in ‘blubbering’ over Libera (ibid.: 186), and it would be disingenuous of me not to admit to shedding a private tear over a recent rendition of You Raise Me Up by William Dutton, also for Songs of Praise. But that is a special confession for this book. Normally, it is the social privilege of the ‘granny’ to be allowed this sentiment and, notwithstanding the study by Phillips (2003), we are left wondering how many other adult males may be given to such private lapses of the required masculine indifference. We have also to understand that sentimentality is primarily an adult emotion, particularly when it is directed at a boy. We need to appreciate the consequences of imaging a boy singer in a way that will appeal to adult sentiment. The image, if seen by peers, could be catastrophic in its consequences for relationships. None of the boys I have observed or interviewed formally exhibited the kinds of sentimentality trait that would lead to the shedding of a tear at another of their number’s performance. Nearly all were very pragmatic and matter of fact. This, however, does not mean that they are unmoved by the great ‘classical’ music they sing in the context of Christian liturgy. This is far from the case. I referred briefly in the previous chapter to the deep conversations I have held with some choristers about their work and I want to draw further on some of these data to present a picture of how boys do feel about the spiritual dimension of the music they are asked to sing. It is important to realize that ‘spiritual’ does not necessarily mean religious. Spirituality has proved a very hard quality to define (Ashley, 2000) though only a small number of authors attempt to deny altogether that there is a ‘spiritual’ dimension to human existence. Beck (1999) includes in his list of definitions of spirituality the following: profound aesthetic experience which is felt to reach levels of significance which are beyond the powers of propositional language to express – listening to late Beethoven string quartets, to take a hackneyed but nevertheless enduring example of works of art which seem to have been recurrently capable of evoking subjective experience of this order. (p. 164)

Authors such as Carey (2005) might dispute that the profundity has to come from sources such as Beethoven, but it is the notion of deep feeling engendered by aesthetic experience that comes closest to describing what appears to be felt by the majority of boy choristers who have admitted to me that they are moved by their music making. The general conclusion of my research into chorister’s perceptions is that most of them find the music ‘spiritual’, though fewer are religious believers. 

  This term, ‘classical’ is highly unsatisfactory and I use it with reluctance. Strictly, it refers to high art music of the Haydn/Mozart period, but it is used in everyday parlance as a generalized opposite to popular forms of music. Alternatives, such as ‘serious’ music, are equally unsatisfactory.

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The 1990s were, in the UK, a decade of great national soul-searching in the wake of widespread grief and shock at the abduction and murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys truanting from their primary school. A right-wing moral campaign, spearheaded by the philosopher Marianne Talbot and the then head of the government’s school curriculum authority, Nick Tate, tapped into widespread angst that the Bulger case was symptomatic of a nation that had lost the moral direction that came from a sense of spirituality. This campaign was successful in persuading the government to adopt an ‘official’ definition of spirituality for use in schools to the present day, though the government held back from sanctioning religion as the source of the spiritual (see Figure 7.1). The definition adopted was a humanistic-phenomenological one that owed much to the writings of John Dewey, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow and others. These authors recognize spirituality as a phenomenon of the human mind and see no need to invoke supernatural concepts. (1)  Beliefs: including, where appropriate, religious, giving rise to personal identity. (2  Awe, Wonder, Mystery: at the natural world and in human achievement. (3)  Transcendence: either through a divine being or one’s innermost resources. (4)  Meaning and Purpose: response to ‘why me?’ hardship, suffering; origins and purpose of life; beauty, suffering and death. (5)  Self knowledge: thoughts, feelings, emotions; identity and self respect. (6)  Relationships: worth of each individual; sense of community; ability to relate. (7)  Creativity: inner thoughts through art, music, literature, craft; imagination, inspiration, intuition, insight. (8)  Feelings and Emotions: moved by beauty and kindness; hurt by injustice, aggression; ability to control emotions.

Figure 7.1  Spirituality according to the National Curriculum Council (1993) Source National Curriculum Council 1993 It is remarkable that so many adults who are not religious believers are still moved spiritually by the power of the great settings of the Christian Liturgy. This phenomenon was studied by Walter (1992), who comments on the degree to which sacred music appears, more than sacred art, to have transcended the religion that begat it. A few choristers have confessed a deep Christian faith to me. Indeed, I was recently told off by a thirteen year old when I accidently let slip the Lord’s name in vain! The majority, however, could be described as agnostic and coming to terms 

  The so-called ‘SCAA Forum’.

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with their position in an institution apparently run by professional believers. Some are confidently atheist and I have a lengthy transcription of a fourteen year old’s favourable views on Richard Dawkins and the significance of cosmology. This remark was made by a thirteen year old who had also confidently identified himself as an atheist: People seem to worship things they don’t understand. The more you know the less you believe.

In spite of this he would, if forced to make the choice, opt for his singing of great sacred music over the other great love of his life, his rugby playing. Interestingly, his mother later described to me how he had felt the loss of his treble voice as a ‘bereavement’. This eleven year old was able to engage with the difference between religion and spirituality but took issue with my suggestion (founded on good evidence) that his peers did not generally perceive their work in choir as a form of religious ministry: No, that’s not fair. There’s a difference between knowing that the music is religious and believing what the music says. Do you? It depends, (pause) … more the moral things it says, but some religious things. … No … my parents are probably more religious than me.

A fourteen year old himself introduced to our discussion the word ‘wonder’ that is so often linked with the words ‘awe’ and ‘mystery’ in defining spirituality (see point 2 in Figure 7.1). He clearly spent time contemplating and reflecting on his surroundings during services: I like being in the church as well, looking around and thinking how wonderful it is.

Encouraged by this response, and by my finding that most choristers tended to enjoy reading more than boys are commonly supposed to do, I decided to investigate the degree to which a group of choristers empathized with the novel I Am David by Ann Holm. Twelve-year-old David is fleeing from the prison camp where he has spent his whole life, and encounters the sound of beautiful music for the first time (Holm, 1965: 70–80).

   Evolutionary biologist, professor of public understanding of science, author of ‘The God Delusion’ and scourge of the religious establishment.

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And David knew he was listening to music. There had once been a musician in the camp … he had talked about music and tried to explain what it sounded like. But David had not understood. He understood now, however. That sound that seemed to flood right into your being and draw you upwards and upwards … and that thin delicate sound that made your heart beat so fast …

This is a novel and passage that has greatly impressed me, but the boys were far more matter of fact and down to Earth than I might have been. One eleven year old had already read I Am David twice and thought it ‘really good’. His response to the description, however, was: Well, sort of, but you don’t usually think that way. Maybe if you’d never heard it before.

Another eleven year old similarly stated: I do enjoy listening to music but I wouldn’t say it was crushed or murdered if someone interrupted, I’d say it was a bit exaggerated. Maybe for the first time? I’d say ‘I like that’, but not wonderful or amazing.

And a twelve year old: In a certain way, I don’t say ‘that uplifted my soul’, but I would say ‘that was really good or enjoyable’. (From Ashley, 2002 and 2008)

The boys thus know the vocabulary of spirituality, but choose not to use it. There is evidence of the ‘spiritual’ in a meaningful response to the aesthetic, but the approach is pragmatic, reserved and singularly unsentimental. Commodification and the Market Place Let us now examine the notion of an angel voice and its association with the spiritual and the commercial. It is probable that the notion of angel and what an angel voice should be has become significantly corrupted over the centuries, first by popular folk religion (see Bowman, 2004) and then even more by the trading of angels as a commodity. Folk religion promotes such sentimental fancies as ‘every star in the sky is another soul looking down’ and mass produced, consumer products can be and are enlisted to encourage gullibility with regard to this (Mercer, 2006). In orthodox ‘hard’ theology, angels are an order of spiritual being that includes cherubim, seraphim and archangel. They are of finite and constant number, all created at once, and most commonly appear as messengers of God, always in the form of adult men and by no means always benign. An angel, seen by David, for

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example, visited pestilence upon Israel as a punishment for David’s sin (2 Samuel 24: 15–17). It is probable that the boy voice was thought angelic in earlier times primarily because it conveys a disembodied, ethereal sound, untouchable, unworldly and out of reach. Somewhat the antithesis, in other words, of a commodity that can be possessed in the form of a CD or iTunes download. As one Christian website summarizes: Angels in the Bible never appear as cute, chubby infants! They are always fullgrown adults. When people in the Bible saw an angel, their typical response was to fall on their faces in fear and awe, not to reach out and tickle an adorable baby. (Bechtle, undated)

Folk religion thus has made a travesty of this concept. For the market place, the angel voice may have associations with escape from the constant use of sex to sell everything, a concept that perversely will certainly sell some records. Perhaps we should rejoice at this, but then sales can be greatly increased by sentimental associations with cute children, guardians of destiny and glittering stars (there being deliberate ambiguity between ‘star’ as in popular culture and ‘star’ as in heavenly being). This is well illustrated by the choice of a Sarah McLachlan song for a particular group of six cute ‘angels’. Ironically, when the song refers to an ‘endlessness that you fear’ it speaks in coded language about drug abuse. Nevertheless, the idea of fleeing a ‘dark, cold hotel room’ in the ‘arms of an angel’ can be read as fantasized escapism in which children fulfil adult needs (McLachlan, 2002). ‘Cute’ is the key concept that links boy with angel and drives a wedge between the real world in which boys struggle to present to a potentially hostile world an authentic masculinity and the sentimentalized images that sell to the ‘granny’ audience and other adults in need of escape from this same, hostile, grown-up world. Mercer’s (2006) discussion tends to posit adults as the more sentimental and gullible and children as the more pragmatic. Importantly, as Roger Hill testified to the Robinson committee’s investigation of creativity and culture: Young people select and discard a huge range of available material, ideas, words and images with impressive speed. The past and other contemporary culture provide them with the material to create an individual style. (Robinson et al., 1999: 49)

This is a conservative estimate of a pragmatic approach. In an age we might call ‘late Bourdieu’, young people are more likely to assemble identities through omnivorous, personalized iPod play lists than by allegiance to a tribal musical style (Bennett, 2000; Wing Chan and Goldthorpe 2007; Savage, 2006). It is an individualistic and pragmatic approach that adults grounded in older notions of spirituality and culture find hard to understand. A recent survey by the Joseph

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Rowntree Foundation found that a combination of individualism with consumerism and greed linked to a decline of community figured prominently in redefining social evils for the early twenty-first century (Watts, 2008). The commercial association of cute boys with folk angels is a potent marketing force that perhaps sits at the margins of these concerns. It surfaced recently in an advertisement that made a virtue out of both cuteness and commodification: So what are The Choirboys? They are cute. They are commercial … They might sing like angels but they have discarded their traditional uniform of cassocks and surplices for Gap chinos, designer suits and trendy haircuts. (Choirboys website, 2008)

I discussed this advertisement with a member of this band. I was anxious to find out his perceptions of being both a cute angel and a commercial asset: So what about cute? I can deal with it. I wouldn’t call myself cute, but, well, older people say when I sing, ‘Oh, you’re so cute’ (imitative voice) but it doesn’t bother me that much. I’m angelic sometimes, but most of the time probably not. So you’d say it’s an occupational hazard? Yes. What about commercial? Why is it quite good to be commercial? Well, I’m with UMG. They make money if people buy the CD. That’s fair and it’s good for them.

The answer given here is disarmingly pragmatic and very much in line with the moral outlook of a thirteen year old. The contract with UMG is a fair one and a good one. My conversation with the boy and his family continued in the direction of whether the band might be considered what the father identified as ‘ambassadors for singing’. This hadn’t been part of their thinking, but it might now be. It raises the whole question of how music is now presented to the public when ‘communities are weak and people are increasingly isolated from their neighbours, at considerable cost to well-being and happiness’ (Watts, 2008). Later, I devote a whole chapter to this idea of ‘ambassadors for singing’ (Chapter 9).

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High Angels, Low Angels and Fallen Angels Wald (2002) regards manufactured, ‘teenybopper’ pop acts as the lowest of all cultures. Into this category, we might place a pop video recorded by the thirteenyear-old Stevie Brock. The imaging is not that of an angel that will attract adults but of a fantasy teeny romance designed to sell to the ‘tweenies’ audience of ten to twelve year olds. The singer is imaged as being adored by young girls, one of whom is favoured to sit with him on a swinging bench before the two jump together into a swimming lake. Gittens (1998) in a discussion of childhood goes further than Wald and cites the postmodern theorists Kroker and Cook (1988) in likening the cynical exploitation of ‘bimbos’ by record companies to excremental culture characterized by disposability and meaningless gratification. The child, she argues, once seen as representing purity, innocence and a hopeful futurity, now becomes a sullied, consumed, penetrated victim, an object of meaningless desire and gratification which, once used, is thrown away. Consultation with young audiences would appear to suggest that the record company is both highly skilled in targeting a precise age group and relatively careless of any longer term considerations. The first comment was typical of those received from ten and eleven year olds in the top year of primary school. Boys as well as girls seemed to fall for the bubblegum pop (Brownlee, 2003): It’s really me and I love that kind of music. (Eleven year old)

The young people, however, rapidly tired of this ‘fodder’, turning against produced pop to rock related genres perceived as more authentic. The second comment is typical of those made by children of around the singer’s own age: He is weird and gay and it is shit and I would rather listen to an old lady sing. (Fourteen year old)

There is undoubtedly a huge problem in finding a balance between cute angels and bubblegum teenypoppers that strikes at the very heart of the question this book attempts to answer. Can the boy voice have an existence that balances authenticity with commercial viability in a world of bands and soloists in which choirs have become a minority taste? I would like to pursue this question in a little more depth through the eyes of two young singers who have both recorded for large commercial companies attempting to capture the so-called ‘crossover’ market. Neither of the boys set out intentionally to be cute but both, like the member of The Choirboys band above, soon learned that this was an occupational hazard. I have done my best to protect their identities, though this is inevitably compromised by their public profiles. Pseudonyms are used throughout. ‘Chris’ began his singing career as a cathedral chorister and was the possessor of an exceedingly fine treble voice, winning the BBC Chorister of the Year competition as well as a number of other accolades from the serious music world,

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including a report in the Observer of a prom concert in which he was said to have ‘held the audience spellbound’. His crossover career began (and ended) with a contract to sing in a six-strong boy/girl band which drew heavily upon the angel concept in its marketing. ‘Jamie’ was for a short period a probationary chorister at a major English cathedral but landed a major film role as well as a big break with a solo album, marketed heavily as the unspoilt voice of a child. I asked both of them the same question that I have put to all my young male singer interviewees: Who do you think are the audience for your singing and what kinds of people listen to you? Chris’s reply really set the scene for what I subsequently heard so many times from other boy singers: I get fifty hugs from old grannies. I’d rather have hugs from girls my age, but they’re not going to be in the audience.

This statement represents admirably the perceptions of almost every boy singer I have interviewed. In a later interview, after Chris had ‘signed’ the record deal, I returned to the theme: Are you happy with an audience of ‘grannies’? I’m happy with the opportunity, though probably not the audience. If I could play the guitar as well as sing, it would be even better.

‘Jamie’s’ position in the ‘granny market’ as well as the taste of ‘grannies’ for crossover/light classical is made clear by the CBBC website which advises its young audiences to give his debut album a miss: A hit for your parents and lovers of classical music. If you’re more into rock, pop or R&B, you’ll probably want to give this a miss! (BBC, 2005)

I listened to some of Jamie’s album with fourteen-year-old ‘Dan’, a young indiepunk singer I had been keen to talk to on account of his singing rock with an unchanged voice. I asked him who he thought the audience for Jamie would be: Old people who go ‘O wow, the voice of an angel!’ My mum would like to listen to him. She’s got really bad taste.

Jamie himself, by the time of our conversation aged fourteen, was perfectly well aware of this. So who would you say is the main audience for your singing? Ah, kinda like women really, you see all the similar albums in supermarkets. Maybe mothers I think.

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He continued to tell me that he had been relatively happy with his first album and this market for it at the time it came out. Now, however, he was becoming more assertive, branching out into composing his own stuff. Like Chris, he would enjoy the approbation of girls. An audience of girls his own age rather than mothers for his next album would appeal to him, though the market wasn’t his first priority. How’s it being marketed? Yeah, well, the first album was for mother’s day. This one’s for younger girls. Do you like that? Do you want that? Oh yeah! I definitely like the girls. But I do what I like. I don’t really think about a market.

This desire for girls rather than grannies, then, unites Chris and Jamie and is entirely reasonable for fourteen year olds. It is also potentially very problematic for them in their relationships with peer group boys. Both of them are clearly conscious of this and have learned, in their different ways, to live with it. Jamie is aware that his imaging is a mixture of the cute and the girly, but is confident in his own personality and individuality: They decide the demographic, what would appeal and so on. It’s a manufactured image. What I’d like to wear is smart casuals. I’d want to say ‘this is me, and this what I do’. If it’s too candyfloss, people can see that. People say ‘hey, look at that girl’ and I say, hang on, you don’t know me. I do care about my image, I’m not trying to be vain. I’m not an emo. I’m me. I’m not a conformist.

Chris found the whole idea of a photoshoot at first a trial. Much of the difficulty stemmed from precisely the problem of the record company trying to dress him down, to make him look like a cute little boy which, at the age of fourteen, he was not: At the last photo shoot I looked like a faggot. I looked such an idiot I could easily have punched everyone. It was the worst experience of my life.

His own ideals and preferences are remarkably similar to Jamie’s: Nice jeans, shoes, button shirts with open collars. But then for a whole day they put me in a white shirt and really bad jeans and cut my hair. They put this enormous fringe on. I didn’t mind the make-up, the hair was the worst thing. My gran could do it better, or Rosco my dog! Yeah, jeans, trousers for the bottom half. I wouldn’t have the top. Just nice shirts. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

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Mindful of the need for as eclectic an appeal as possible, the record company eventually produced on the central spread of the album what was described by a female learning support assistant as a ‘handsome young man’. The mature lady concerned ran the choir in her primary school and really saw Chris as a positive role model for the younger boys in that choir. The most significant reaction, however, was amongst the fourteen-year-old ‘peer audiences’ in the various secondary schools I visited. These girls’ comments are typical: Don’t worry about young girls not liking you because, trust me, we love you! I think he looks cute and he looks sweet. WE LOVE YOU! He looks more cool and the image appeals more to younger people. He is really good looking and I don’t mind meeting him. Love ya. You’re a good singer. I would love you to sing to me.

This is all about image and manufactured adolescent sex appeal. There are no comments here on the music. It is left to the boys to make the more critical comments. Of the voice: I think he should try and sing in a deeper voice. You are being an idiot. Sing in a lower voice. Stop singing like that and start singing lower because it sounds a bit stupid, no offence! Stop sounding like a girl. Become a man with a lower voice and become a proper singer.

… and of the image … You look a complete dork. Keep the voice down and burn the clothes, you numpty. Stop being gay. You are about to become a cheesy boy band that everyone will hate. Try and go for not religious songs.

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These are unkind comments, but they are what boys say in the context of a commercially marketed recording in which the performer is unknown personally to the audience. Very interestingly, Chris had confided in me some of his worries about ‘rough boys’ at his school: They’re not understanding, they just laugh. There’s this new guy who’s come in, he’s a complete arse hole, he goes ‘oi you, chorister boy’ … then there’s others that don’t care.

His worry peaked at the time the album was in production: There are a lot of rough boys at my school now. So far they haven’t heard my music and they think, ‘wow, fantastic’ that I’m making a CD, but when they hear it, they’re going to go Ha, ha.

We have just seen the unkind reaction of boys who did not know Chris. Interestingly, however, even the ‘rough boys’ at his own school apparently joined for a while in the celebration of his success and acclaim on the release of the album. There is a very important lesson here. Boys seem to inhabit an uncertain world in which the admiration of talent and success co-exists uncomfortably with jealousy. Jamie’s own perceptions differed somewhat from his peers at school. According to Jamie: I don’t really get ribbed here, a few rough boys might say ‘Oi! singing kid, give me a hundred quid!’ but that’s all.

However, I recorded this conversation with boys in the year above Jamie at his (all boys) school: You thought [Jamie] was a girl singing? He looks like a girl! Girl, girl, girl! (laughter) The thing about this school is, if we could beat [Jamie] up without getting like chucked out, we would. We already have!

In a more detailed, one-to-one interview elsewhere, I put this problem to ‘Paul’, a parish church choirboy of more modest accomplishment who was able to act as an impartial fourteen-year-old observer. I had not repeated the above incident to Paul.

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I had simply shown him some images from Jamie’s album and asked his opinion of marketing boys to older audiences: That’s not very nice! People at his school will make fun of him. You shouldn’t make a child appeal to older ages. He’ll get a lot of grief. Do you think it’s wrong, then? Well, I think he should maybe look on the bright side. But people who are immature will hang around him and bother him for a long time if they find he’s made to sing folk and look cute. But he gets good money for it. But then, are you willing to risk a lot of friends for money?

I discussed the question with a focus group of boys from Guildford County School, a school that has been unusually successful in making a boys’ choir attractive to eleven to eighteen year olds and which was visited for ‘inspiration’ during the filming of The Choir: Boys don’t sing. The Guildford boys were not generally impressed by albums made by boys their own age. Would you listen to a CD by a singer of your own age? Probably not. In the music industry a lot of small kids have success but they’re not really very good. (Twelve year old) I get annoyed with that. They should wait for their time to come. (Thirteen year old) It really depends on whether he is talented. If he’s got an original interpretation. (Fourteen year old) Yeah, if it was just cute but he didn’t really have a good voice, I wouldn’t listen. (Fifteen year old)

I talked to them about the reactions I’d had when playing Chris’s album to young people their own age. They were not surprised, partly because of the genre, but one fourteen year old suggested that the reaction would very probably also be driven by jealousy. Whether or not jealousy was also a factor behind their reactions to TV talent shows is something that needs to be carefully considered. I watch the X factor, just for the auditions, to see people sweat. (Thirteen year old)

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You know the way to find talent is to get rid of all the reality TV shows. (Twelve year old) There are so many people at this school who are better than anyone of the X Factor. (Fifteen year old).

The last statement may be a subjective opinion, but it is the opinion of a boy who sings in a school choir because he perceives the experience to be of intrinsic musical and social value, so perhaps it should not be too lightly dismissed. The observation by his peer that ‘all the record companies want to do is make money’ suggests that young people’s values are readily influenced, one way or the other, by the kinds of experience adults promote. This would appear to have been Chris’s experience. By the age of sixteen, he had decided that he no longer wanted to pursue a career in music. According to his parents, his trust in the adult world had been profoundly damaged by his experiences of the recording company. He had seen what was on offer and decided that all the TV appearances were worthless hype and not something he wished to be involved with any more. Indeed, he had been very supportive of another member of the band whose experience appeared to have been even worse. We shall call this twelve year old ‘Matt’. In the words of his father, who was ‘quite depressed’ that he had left a prestigious youth choir: Matt hated the celebrity stuff. He didn’t want it. He even sent [well known pop impresario/TV talent personality] an e-mail saying that if he made him do another appearance like the last one, he’d refuse to sing.

The irony was the way in which the parents in both families observed that, in spite of the media hype about multi-million recording deals, ‘the kids were getting hardly a penny out of it’. I have heard similar stories from other boys promised followon contracts from big record companies that have subsequently not materialized. Boys can also be dropped rapidly once they lose their cute angel appeal and have to compete in an entirely different market for which not all are well equipped. Is There an Alternative? There is a long established tradition of small companies such as Priory, Lammas or Herald that specialize in the smaller niche market for what we might, for want of a better word, call ‘serious’ singing by boys. Most of the output of these companies, unsurprisingly, is of classical sacred music and related genres, and the economic scale is of a different order to the major labels discussed above. One end of this scale equates, effectively, to vanity publishing. If a choir can raise adequate capital, a professional recording can be made, and, with sufficient determination the costs might eventually be recovered through sales to family and friends, Christmas

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markets and so on. At the other end of the scale, small commercial returns can be achieved through the more well known and sought after choirs and an extensive distribution network that targets the cognoscenti audience. Whilst such activities must pay their way and adequately remunerate the professionals involved, many enterprises remain on a cottage industry scale in which sound cash flow is the simple necessity behind the desire to capture and make available the art. Another small company, known as Tadpole Recordings, exists with the specifically altruistic motive of ‘promoting outstanding young musicians who might not otherwise have a showcase for their talents’. Additions to the Tadpole catalogue are infrequent and the approach could hardly be described as systematic or comprehensive. Nevertheless, a boy might be recorded for the sake of his voice and artistry and little attention is given to the kind of ‘cool’ imaging that is regarded as necessary to sell to large audiences. One such young artist, who has recorded Schubert Lieder and English classical song in the treble voice, and whom we shall call ‘Sebastian’, came to attention through an article he had authored, at the age of fourteen, for the Singer magazine. In this article, he was critical of what he perceived as ‘a vogue in boys’ singing seems to be going towards the innocence of extreme youth rather than the artistry of a more mature soprano sound’. He had, at the time, been under the influence of the Better Land series and its rhetoric of the golden age of the pre-war boy soprano. Paradoxically, however, he did not extend his own period of treble singing, preferring to follow the advice of his singing teacher and rest his voice during change. When I questioned him about where we could, today, hear the mature boy voice he alluded to in his article, he suggested the alto section of a boys’ choir. Remarkably, he gave an extended interview to BBC Radio 3 in which he is heard performing the same Leid in both treble and changing voice. In our conversation, he very much questioned the appropriateness of treble singing in genres other than sacred classical and its derivatives. He held a clear view that boys such as the three in The Choirboys were taken advantage of. Not only were their voices exploited but so was their innocence with regard to the world of commercial music. He did not use the term ‘grannies’ that Chris had introduced, but was close to Jamie in suggesting a middle-aged audience (probably mothers), also astutely identifying that the audience for cute little boys would be a different one to an even more elderly audience for ‘serious’ boys such as cathedral choristers: I’d imagine it’s a sort of middle aged, kind of, yeah. I can’t imagine it really appealing to the elderly like, sort of cathedral choirs do. Um I can imagine it’s more sort of middle aged, music listeners, classic and that kind of … Classic FM? Not Radio 3? No, not …

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Classic FM. Yeah. Um. Interesting. What about boys of their own age? Are they going to listen to it? I doubt it. I mean I can’t see them finding it hugely interesting.

The imaging of Sebastian’s classical English song album was an interesting exercise in restraint. Rather than a full-on picture of a cute little boy, or a slightly older boy made attractive to girls, it shows a boy in everyday clothes seated on a fence looking away across the countryside that is evoked by the material of the album. On the subject of audience for his own albums, he was fairly nonchalant. So who listens to your albums? No idea!

Such nonchalance was a luxury Sebastian could afford through his work with small, independent companies dedicated to serious music for a niche market. Chris and Jamie, on the other hand, were both beholden to one of the largest multinational labels. Sebastian had, during his Radio 3 interview, defended his album of Lieder on the grounds that the theme of young love would appeal to younger people. I was keen to push him on this issue: What kind of young people do you imagine? Well, um, people that are interested in um, in Lieder I suppose, and people that are slightly more interested in the music and the um background to the music than the sound it makes and just the nice tunes … more interested in the music I suppose.

Here, he clearly identifies a ‘serious’ audience of musical cognoscenti which connects closely to Chris’s privately held opinion that the audiences for cute angel voice style albums are ‘lacking musical education’, ‘gullible’ and ‘unsophisticated’. It is worth stressing the frequency with which I have encountered similar opinions held by boys possessing higher cultural capital. Fourteen-year-old David, for example, like many other boys with chorister training, singles out the works of the composer John Rutter as ‘cheesy’ and appealing to Chris’s ‘gullible girls and women’: Songs that are written by John Rutter and people … are targeted at ignorant people that don’t know much about music. They’re cheesy and cheesy songs are the ones that people mostly like.

Sebastian, however, is clutching at straws when he appeals to ‘young’. Quite what kind of a ‘young person’ he had in mind is debatable but he attends a major

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independent boarding school and showed much less awareness of the full harsh realities of social class division than did Jamie, who attends a state maintained school, or Chris, whose city centre choir school is less socially isolated. I played a track from his Lieder album to state school peer audiences in the early stages of the research, but the reaction was so overwhelmingly hostile that I felt further repetition of the exercise pointless and somehow cruel. In stressing that the English class system and the complexity of its historic allegiances to private and state funded schools is part of this, I would not want to convey the impression that there are no similar divisions elsewhere in Europe. The final two interviews, reproduced from Ashley (2008), are with a German and French boy respectively. Fourteen-year-old Heinrich sings with a very well known European boys’ choir based in Austria. He has been featured (though not credited) as a soloist on one of the choir’s widely marketed albums. At the time of our meeting, he was singing alto in the choir, though also engaged in recording privately in the soprano voice. As with Chris and other fourteen-year-old boys I have interviewed who have come to value greatly their high voices, he was reluctant to let go. Heinrich described the choir as fun. Like the English choristers, his ‘seriousness’ did not appear to extend to either geekiness or saintliness: It’s always fun. You have often to talk with someone and make fun.

His ‘seriousness’ with regard to repertoire, however, is beyond doubt. His first choice for both performance and personal recreation would always be ‘classical’. Interestingly, when pushed to name other genres, he came up with jazz, increasingly regarded as ‘serious’ music in the UK and often played on Radio 3. His particular dislikes were what he referred to as ‘techno’ and rap. He thus positioned himself as far away as possible from the aggressive non-singing voice of contemporary young male vocal performance. In this extract, he describes much of what Lucy Green has to say about the voice emanating from the body: Um, now a lot of English boys have said to me, um, I just love singing, I don’t know why, I just do. Would you say that’s true for you? Would you agree with them? Yes (enthusiastically) I mean, well, I know why, I think so. It’s just that, er when we sing, you have better feeling in your body and you can express yourself with the music … don’t have to explain everything in words, just sing and, it’s also a bit of talent that you, it’s more hard work to learn how, it’s more like a language … and you know how to express yourself.

Heinrich soon brought up the elderliness of the classical music audience. He apologized to me for the ‘rudeness’ of suggesting that European audiences for the choir’s concerts were ‘always the older people’. Significantly, though, he also explained that when the choir was on tour, particularly in Asia, there were always large audiences of over a thousand, often with many younger people.

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Mm, hm. So, what about boys and girls of your own age in Austria? Would they not listen to your singing? I don’t think so. Um, would you like them to listen to you? Would you like to sing to them? Why not? Yes, it would be nice but, I think then they don’t get the opportunity to hear it.

In this important extract, Heinrich clearly aligns himself with the English chorister position identified earlier. He likes classical music and he would like other young people of his age to appreciate it, but it is a sadness that they will not. He was quite clear that the Austrian media were responsible to a significant degree for this, blaming them for not giving young people the opportunity to hear classical music and the choir’s singing. He compared Austrian TV and radio unfavourably with his experience of the Japanese media. He lamented the near impossibility of listening to Austrian radio for relaxation on account of it always playing ‘modern’ music, the techno and rap which he so disliked. The implication is that young people might be less hostile if they were more familiar with the choir and its repertoire. Heinrich seemed, however, less naïve than Sebastian on what the peer group audience would think of him. Although he did not see a major difficulty with the sailor suit uniform, the high voice was, by contrast, something he would be ashamed of when in the company of non-musical peers. He also used the word ‘ashamed’ in connection with singing with girls. We explored carefully the meaning of this word and I suggested the alternative of ‘embarrassed’, frequently used by English choristers. Heinrich stuck with ashamed, however. He had no objection to girls’ singing, but he felt that if girls were introduced to his own choir, many boys would want to leave because they would be ashamed to sing with their high voices in front of the girls. I discussed this with his mother who felt that it was an issue of how girls perceived manliness. Heinrich himself felt that his mother didn’t fully understand ‘boy things’. Only boys could understand the way in which they were proud when singing as a boys choir, but ashamed of their voices in front of girls. Meanwhile, we conclude this chapter with one more case study of a young singer, aiming to be a serious exponent of his art, but increasingly torn between it and the offers of big time CD and media ‘signings’. Yniold was only eleven when I first met him and at the beginning of what looked to be both a promising and unique career. He is trained in the old Tito Schipa Bel Canto tradition, at the time of writing through video link with a teacher now living in Australia, believed to be one of the last living exponents of this particular tradition. Most of Yniold’s work has been on the stage in opera, in traditional ‘classical’ venues such as chamber recitals or, for example, an outdoor performance of The Magic Flute. His relative lack of choir singing is as much a chance of birth as anything else. Of dual nationality and fluent in English and French, he lives in Paris where there are

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nothing like the opportunities for boys’ choral singing that exist in England. His early experiences of singing with French choirs had not generally been happy ones and the conditions described to me by his mother seemed far removed from the more familiar (to me) situation of English cathedral choirs. A key principle of the Tito Schipa Bel Canto tradition is that the boy is seen as an apprentice to a singing master. Any boy considered good enough to be taken into such a relationship might expect to progress to the stage of carrying on the tradition of the Bel Canto master when he matures as an adult singer. The notion of ‘cute boy’, needless to say, is a somewhat alien intrusion into this kind of serious preparation for life as an adult singer. During our first meeting, both Yniold and his mother expressed quite strong views on this. It was first of all considered that a female singing teacher would be quite inappropriate for a boy, much more so than in the case of anything I had encountered in England. Indeed, the family was most concerned that Yniold should have a male role model and surprised at any suggestion that boys could develop properly as men without adult male contact. This seemed to them fundamental to the development of proper masculinity. According to Yniold’s mother: Boys have to be taught by men. How can they learn the passion and artistry of male singing from a woman?

What is being referred to here is not a brief exploitation of a small boy’s transitory cuteness, but the future man. The boy apprentice begins early his training for a lifelong career as a serious, adult male singer. This was clearly linked to choice of repertoire. Yniold particularly enjoyed Italian songs, being confident and fluent in his use of this language. The Italian songs were regarded by the family as masculine and therefore suitable for a boy. The Tito Schipa tradition is itself based upon the daily rehearsal of carefully selected classical songs, graded into exercises that develop the voix mixte and smooth out passagio. Showing off with high notes at the top of the range is frowned upon. Yniold himself was clear that he had been attracted, from the age of seven, to ‘serious’ classical music making, Mozart and Mendelssohn being named as favourite composers. His earliest desire had been to sing like Ernest Lough and he identified himself to me at our first meeting as a ‘boy soprano’, having been influenced by the Better Land collection of recordings. Increasing maturity, however, led to an increasing distance from the Better Land and the realization that the pre-war boy sopranos did not sing in the same Bel Canto tradition he was developing himself. During this time Yniold was performing in an increasing number of classical concerts, mostly to elderly audiences and, to the increasing consternation of his mother, audiences of ‘old men’. However, postings of his various appearances on YouTube were beginning to generate different kinds of audience, including a significant following of girls. Knowing my position, his mother forwarded me the following comment that had been posted on YouTube:

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They sure grow fast don’t they. Keep him little and cute, No more food. LOL Wonderful performance [Yniold]. Your CD is really great! Thanks for sharing.

There seems to be here a fundamental failure to understand what the Bel Canto training is about. The notion of the future man is absent and we have, apparently, just another cute, little boy whose attraction seems dependent upon his being kept so. Not long after this, and in spite of protestations by the family that it would never happen, Yniold became involved in the world of commercial music and popular TV. He reached the final of a European TV show equivalent to Britain’s Got Talent and signed for a boy/girl ‘angel’ band modelled on the one ‘Chris’ had recorded for (see above). This instant celebrity was apparently not at all to Yniold’s taste and I received several e-mails from the family recounting his disgust and boredom with the popular music industry. Having to mime in front of the microphone and appear on countless tedious TV shows was, apparently, a source of irritation and distraction from the serious art of continuing Bel Canto. In spite of this, Yniold at the time of writing seems to have fared better than some of his English peers, managing a career of popular TV appearances and a second angel recording alongside his serious Bel Canto training. This has probably been down to a combination of the liking he showed for classical music at the age of seven, a strict teacher and perhaps a certain resolution in the family that is not always found when the big record companies come knocking. I have heard too many less happy stories and we shall return to the theme of the angelic boy voice in the mass media in Chapter 9. Before that I turn to the very important question of whether the boy’s treble voice can be effective in genres other than those that are related to angels. I ask, in the next chapter, whether it is the case that boys are condemned to be angels or nothing at all in their singing. References Ashley, M. (2000), ‘Secular Spirituality and Implicit Religion: The realisation of human potential’, Implicit Religion, 3 (1), 31–49. —. (2002), ‘The Spiritual, the Cultural and the Religious: What can we learn from a study of boy choristers?’, International Journal of Children’s Spirituality, 7 (3), 258–72. — (2008), Teaching Singing to Boys and Teenagers: The young male voice and the problem of masculinity, Lampeter: Mellen. BBC (2005-last update), CBBC news, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/ cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4410000/newsid_4417200/4417294.stm (accessed 18 November 2006). Bechtle, John (undated), ‘What Do Angels Look Like?’, ChristianAnswers.net, available at http://www.christiananswers.net/q-acb/acb-t005.html (accessed 16 June 2008).

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Beck, J. (1999), ‘“Spiritual and Moral Development” and Religious Education’, in Thatcher, A. (ed.), Spirituality and the Curriculum, London: Cassell. Bennett, A. (2000), Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, identity and place, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bowman, M. (2004), ‘Phenomenology, Fieldwork and Folk Religion’, in Sutcliffe, S. (ed.), Religion: Empirical studies, Aldershot: Ashgate. Brownlee, N. (2003), Bubblegum: The history of plastic pop, London: Sanctuary. Carey, J. (2005), What Good Are the Arts?, London: Faber & Faber. Choirboys website (2008), http://www.thechoirboys.co.uk/ (accessed 13 May 2008). Gittens, D. (1998), The Child in Question, London: Macmillan. Holm, A. (1965), I Am David, London: Methuen/Mammoth. Jones, A. with Henley, D. (2005), Aled: The autobiography, London: Virgin. Kroker, A. and Cook, D. (1988), The Postmodern Scene: Excremental culture and hyper-aesthetics, Basingstoke: Macmillan. McLachlan, Sarah (2002), Angel, Sony/ATV Music. Released on Maxi Nettwerk ASIN: B00005UT5O. Mercer, J. (2006), ‘Capitalising on Children’s Spirituality: Parental anxiety, children as consumers and the marketing of spirituality’, International Journal of Children’s Spirituality, 11 (1), 23–33. National Curriculum Council (1993), Spiritual and Moral Development: A discussion paper, York: NCC. Phillips, A. (2003), The Trouble with Boys: A wise and sympathetic guide to the risky business of raising sons, London: Basic/Pandora. Robinson, K. et al. (National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education) (1999), All Our Futures: Creativity, culture and education (The Robinson Report), Sudbury: DfEE. Savage, M. (2006), ‘The Musical Field’, Cultural Trends, 15 (2/3), 159–74. Wald, G. (2002), ‘I Want It That Way: Teenybopper music and the girling of boy bands’, Genders, 35, on-line journal available at http://www.genders.org/g35/ g35_wald.html (accessed 12 July 2007). Walter, T. (1992), ‘Angelic Choirs: Why do people join choirs and sing texts remote from their individual beliefs? A sociologist looks for answers’, The Musical Times, 133 (1792), 278–81. Watts, B. (2008), What Are Today’s Social Evils? The results of a web consultation, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Wing Chan, T. and Goldthorpe, J. (2007), ‘The Social Stratification of Cultural Consumption: Some policy implications of a research project’, Cultural Trends, 16 (4), 373–83.

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Chapter 8

We Can’t Sing Like Men, So We Won’t Sing At All Of all the case studies in the previous chapter, Yniold’s remains one of the more significant for me and the theme I have been developing. The boy is having singing lessons as a future man, yet an adult fan wants to keep him ‘small and cute’. Girl children, of course, can be very ‘cute’ in their own Shirley Temple-like way, but for boys the convergence of good looks, childish innocence and potential boyish naughtiness (allowable for boys but not girls) is a devastatingly potent combination in making boy singers attractive to adult audiences. I have struggled for some time with the idea that boys aged between eleven and fourteen desire to be not children, to escape from being attractive to adults, from mothering and from female censure, and to identify with the world of older boys and young men. In this chapter I am going to ask whether it is the case that boys are condemned to be angels or nothing at all in their singing. In some ways, this is a curious question to ask for as we have seen, in the Christian bible, angels are adult men, yet it was the Christian church that first gave us the idea that boys’ ‘head’ voices were those of angels. There does seem to be some muddled thinking here and I have not yet met a theologian who can explain it. Sheila Whiteley (2005) seems to me perhaps a little more coherent when she employs the term ‘nice boy’ to describe ‘pop’ singers and ‘wild boys’ to describe rock singers. For older women, the perennial Cliff Richard, with his clean-cut looks and born again Christian lifestyle has been ‘nice’ for some decades after bursting upon the world as one of the first major British rock artists. Equally, Mick Jagger has been the focus of mothers’ revulsion for a similar amount of time and remains so. Nobody could accuse the Stones of being ‘cute’. It is probable, however, that from Cliff Richard to Westlife, ‘nice boys’ are also ‘cute’, in the sense that their bodies and performances are entertaining, desirable or titillating for women without the full in the face, aggressive and (in the case of heavy metal) often misogynistic masculinity that is cultivated by rock performers. It has been very clear to me that it is to rock and not pop performers that the majority of eleven to fourteen year olds look. This does not auger well for the small boy who adds to the ‘niceness’ of the easy listening pop genre the cuteness of the folk angel genre. The ‘wild boy’ masculinity of rock clearly requires a voice that can sound aggressive or, perhaps more to the point, rebellious against mothering, but this seems to be less significant than the fact that it is rock music that is viewed as authentic, whilst pop is seen simply as ‘cheesy’, ‘plastic’ and ‘produced’. This does seem to matter very much to young people who are searching for the authentic

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and as we shall see, voices which are so readily suited to ‘angel’ may be out of their comfort zone in other genres. Boys’ Need for Security of Identity In the earlier days, I imagined that voice pitch would be a simple marker between childhood and manhood for boys. The boy with the high voice was, whatever his actual age, still a child, whilst the boy with the lower, changing voice was publicly well on his way to manhood. The evidence I have gathered, however, has increasingly led me to attach less and less significance to this. Boys do understand that their voices are those of neither a child nor a man and, contrary to the idea that boys are stuck in an existential crisis or wish to grow up too soon, many of those I have asked in my research have seemed content with their transitory lot. What most seem to have more difficulty with is the so-called head voice and the one thing that cries out for explanation here is why so many adult pop singers can and do use the falsetto/head voice, yet the same thing is denied to younger boys. The perception that the head voice is girly or gay may not be simply a question of pitch. It may also be that this voice, lacking the body of the full vocal folds is unable to convey any hint of testosterone. The lower register of the twelve-yearold singing voice, like the speaking voice to which it is directly related vocally, in contrast can be thought quite boy-like, though not, as we shall see, man-like. Children and young people can use words such as ‘gay’, or the phrase ‘sing like a girl’ dismissively without much thought. It is interesting that the only serious reflection on the meaning of voice pitch amongst boys seems to have occurred at my instigation. The idea that any particular boy was physically a mere child because his voice was still high was never one that occurred spontaneously. The problem of the boy as opposed to pop-singer head/falsetto voice came up recently in a focus group discussion with fifteen- to seventeen-year-old members of a youth choir. Rather than supply an answer myself, I waited for the young men to work it out for themselves: It’s because by the time people have reached our age, it’s not that everything is gay. Yes it’s a question of security. They don’t know what they are at that age so much, they need to tell everybody to be sure themselves.

Hawkins (2006) discusses the case of Robbie Williams. On the one hand, Williams presents a strongly heteronormative image of machismo and a muscular, mesomorphic body. On the other hand, he has appropriated gay culture and sought adoration from gay men (ibid.: 284, 287). A performer of this age can handle

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issues of sexuality and identity in a way that few thirteen or fourteen year olds might. There is little doubt that record sales and public persona are buoyed by this deliberately designed ambivalence and the gay press has shown a reciprocal appetite for engineered speculation that popular icons might be gay, or one of their own. More recently, the Lebanese born Mika, who has made a virtue of the falsetto voice and a range of over three octaves, has been subject to this treatment. The gay press, attracted by his camp performances and high voice, have repeatedly tried to claim him as one of their own (Grew, 2007). Mika himself has hitherto refused in public to be drawn on the issue, stating that it is ‘too early in my career’ to comment (ibid.) Meanwhile, adult counter-tenors are appreciated for their voices by audiences more genuinely interested in music and I have met plenty of thirteen year olds who, understanding this voice, seek to aspire to it. In the previous chapter, we looked at the case of ‘Jamie’, marketed as the unspoiled voice of a child. ‘Child’ is a relatively secure identity but one that is increasingly difficult for boys over the age of twelve or so to retain. One of my most revealing encounters was not with Jamie himself, but with the boys in a parallel class to his at his school. I had considered it unfair on Jamie to speak to his actual class, and the parallel class did indeed have plenty to say about him. In response to the derision they were heaping upon ‘cute boy’ singers, I pointed out that, in frankness, a not insignificant number of them could, by virtue of their small stature, high speaking voices and (in some cases, fair hair and blue eyes) be as easily imaged as ‘cute boys’ as their peer in the parallel class. Their response was not to deny this, but negotiate amongst themselves the statement put forward by one speaking on behalf of all: We don’t want to be cute, we can’t sing like men, so the answer is not to sing, or maybe to sing rap.

I asked some twelve- to fifteen-year-old boys who did sing, in a large and highly successful school boys’ choir, what they thought of the rap and anti-singing stance and how it related to the lyrical, treble voice as ‘cute’. They felt that certain styles that they listened to as audiences were not available to them as singers. Fourteen year old a: Well, that’s what the music industry is. There’s R&B but we can’t do that. How can I say? We do a lot of instrumental music in this school, but we can’t do rap. Why not? Thirteen year old: It’s quite hard in the music industry to find rap that’s politically correct. Fourteen year old b: I do like grime, I do listen to it. But it’s not graceful if our parents want to come and watch.

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How High Should Boys Sing? Fifteen year old: it’s all to do with upbringing, if you get angry … Thirteen year old: Yeah, it’s quite explicit in all their songs.

Clearly, the problem identified is not so much the voice as the lyrics. The boys seem to think that, when performing for adults, they must be ‘graceful’. They are clearly aware that rap is associated with angry youth, brought up in a different way to themselves, and likely to be disapproved of by authority or older people. Their own progress through adolescence is such that a degree of deference and decorum is still required when relating to adult audiences. Like many of the cathedral choristers, they listen to one genre and perform another. Perhaps ‘gracefulness’ is the stage after cuteness and even fourteen and fifteen year olds, at least of a certain social class, may not be quite ready to break the tie with parental approval and commit wholeheartedly the wild acts of rock. There is certainly evidence that they are taking a risk if they do. There is a great deal more to being a rock star than simply shouting. One young singer that boys quite often complain about is Little Chris who appeared on TV’s Rock School. The following comment is typical of what I have often heard: I just don’t like him because he’s a little kid and he’s annoying. He’s trying to be a rock star when he’s not. He’s just irritating. (Fifteen year old)

There seems to be recognition here that the performance is precocious and the fact that it is precociousness in a youth genre rather than an adult one brings it closer to home and makes it less acceptable. Performances in the aggressive, shouted, non-singing stance by boys with unchanged voices are hard to come by, but a genuinely good one by a fourteenyear-old ‘indie-punk’ singer who had recorded a demo album with his band was located. The band was mentored by a Youth Music scheme and had recently won quite a prestigious award. The voice at the time of the recording was at Stage 2 in the Cooksey scheme, and during the interview which took place about four months later, pitched at around 170 Hz for speaking. Had the boy been a chorister, he would have been singing treble. I was able to observe a live performance, which was certainly spectacular. It was highly energetic and vigorous and every effort was made to make the shouted vocals sound aggressive. This performance certainly attracted the attention of a large and enthusiastic group of teenagers who congregated in front of the stage, whilst a majority of the adults present continued to drink and converse elsewhere in the hall. Devoid of this actual, live context, the reactions of young people (aged twelve to fifteen) in school listening to the CD were different. They were asked to estimate the singer’s age on the basis of his voice and were able to do this with some accuracy, girls being slightly more accurate than boys (see Table 8.1). Overall, 50 per cent of the total sample (n = 272) correctly identified the age to with +/- one year on the basis of pitch perception.

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Table 8.1  Age estimates of fourteen-year-old singer based on peer audience perception of pitch Age estimate 13 or under

Boys %

Girls %

8

2

14

21

30

15

21

36

16

21

9

17

17

7

18 or older

12

16

Comments relating to pitch from the listeners who were within one year of the correct age included: • • • • • • • • • •

a boy’s voice that has broken it sounds quite young an unbroken voice trying to be an adult a boy’s voice that’s breaking beginning to break unbroken but about to break in the middle of breaking still quite high so not sure if it’s broken sings quite young, not broken yet trying to go low in a voice that hasn’t broken.

Young people thus clearly do hear voice change, but do not particularly attend to it unless asked to. When pushed into analytical mode by adult intervention, the comment ‘trying to be an adult’ interestingly emerged. ‘Trying to go low’ also indicates recognition that this is a boy who is not yet ready to sing like a man. Very few of the pupils actually thought that this high voice worked for the genre. When asked to give this performer advice for the development of his career, typical comments included: Thirteen-year-old girls: His voice doesn’t suit the song. He should wait to get a bit older before becoming a singer or maybe try a different style. He should develop his voice a bit more and wait until it’s broken. Wait until your voice breaks. I like the music and the words are good but your voice does not match!

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Fourteen-year-old girls: I think he’s the best but he shouldn’t sing until he’s older. His voice sounds the same all the way through and he needs to wait until his voice has developed properly. I would wait until you’re a bit older because there will be more girls that will like you and you’ll be taken seriously.

Thirteen-year-old boys: It [voice] was too young for this song, which made it bad overall. I think you’re good, but wait until you’re older. Do more hard-core songs in rock so that you can get the full stretch of your voice.

Fourteen-year-old boys: Carry on practising until you’re eighteen and you can sing like that in a deep voice. I think he should wait until he’s older so that the voice matches the music more.

There were some comments on the lack of lyricism. Interestingly, this particularly concerned pupils in a Welsh-speaking comprehensive school: His voice is strong. In some places he just shouts and goes out of tune. (Fourteenyear-old girl) He doesn’t sing in tune. He’s just talking it. (Fourteen-year-old boy)

This fourteen-year-old boy’s comment is interesting and may indicate a genuine cultural difference between England and Wales, which is sometimes known as the ‘land of song’. However, the questions of expectations and empowerment for choice arise if teachers and others adopt the position that boys will only use their voices if it’s rap or beat-boxing. Plenty of evidence has been gathered for this book that suggests this is not the case. I asked the band’s mentor (himself a member of an eclectic rock band) what he thought and whether a boy physically capable of a chorister top G was really ready to perform punk. He felt that the song was not a ‘massively high one’, though recognized that the tone of the voice was such that you could ‘tell it’s somebody

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singing that note with a high voice as opposed to somebody with a low voice singing a high note’. So it doesn’t matter that it’s that high? Yeah, yeah, in terms of sound I don’t think it’s a problem. There’s lots of other factors that accompany somebody’s voice changing that make it, that make you a better singer. When your voice changes, it’s nothing to do with the pitch of your voice purely, you know it’s the amount of time you’ve been singing, that sort of thing. Plus once you can sing in a lower register you can sing a lot of other songs that maybe you would have struggled to sing before so you get a lot of practice.

There is, perhaps, an element of clutching at straws here, though it was the first time the band’s mentor had been asked to consider the question. More directly, the ready comments of the school-age peers speak volumes about the nature of boyhood as defined by vocal identity. A boy’s voice is not capable of projecting aggression in the way a young man’s is. By this criterion, boys and young men are not the same. Perhaps boys, therefore, need either to sing with an element of ‘grace’ in deference to adults or not at all if they are to be taken seriously. The next case study that can help us with this perplexing question is that of ‘Tom’. Tom started as a cathedral chorister but was attracted to an audition in London by a producer ‘looking for the next Charlotte Church’. Tom did not (perhaps fortunately for him) become the next Charlotte Church, apparently none of the candidates did. However, a vocal coach present at the auditions was much taken by Tom’s singing and contacted his parents to ask if she could ‘take him on’. The result was a commercial album, released when Tom was fourteen years of age. On this album, Tom sings in the modal voice of a Stage 2 boy, perhaps captured by the arrangement of May it Be which ranges from A 3 (207 Hz) to B 4 (466 Hz). This caused some conflict with his cathedral choir director who felt that all the good work of training the ‘head voice’ was being undone. After an ultimatum to choose one or the other, Tom left the choir to pursue a solo career. Tom was then signed by a pop producer which resulted in a number of singles and a promotional tour in schools during the time of Tom’s transition through Stage 3. I have used these two recordings, together with an earlier one made when Tom was aged twelve quite extensively in my research with peer audiences, partly as a demonstration of well managed voice change and partly to elicit comments on the voice and performance. The imaging, too, has been an important part of this research. The twelve-year-old Tom is a ‘cute’ boy singing a song for Mother’s Day, the fourteen year old a good looking ‘normal’ young adolescent, and the fifteen year old heavily imaged with spiked hair as a young pop performer. Significantly, Tom’s fan base appears to change between the fourteen and fifteen year old recordings. Appreciative comments of the fourteen-year-old voice were mainly from adults, but the fifteen-year-old performance began to appeal to

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listeners of Tom’s age or younger. Many older primary school children thought the single easily the ‘coolest’ of all the boy recordings I played them. Secondary school audiences, though generally also favourable, were more mixed in their reception. An issue that particularly concerned some boys is represented by the disgust implicit in this fourteen year old’s comment: All the songs are terrible. ‘Tom’ said he was a rock singer but that was pop!

Other fourteen-year-old boys, reacting in a similar way, nevertheless recognized a voice and performance that were of better quality than a bubblegum teenypop recording they had heard earlier, and this may have been due to the musicianship Tom had absorbed as a chorister: Tom is way better than Stevie at singing but the song is cheesy. I wouldn’t buy either. Tom was better but still not very good.

Nevertheless, the lower sounding voice was accorded a much better reception than the angel singing of ‘Chris’ (see previous chapter) in the higher treble register. Tom appeared to escape both the censure of being an angel and the censure of trying to sound like an aggressive young man and failing. Both boys and girls of Tom’s age were confident that this was an appropriate register for a ‘boy’ to sing in. Boys’ comments: He’s got a deeper voice and that’s better. Good voice, it’s more boyish than any of the others.

Girls’ comments: Tom has the most boy voice because it’s broken and he’s not singing choir. His voice is deeper and more boyish. He looks a bit gay. I don’t mean to be mean. He looks OK.

Setting aside the voice, boys and girls reacted somewhat differently to the imaging. Significant numbers of girls seemed to imply that the fifteen-year-old Tom was a boy they’d love to go out with. Indeed, some wrote their phone numbers on the questionnaires I had used in their schools in the hope that I would pass them on! The following comments are typical: Tom is way better. He’s much fitter and I think his voice is more appealing.

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It’s a really nice, sexy image and the clothes are lush. So is the hair. He’s better looking, cuter than the others. It’s not as geeky. They have made him look like a teenager.

Significantly, the word ‘cute’, as used and its meaning here, is clearly a goodlooking boy that a girl would like to go out with, not a pretty little boy that a granny would like to hug. Also significant is the use of the word ‘geek’ in the fourth comment. The audience is able to relate to a boy who looks like a teenager, whilst a boy who dresses and sings to please adults is likely to be considered geeky. These boys’ comments encapsulate many of the themes we have already encountered. The first, which is drawing a comparison with the previous indiepunk singer, recognizes that there is not a problem with a relatively young, undeveloped voice trying to sound more aggressively masculine than is possible. He is not singing an aggressive rock song. The second reflects boys’ sensitivity to jealousy and dislike of other boys who show off. The third is by a boy who clearly recognizes Tom’s talent but is cautious, as a boy who must be seen as heterosexual, in making comments about his good looks and successful imaging. I personally think that Tom is best and his voice and the music match. He looked more normal and less cocky than Stevie. His hair looks gay-o-matic but he looks much better than the other ones. His voice was extremely good (I’m not gay).

The lyrics of the song clearly confirm that Tom has come under the influence of a pop producer whose commercial instinct is to promote the kind of hegemonic masculinity that regularly positions females as passive, dupe consumers of ‘cute’ young male bodies, and is critiqued by Bayton (1993) or Bennett (2000). They refer to an idealized girl who is his ‘greatest fan’ as he ‘still tops the charts’. It has to be said that the pop producer’s commercial instincts were right. I discussed the process of imaging with Tom at some length and he described to me how, at the age of twelve, he had been totally beholden to the adults behind the project. Autonomy, respect for his own views and a more equal partnership began to emerge at around the age of fifteen. Well, I, at the moment, because I’m not doing much, I. Well, when I was a couple of years ago, I’d be too scared to say I wanna look like this way, so I’d just go, yep, dress me in this whatever … Yeh.

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How High Should Boys Sing? … but now I am old enough to think I’ll e-mail [producer] to say look I wanna do this, I wanna do this, this is what I wanna do … and, er, we usually go along, he’ll advise me to do what he thinks but then I’ll argue maybe back, but, then again I wanna do what’s best …

We had looked at the album covers of some other boys and Tom had been quick to point out that most of the images would clearly appeal to the older generation and quite possibly result in trouble for the boys at school. ‘Jamie’s’ image (see previous chapter) for example, Tom particularly considered ‘girly’ and ‘poofy’ on account of its appeal to older people: ’Cos if it was, if he was appealing to, er, forty, fifty and above … that’d be, you know, cool in there, you know, and ooh isn’t he sweet? … I’d say, my generation to about, I dunno, we’d call that girly. … ’Cos he looks a bit poofy.

In Tom, we have the example of a boy performer who has been professionally moulded to appeal to his own age group. We have a boy performer who is exercising a degree of autonomy and creativity with regard to what he performs and how he performs it. The judgement of Tom’s peers is that he neither ‘sings like a girl’, nor tries to sing like a man and fails through physical immaturity. Choirs, Bands and Doing Your Own Thing Green (1997) refers to the ‘non-singing’ or ‘anti-singing’ stance which she regards as associated with ‘popular music’ and a way for teachers to avoid what she perceives as the ‘sissy connotation’ of singing. Popular music even overcomes to some extent the ‘sissy’ connotations of singing, sometimes through highly individualized techniques which are impossible for massed voices, and sometimes through the delineation of a non-singing stance such as in rap, or an anti-singing stance such as in punk, a stance which is also harnessed in the construction of machismo at football matches. (Green, 1997: 185)

There is undoubtedly some truth in this, but I don’t think Green has here conveyed the full picture, not least because she fails to distinguish between rock and pop. First, it is the case that ‘massed voices’ is at least as much a generational issue as a gender issue. Massed voices are perceived as something that older people do, by girls as well as boys. For many young people, the natural home for singing is the small band and there are important differences between how small bands and large choirs learn music. What is missing from Green’s analysis is the link with the ‘uncool to work’ discourse. According to this, not only is it uncool for boys to sing, it is also uncool for them to be interested in science or to be seen to be trying hard at any form of schoolwork. To work hard at schoolwork is, according

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to numerous authors, a ‘feminine’ act and therefore little different, as far as ‘real boys’ are concerned, to singing. This is commonly presented as a gender issue, but again this masks the degree to which it is perhaps even more a social class issue. This was a question I put to Tom and his answer described perfectly the kind of middle-class boy who has perfected the masculine art of ‘effortless achievement’. He does do his schoolwork but conceals this to avoid conveying the impression of being a swot. I put the question of ‘uncool to work’ directly to another fifteen year old who sings with a prestigious secular youth choir. You said a minute ago that you liked learning a lot. Something that’s spoken a lot about these days is boys and it’s not cool to work. That’s ridiculous! That is, that is the most clichéd thing ever … I’m not saying you would!

He went on to explain how in his experience he had met ‘two types of people’. The first were those with no foresight who thought why work for the future when there are better things to do now and the second were those that recognized they perhaps had eighty years ahead of them and needed to make the most of their opportunities in the present. This fifteen year old attends a state maintained, selective grammar school and is representative of the type of middle-class boy who is so conveniently overlooked by those whose concern seems mainly to be maintaining a level of moral panic about boys’ underachievement. He continued with a statement that struck me as something that teachers in training ought to hear: There will be, I can guarantee you, in any classroom anywhere, there will be at least one person who cares about what you’re saying.

I was particularly struck by his perception that a school class would contain boys who would secretly like to sing but cannot face down the more vocal ones who will ridicule any attempts made by a music teacher to promote boys’ singing. This was evidence I gathered late on in my study but it seemed to validate perfectly what so many other boys had said in earlier interviews. Once again we appear to be seeing middle-class boys more empowered to make choices than workingclass boys. Tom, like many other boys I have interviewed recently in a variety of contexts, used the word ‘chav’ and not ‘lad’ to describe those boys who would neither sing nor make an effort with their schoolwork. Many authors have sought to offer explanations for the ‘uncool to work’ syndrome and I would not be so bold as to claim that I have the answer. However, a factor which I have discovered to be common to young people who give up on activities such as scouting and young people who dislike choir singing is the desire to escape from being ‘bossed around’. We have to see here the operation of both

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generation and social class. Middle-class boys are more likely to listen to what the generation above them has to say and thus more likely to acquire the kind of cultural capital involved in choir singing. Many young people like to discover music for themselves, on their own terms and at their own pace. This of course can be as true or even more true of middle- as working-class boys, it is just that the former may be more likely to benefit from a disposition to both forms of learning. The young rock band meeting in a parent’s garage epitomizes the desire to learn music without being ‘bossed around’, whilst the traditional stand up and do as your told choir epitomizes its opposite. This provides an explanation for why gospel singing has become more popular at the expense of traditional choir. This is a genre which appears to escape the choirs-are-for-‘old people’ perception. The opportunity to explore lyrics which can resonate meaningfully with young people (as opposed to what many perceive as the ‘all oooooh wooooh’ of sacred choral music) would seem to be one explanation for this. As Mills (2005) recognizes, another explanation is the more collaborative method of working within gospel choirs where rehearsals are characterized by ‘frequent breakdown for discussion’ in which ‘sometimes directors emerge’ (p. 188). This is much more in tune with the band style of musical learning to which Green refers (2002). Unless the director has a particular form of charisma, boys can react with hostility to a ‘bossy’ type of traditional choir director who lacks humour and places his own musical desires above respect for his singers. These eleven- and twelve-year-old boys have clearly been discouraged by one such director: MA: So who’s actually been and tried it [choir singing]? Jason: I have. In Weston Park. You went to this church. MA: What was it like? Jason: Embarrassing. Everybody was embarrassed and nervous. Nobody wanted to be overheard by anyone else. That person would be really embarrassed. Alec: It was boring. MA: Why? Alec: He shouted at us if we went too high. And he stopped if we got the note wrong. He kept stopping and we had to sing it again.

This young, black male leader of a school gospel choir I observed at a city performing arts specialist school describes the contrary situation of his own more facilitative, collaborative style of working: They like this because they do their own style, their own interpretations.

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Is this one of the things that makes it cool? Definitely. They don’t like traditional choir because of the stand up and do as you’re told.

‘They’ in this case consisted of twenty-one girls and two boys. However, the treble voice did not appear to be the issue. The head of music at this school had already alerted me to look out for ‘Henry’, whom he described as ‘a total lady’s boy’. Henry and the other boy in this choir could ‘do their own thing’ and draw on their (not inconsiderable) masculine capital to become the centre of the group’s attention: MA: You don’t mind being almost the only boy? Henry (twelve): No! Because all my friends are girls. I normally hang out with girls. I’m fine with girls. Teacher (later): He’s the boy I was telling you about. He’s a total lady’s boy. He loves it.

Clearly, Henry possesses a social confidence in front of girls that the majority of other boys of his age who find girls en masse intimidating lack. It is his choice to be there, his choice to sing gospel and his choice to hang out with girls. A focus group I held with other teenage members of the youth choir referred to above would not find this surprising as several of them admitted to being both individualistic and assertive in their tastes. This is one of the qualities I encounter most regularly in talking to choristers and other boys who sing. I never cared what other people thought too much. I’ve been the only boy in a choir before now. I wanted to be there because I wanted to sing.

These young men, however, were perfectly content with the ‘stand up and do as you’re told’ of formal choir. They found it difficult to relate to the idea that conductors could be ‘bossy’ and discourage boys from singing, though they agreed that this could perhaps happen because the personality of the conductor was such an important factor in the success of any choir. As members of one of the most prestigious young people’s choirs in the country it was unsurprising that their experience was of good and inspirational conductors whom they liked. It’s fun when [conductor] does it. He tells jokes, we have a laugh as well as work hard. You need a secret video camera to show people this.

I could not wholly agree with them on this issue. They were boys who had learned to concentrate and focus for sustained periods from a young age, who were of

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above average intelligence and musicality, and privileged in the quality of their musical education. They were in the choir because they desperately wanted to be there and knew full well that their continued membership depended upon regular auditioning as well as first-class conduct. Under such circumstances, a conductor can get straight on with the work as well as develop a good, mutually respectful relationship with his singers, relieved from time to time by humour. Thus is great choral singing by young people able to flourish. They are hardly the circumstances faced daily by most teachers. Perhaps good community choir directors can achieve them and they are more often than not replicated with younger boys in cathedral choirs. The tragedy is that so few boys have comparable opportunities and so few adults in positions of authority in education have any real insight into what superb training good, disciplined choir singing can be for developing a boy’s ability to concentrate and contribute to the communal achievement. I would like to contrast this now with the work of a teacher who has been inspirational in an entirely different way. I was introduced to an approximatelyfifteen-strong primary school boy band. These were eight to ten year olds who very much enjoyed their singing, but do not call them a ‘choir’ for they are not! They are a group of boys from very ordinary homes who enjoy ‘staying behind after school to have fun and make a noise’. That, at least, is how the teacher introduced the activity to the boys in the school. Perhaps this might alarm the dyed-in-thewool traditionalist but the motive for starting this band was ‘to engage boys who were otherwise in danger of disaffection in something worthwhile’. The boys have named themselves after a chocolate bar which is well known in the UK because it advertises itself as ‘not for girls’. I shall refrain from actually naming this bar, which may frustrate readers beyond the shores of the UK, and doubtless there will be some in primary education who will disapprove of such blatant sexism. Are they though able to show me that boys have genuine equality of opportunity with girls to enjoy singing in their schools? I described this teacher and her choir to a thoughtful, fifteen-year-old member of a youth choir who had volunteered to help me in designing a web-based approach that would appeal to boys. He thought she was ‘awesome’ in her imagination and her understanding of that vital point that so few seem fully to grasp – singing is good for boys. When the boys performed for me, they chose We Will Rock You by Queen – an aggressive rock song the chorus of which can sound like a parody of the gentle Czech carol Rocking. This was not a fourteen year old with an unchanged voice trying to sound like an adult rock singer, however, it was boy children who were essentially learning through play. We need to consider what they were learning through play – that using their voices constructively is a fun, social thing to do that requires the suppression of ego for the good of the activity and the group. That is the same foundation upon which the edifice of the best choirs stands and I think it is such a contrast with the choir director above who was discouraging probably through putting his own musical ambitions before any understanding of how to win the trust of boys who, though outwardly ‘tough’, are shy, nervous and embarrassed about their voices.

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I am not suggesting that a CD should be made of these boys, at least, not one that would be marketable to any other than their parents and immediate associates. What I am suggesting is that we are presented with a challenge and opportunity in taking their interest forwards and developing their voices in a constructive way that is not limited by unnecessarily low expectations of where their singing might go. Even more importantly, I am drawing attention to where the foundations of all I think we should be doing lie. They lie in social play. Kodaly and others have given us the principle of the singing game, which I believe to be very sound for the early years but there may be a gap to be filled in the provision of singing fun for boys who have grown out of the nursery oriented words associated with these games. The issue here, of course, is that children in Kodaly’s Hungary were so far ahead of most English children today in singing development that the risk of a mismatch between musical difficulty and age level of the words would have been much less. What matters most is that we have a ‘band’ of young boys who have learned the most basic lesson of all – singing is pleasurable because it is a way of having fun with your friends. This, I think may be a point that is frequently overlooked by those who go no further than ‘boys don’t want to sound like girls’ in satisfying themselves as to why it is that boys are reluctant to sing. Social play remains important throughout the life-cycle of boyhood. It changes, of course, from the rough and tumble of nine year olds to the boasting about girl conquests of sixteen year olds, but it is social play nevertheless. Boys are developing their identities through that grand and never to be repeated social experiment that boyhood is. Too often, the traditional structures of boys’ singing focus on those few, individualistic, maverick boys who gain a perverse security of identity by deliberately resisting the hegemonic forms of boyhood. That is the beginning of a downward spiral for such boys are seldom good role models and are certainly not the keys to releasing those boys who would secretly like to sing but are unwilling to challenge those who set the tone of hegemonic boyhood. Things will not change until there is a willingness in the musical community to shift the base of knowledge and understanding from the transmission of the Western canon to understanding boys and boyhood. I think my fifteen-year-old informant may be right when he describes the insight of the teacher who understands this as ‘awesome’. References Bayton, M. (1993), ‘Feminist Musical Practice: Problems and contradictions’, in Bennett, T., Frith, S., Grossberg, L., Shepherd, J. and Turner, G. (eds), Rock and Popular Music: Politics, policies, institutions, London: Routledge. Bennett, A. (2000), Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, identity and place, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Green, L. (1997), Music, Gender, Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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— (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A way ahead for music education, Aldershot: Ashgate. Grew, T. (2007), ‘Brit Pop Star Won’t Say Which Way He Swings’, available at http://www.pinknews.co.uk/news/articles/2005-3553.html edn (accessed 12 January 2008). Hawkins, S. (2006), ‘On Male Queering in Mainstream Pop’, in Whiteley, S. and Rycenga, J. (eds), Queering the Popular Pitch, London: Routledge. Mills, J. (2005), Music in the School, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whiteley, S. (2005), Too Much Too Young: Popular music, age and gender, Abingdon: Routledge.

Chapter 9

Ambassadors and Mediators Introduction: What Are Ambassadors and Do We Need Them? A clear view of the state of boys’ singing has emerged over the previous chapters. It would be fair to say that a golden century (which was probably never that golden) ended roughly in about 1950 and things since then have been increasingly precarious. We are now in a position to summarize why: • • • •

the disappearance of boys’ choirs in parish churches and the rapid decline in the musical significance of the Christian church; the absence of a strong, alternative tradition that values boys’ voices in the same way and the relative infrequency with which the boys’ treble voice is imaginatively exploited in new forms of contemporary music; the continued growing apart of older and younger generations and the youthful perception that choirs are ‘posh’ and for the ‘elderly’ whilst bands, solo singing or more informal chorus groups such as gospel are for them; the influence of TV talent shows which create transitory celebrity status, focus on popular appeal rather than artistry, detract from the intrinsic value of singing in chorus as a social activity, and disempower ordinary singers.

Probably the most significant of all reasons, however, is the failure of significant numbers of adults to engage seriously with what it means to be a boy. I think I have made the point several times in this book that boyhood between the ages of ten and fourteen is a time of great vulnerability and uncertainty in which the macho exterior is but the outward defence. Any responsible adult must think of the future man, not the money-earning power of the brief flourishing of the boy voice. The future man is very much a product of the boy’s attempts to come to terms with what we might call the two big Gs – the distancing (at least in public) of Grannies and the tentative first contacts with Girls. The situation is not going to improve until the adults who organize and promote boys’ singing understand what they are asking of a boy to sing when Girls might be listening or reflect seriously on what they are doing when they image boys to enhance the Granny appeal. More empathy and understanding than was shown to some of the singers discussed in Chapter 7 is needed. If there is a role for responsible fathers, it is to act firmly in the long-term interests of the boy. All who influence an early singing career have a ‘fathering’ role to reflect on here and I am obviously referring to the kinds of father who value boys’ singing, not the ones who tell a boy that singing is for ‘poofs’.

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What really qualifies as a true ‘father’ is an agent who has a lifelong, unconditional interest in a boy’s welfare. I say ‘agent’, perhaps I should say ‘agencies’ for what a boy needs during adolescence is older and wiser males who might be brothers, uncles, mentors or trustworthy members of the community. To confine this to a single ‘father’ is too limiting and highly unsatisfactory for the many boys whose fathers are for whatever the reason not up to the job (see Mechling, 2008). Unfortunately, the track record of the music industry as a respecter of its young boy stars’ future lives is not at all good. The tragic case of Darren Burn (1961–91) makes sobering reading (Boy Choir and Soloist Directory, 2007) and the recording process itself has the effect of postponing the required reckoning indefinitely. There will always be enough cute little boys with the kind of talent needed to satisfy the Granny market and, as Kroker and Cook (1988) have observed, they can be discarded like any other music industry bimbo once their commercial usefulness has passed. Such precious children, furthermore, can record albums in the cocoon of the recording studio and never face the real world of hostile peers. For as long as this is so, it is unlikely that any involved in the music industry will take seriously the challenge of facing ‘ordinary’ boys to convince them that singing is a really good activity and that acceptable and imaginative uses can be found for their treble voices, which people, particularly Girls, will respect. The term ‘ambassador for singing’ has gradually crept into the lexicon. The fact that it has done so indicates that the need for an ambassadorial role, in reality to tackle issues such as these, is felt. I am not certain that the concept of ‘ambassador’ is exactly the right one, but we will stick with the term for now. An alternative might be ‘role model’, and that was very nearly the title of this chapter. There is undoubtedly some value in an ambassadorial role such as roving the country and talking up singing at well attended concerts or other gatherings of those already converted to the cause and (importantly) converting government ministers to the cause. This is not the same as working alongside the great unconverted (i.e. ‘ordinary’ boys) in hard to reach situations and winning their hearts and minds. There is some doubt as to whether a role such as this can be undertaken solely by adults because the generational chasm has grown so wide. It is also the case that earlier chapters have shown consistently that, whatever the problems with boys’ singing might be, a lack of male leaders is not chief amongst them. Although this runs contrary to much intuition and common sense, the evidence is both robust and consistent that finding more male singing leaders is not the highest priority. Most of the signs point toward the challenging possibility that it is boys themselves who must shoulder much of the burden of the ambassadorial role. This is asking a lot, but we have a good starting point. We know that there are boys out there, by no means all of them ‘precious children’, who really do love singing and are actually looking for the kind of sympathetic, adult support that would empower them to share this love with their peers. Indeed, only yesterday I was talking to a Year 8 (age thirteen) class I had never previously met, and one such boy came forward at the end of my talk. He admitted to singing,

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having singing lessons, really enjoying it, but keeping it secret from his peers. His two fascinated friends looked on. I have met so many such boys. The Media: Friend or Foe? The belief that more male leaders and conductors must ‘obviously’ be necessary to get boys to sing is one that I encounter very frequently. Another is that the wealth of TV talent shows and reality shows are obviously a ‘good thing’. They seldom are. Far from making boys’ singing ‘cool’ they can simply reinforce all the most unhelpful stereotypes and make the task of convincing ‘ordinary’ boys that their treble voices are an asset for ever harder and harder. Moreover, we have seen in previous chapters that celebrity status has seldom brought happiness or lasting peer esteem to boy singers and has, in some cases, been the source of early disturbance or disillusionment with the adult world. There are serious ethical questions about whether the hope of celebrity status for a boy singer ought ever to be on the agenda. I would like to look at some case studies that will help us explore these challenging ideas. A well tried formula that has become popular in the Western world is the TV talent contest where a number of judges listen to various auditions and contestants are gradually eliminated. In the early stages of this formula, the main entertainment value is the public humiliation of the acts that are first to go out. Later, it is when the public take over from the judges in voting for the ‘best’ act that hypes up excitement until the final climax. This formula has achieved high viewing ratings in the UK (Britain’s Got Talent) and is paralleled, for example, in the United States or in France (Incroyable Talent). Other shows such as I’d Do Anything, X Factor or Pop Idol have used basically the same formula and plenty of secondary schools have imitated it in their own end-of-term performing arts events. Most recently, a show called Last Choir Standing has called upon the same formula. A high level of hype is deemed important, with much backstage drama. The metaphors used are those of ‘battle’ and ‘fight to the end’. The values of the show are founded upon the principles of winning at all costs and the entertainment to be derived from this. Quotes from emotional contestants such as ‘this means everything to me, it can make or break us, this is everything’ or ‘We wanna win! Yeah!’ are tied to scenes of hysterical rejoicing at success or sobbing at failure. This values base makes an interesting contrast with the values of sport where the taking part rather than the winning has traditionally been emphasized. Given that much current debate revolves around the degree to which such values are still desirable and may or may not have been undermined by the sports stars seen as role models for boys, this has to be significant. Whilst the musical standards of the choirs presented are undoubtedly high, the choirs are also required to project strong stage presence. Merely standing still and singing will get them nowhere. This has to be partly due to the need to make a prime-time audience which is

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unable to comment on the finer musical points of performance feel that it is able to contribute to the judging. Interestingly, the first episode showed a brief clip of a men and boys’ cathedral choir which was dismissed by the narrator thus: From green field to roast beef, in Britain, we love a good choir. But if you thought they were all like this, then think again.

The point here is not so much that sacred choirs are explicitly put down, though this is undoubtedly relevant given the significance these choirs have had in nurturing boys’ singing talent. It is that few boys other than those with unusually strong personalities and perhaps coaching in stage technique and music theatre would be able to match the adult contestants for the human interest and projection of character which is essential to the show’s success. This was perhaps spectacularly demonstrated by the 2005 Choirboys whose performance of The Snowman on the now defunct Top of the Pops was severely critiqued by other boys consulted during this study. Their objection was to the static and wooden projection of boys with undoubtedly good voices but minimal stage presence. I have also viewed too many embarrassing TV interviews where boy singers are patronized by ‘cool’ young media personalities and the magic of their CD performance vanishes as the mere child is exposed, though for some adults, perhaps, the effect might be the reverse if the impression of cute is enhanced. On a more practical point, school directors of music have informed me that the rehearsal and recording schedules for the show were unrealistic and the programme’s producers apparently naïve about what is involved in organizing the availability of singers from school choirs. It is probably reasonable to pass on with the conclusion that Last Choir Standing has done little for boys’ singing. Recently, an English cathedral chorister came third in the finals of Britain’s Got Talent with a rendition of the ‘the song that’s won the nation’s hearts’ Pie Jesu (John Rutter’s version). I discussed this with classes in several schools at a time when it was still fresh in the children’s minds, showing them a clip to remind them. First, I asked the pupils (aged the same as the singer) whether they personally would have voted for this ‘act’. Overall, very few would have voted for it. Working/lower-middle-class boys were the least likely, at 2 per cent. Middleclass children seemed a little more sympathetic, with 21 per cent of girls and 13 per cent of boys saying they would have voted. Next, I asked them to write down the kinds of viewer they thought would have voted for it, pointing out that clearly a large number of people had as it had come third. Here is a representation of answers given by boys: His family and women who love kids. His family and friends and people that like opra [sic].

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Adults. People who are posh and like opera music.

The perception that this kind of singing was opera was common and was linked to the high register, which several children commented on, inevitably as in ‘he’s like a girl’. Interestingly, a girl gave this answer to the question of who would have voted for him: People who have been bullied, his family, his school and his friends.

The exercise of asking, in one sense, was hardly necessary, given the weight of evidence already gathered and reported in earlier chapters. However, claims and positions need constantly to be retested against emerging data. More significantly, the theme of bullying was one that had run throughout the show, ever since the boy had first announced in public that he was bullied at school for his singing. This was obviously ‘good television’ and the cause of promoting the boy’s esteem and ‘beating the bullies’ was taken up eagerly by the judges, particularly the female one. The children I spoke to in school had clearly picked up on this, identifying that he ‘has got a sob-story to tell’. The significance and appropriateness of this public exposure is perhaps clearer in the answers to my third and most direct question: Do you think [singer] would be a good ambassador for singing? If he went into a school, would it make other boys want to sing? The young people were challenged by this question and though a majority felt he would not make a good ambassador there was not the strong consensus that characterized the question about who would have voted for him. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the issue that divided them was whether the bullying story was an advantage or a handicap. Some felt that having beaten the bullies through singing would make him a good role model or ambassador, others felt the opposite. This rather confirms my earlier point that when singers are scrutinized in the popular media spotlight, the human interest is likely to dominate over any informed discussion of the musical factors. Typical comments from those who thought he would be a good ambassador included: He got picked on and he still went for his dream. (Girl) Because he has experienced bullies and is a brilliant singer. He has also bin [sic] on telly. (Girl) Because it shows that anyone who wants to sing shouldn’t let anyone else stop them. (Boy)

Interestingly in view of the above discussion, one boy wrote:

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These comments, however, represented the minority view. The majority were more likely to make statements such as: Because he is too young and older students wouldn’t do it because he is younger than them. (Boy) Because he got bullied. (Boy) Because it is too high singing for boys. (Boy) You need someone cool. They need to see normal kids singing. (Boy) He thinks he’s all cute. (Boy) Because boys who aren’t as good would be jealous. (Boy) His voice is very feminine so in my opinion not many people would want to sing. (Girl)

Children sometimes need other kinds of hero and the ‘sob story’ of the boy who appeared on Britain’s Got Talent was obviously inspirational to some, though undoubtedly a minority. Bullying remains one of the chief concerns for many children at school. It raises the question of adult mediation of the music industry and the role of teachers in making ‘real’ the celebrity stories that are in the news. ‘Tom’ (see Chapter 8) has had experience of school tours, in his case more directly as promotions for his new single. One could argue that if it brought some pleasure, relief from a dull lesson and even inspiration, then it was harmless. If the motive, however, was purely commercial, then there is no mediation and no critical engagement where it might be needed. It was disappointingly clear to me in my conversation with Tom that the wonderful opportunity to educate about voice through showing how he had progressed through Cooksey’s first three stages had not been thought worth doing by anybody. Indeed, Tom’s immediate past, his very boyhood, was something to be discarded as quickly as possible in the rush to image the ‘cool’ teenager. Some adults, then, it seems wish to keep boys small and cute, others wish to rush them as quickly as possible through childhood. Neither position, in my view, can lead to an authentic representation of boys as singers, still less to contentment amongst ten to fourteen year olds with their transitory status in life. Previous chapters have already shown the considerable pressures on young males to leave behind them the innocence and cuteness of boyhood. Popularly acceptable musical role models are almost invariably young men who have some time since lost their

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boyish treble voices. To this is added the populist moral panic that childhood is being lost and children forced to grow up too quickly. It is worth, therefore, reflecting on something else that we can learn through the responses of boys to the cartoon figures in Figure 9.1.

Figure 9.1  Cartoon figures used in research on boys’ vocal identity My research has frequently taken me to music classes in the eleven-to-fourteenyear-old age group and an activity I have used a lot is that of asking the boys to identify which of the cartoon figures most closely represents themselves. The most frequently chosen, by a considerable margin, is the middle one. This is significant, for the middle one was indeed intended to represent the median position for Key Stage Three – the average state of physical growth of a boy midway through National Curriculum Year 8 (twelve going on thirteen). Boys who did not choose this figure most commonly chose the one on the right, which is intended to represent Key Stage Four, a mean age of fifteen, but could represent an early maturing thirteen year old who was large for his age. The number who did so, however, was small (17 per cent). This suggests that most boys are realistic about how ‘grown up’ they are, at least in a physical sense. Interview data that allows interpretation of this finding tends to confirm, furthermore, that boys are generally happy with this state of affairs. Contrary to the ‘toxic childhood’ panic of growing up too soon, the majority see no need to rush through their middle childhood. When given a list of words that included ‘kid’, ‘child’, ‘boy’, ‘lad’, ‘youth’, ‘young man’ I was surprised by the number of twelve year olds who actually chose ‘child’ as the most authentic representation of who they perceived themselves to be. ‘Boy’ was probably the most frequently selected, but with an interesting regional difference, ‘lad’ being more popular in the North and ‘boy’ in the South. It was words such as ‘youth’ that were less popular. A pejorative meaning was sometimes attributed to ‘youth’ – people who are not liked because they ‘hang out’. This seems to have become an increasing issue with constant media demonization of ‘hoodies’ and ‘chavs’. Few boys of any social class seemed happy with a term that implies adults view them as a potential problem or threat and ‘youth’ seemed often to be regarded as one such label.

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Nevertheless, as we have seen in the foregoing discussion, the music industry very seldom permits boys the authenticity of being that matches this reality of contentment with status during the middle years. Outside such niche markets as sacred choral singing or boys’ opera, they must be either infantilized and dressed down to satisfy adult audiences who want cute, or they must be accelerated toward a more sophisticated teenage to apparently satisfy their own peer market. Making boys the subject of adult fantasies about boyhood sells records to adult audiences but not to teenage audiences. Boys show little interest in the performances of their peers but can be much more readily interested in what the age group immediately above them is doing. Thus the image of Tom as the fifteen-year-old rock singer is bound to be more attractive than that of Tom as the thirteen-year-old peer. This has little to do with the loss of childhood and children growing up too soon. Boys aged between ten and thirteen know that they are entering puberty and changing and it is a perfectly normal and healthy curiosity to wonder from time to time about what they are changing into. Work on boyhood identities such as that of Walker and Kushner (1999) or Frosh et al. (2002) has emphasized a fluidity and experimentation here and Walker’s more recent work has confirmed that it is to the age group above that boys most commonly look for models of what they can see themselves becoming within an imaginable timescale (Walker, 2007). Mechling (2008) has employed the term fratriarchy in preference to patriarchy to reflect the fact that it is the community of older brothers rather than adults who are the main influences on boys’ identity and aspirations. In principle, this may well be the way forwards. It is a system that has operated in men and boys’ choirs for centuries where eight year olds have looked in awe to the thirteen year olds set above them and the thirteen year olds have in turn looked to the men in the rows behind for the image of what they might become as singers. Its rediscovery as a feature of life outside this tradition, however, is fraught with difficulty because we are brought abruptly back to the fact that it is a limited range of adult tastes from a particular social and ethnic tradition that are being promoted by such choirs. The conditions of contemporary life, as have been well rehearsed in previous chapters, are those in which young people invent, reinvent and share amongst themselves a remarkably eclectic musical creativity of youth. It is unlikely that young people will promote amongst themselves the adult desire for thirteen-year-old boys singing in the high register without encouragement, guidance and input from adults who do see value in such singing. This might be sufficient to dismiss the prospect out of hand, were it not for the fact that some boys do value the genre and any male adult who does must once have been a boy. In this section, we have considered that the mass media, as currently constituted, are unlikely to change boys’ attitudes in favour of a more open-minded or less embarrassment driven approach to the use of their voices. Even the boys who themselves perform in the high register seldom listen to recordings of other such performers. In the next section, I consider the very important question of whether live performance makes a difference.

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Live Boys One of the greatest difficulties with all forms of electronic media, setting aside the considerable issues of hype and the kinds of value sometimes promoted, is the simple fact that the element of live performance is inevitably missing. This can make a crucial difference for the reception of boys’ singing. We have seen that most boys seem to tread a tightrope between jealousy and the admiration of talent and skill. This is most commonly sporting talent, but my studies and enquiries have uncovered plenty of evidence that other talents, including singing, can also be admired. Even singing a fairly ‘classical’ number in the high register can be recognized as admirable talent, provided that it is a live performance. The physical presence of the singer(s) and the opportunity this offers to project subtle dimensions of humanity and personality would seem to be particularly crucial in winning over boys unfamiliar with the genre. The majority of boys who are nervous or unsure about the identity a singing voice will give them are looking for two particular kinds of reassurance: 1. 2.

plenty of other boys do this; and/or those boys that do are ‘normal’ in the sense that they also play sport, fight each other, have a laugh and so on.

Anybody who knows and understands children will appreciate that questions, seemingly irrelevant to adults, such as ‘what do you like for breakfast?’ can be asked of a live performer. It is all part of a testing out of the kinds of identity element suggested above and of fundamental importance to children’s developing senses of self and the world. Boys might also want some physical contact, to actually play fight a live performer to see if, though he sings, he is still a ‘real boy’. This point was well illustrated when I organized a concert tour for ‘Yniold’ (see previous chapter) to the UK. When I first interviewed him in Paris, his mother seemed to be in agreement with those popular writers such as Sax (2005) who suggest that schools in England and the United States are in the grip of a ‘political correctness’ which denies boys’ ‘natural’ tendency to rough and tumble. She believed that English primary teachers were over-protective: There’s a lot of physical contact at schools [in France]. It’s normal for boys to fight and teachers don’t generally intervene. [Yniold] is quite capable of sticking up for himself in any fight.

A year later, when he was twelve, his itinerary for the UK included singing Mendelssohn’s Hear My Prayer with a cathedral choir at evensong (the realization of an ambition to ‘do a Lough’), a chamber concert of Bel Canto attended by a mostly adult audience and visits to three primary schools to perform at special assemblies. The pieces we chose for the primary school performances were Walking in the Air (a familiar opening) as well as a florid, mellismatic passage of Purcell. Other than

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Walking in the Air, no concessions were made with regard to the popular or the familiar. I had briefed Yniold beforehand that there was a possibility some children might snigger or say he ‘sounded like a girl’. Most appeared to listen with rapt attention and the audiences at all three schools, regardless of the differing social intakes, were appreciative and well behaved. Yniold commented that, though I had not noticed it, at one of the schools some girls had sniggered, but none of the boys had. The most successful of the three visits was to the school where the Head Teacher really entered into the spirit of ‘entente’ and arranged for Yniold to give a Year 6 class some French conversation lessons and, most importantly, to play with the children at break and have lunch with them. He entered very fully into the boys’ football and rough and tumble and was a match for any boy in the school for stamina and toughness. The result of this was a delayed departure as a long queue of boys (no girls) had formed for autographs. I think this vignette illustrates four things: • • • •

children are perfectly willing to listen to ‘classical’ music if it is sung well by a performer they can relate to; boys do admire talent and this can include singing; boys are reassured by physical contact and boyish rough and tumble; the autograph culture is a firmly embedded part of general consciousness and boy sopranos are by no means excluded from it by their peers.

I think this story challenges us to reflect seriously on what we are doing to childhood and the possibility that singing might be an acceptable activity for boys if we allow celebrity culture and the music industry to create the impression that boys who sing are somehow a world apart from everyday understandings of boyhood. Yet to err in the other direction, to contrive a form of inverted snobbery where only the mundane and indifferent can be celebrated, must also be wrong. This is the situation that English cathedral choristers face on the government funded outreach programme that I have referred to already in Chapter 6. At the time of writing, we are once again in a situation where this very small total number of boys is called upon to exert an influence out of all proportion to their actual number. What is painfully significant is that these boys are almost unique in representing a tradition of boys’ singing that is largely uncontaminated by the kind of existential challenge presented by boys singing a repertoire written either for adult female sopranos or male adults but imitated by a boy. What, apparently, most attracts government ministers is not the possibility that junior choirs might be supported but that choristers will sing with primary school children. The policy driver for this, however, may owe more to such matters as the sharing of practice between maintained and independent schools, and the worthiness of the charitable status of the latter. It probably owes less to a considered response to the question of whether boy choristers can be role models or ambassadors for singing and what the issues might be. Unfortunately, choristers enter schools as ambassadors with two potentially enormous handicaps: they are ‘posh’ and they are ‘religious’. I use these terms

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simply because they are used constantly by the young people I meet in schools and unless thoughtful steps are taken to prevent it, visiting choristers will be categorized as such by the audiences they sing to. ‘Posh’ and ‘religious’, though seldom directly articulated in such a way by young people, carry heavy implications of the cultural otherness of an alien adult world. ‘Posh’, as we have seen, is a near synonym for ‘opera’. For most young people this means any genre of trained, classical singing, particularly the high, florid and mellismatic. The implication of ‘religious’ for many young people of chorister age is that of ‘you might be trying to convert me and I’m not ready for that, please go away’. Whatever our personal beliefs and values may be, we have to recognize that symbols of religion can send out messages that the majority of young people have become unusually unreceptive to. The chorister cassock is one of the most potent of these. I have conducted research in over thirty schools from the Isle of Man to the South East of England and, without exception, there is hostility amongst young people to religious music and few boys will respond positively to the call to sing if they perceive it as recruitment to religion in disguise. It matters not whether the genre is William Byrd or Graham Kendrick. Recently, I used in some schools an extract from Songs of Praise in which a single boy, wearing cassock and surplice, sings You Raise Me Up. There were groans at Songs of Praise and condemnation of the religious setting and dress was universal and absolute. Had this been a live performance by the same boy, however, not dressed in alienating clothes and allowed to relate socially to the children, I am fairly confident that it would have been significantly more successful. Even singing in the high register, done well, might have commanded respect, even if it did not make all the boys want to imitate it. My grounds for believing this are that a surprising number of young people, girls and boys aged twelve to fourteen, said they liked both song and singer and some actually volunteered that the boy’s performance would have been good without the religious trappings. One twelveyear-old boy suggested that he’d like to sing it in class himself, though he did state that it would ‘need to be in a lower voice’. It is probable that they have heard this song in a variety of secular settings and do not associate it with an inspirational religious sentiment. The boy band Westlife, for example, included the song as the cover track on their 2005 award winning album. A very popular version was also recorded in 2003 by Daniel O’Donnell. In the case of the cathedral outreach scheme I have managed myself, a compromise has been reached with the director of music whereby the choristers sing in their ordinary school uniform but then show the children the ‘special clothes’ they wear to perform in the cathedral. One or two children are then invited to try these on. This has a degree of integrity to it. The choristers are not pretending to be something they are not, but neither are they presenting as something completely alien. There is evidence that the children seem to appreciate this but most importantly, as in the case of Yniold’s tour, it is the personality and humanity of the boy (and girl) choristers themselves that wins the children over.

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The choral animateur working on the project was intrigued to know what a boy who had tried on a chorister cassock thought about it and asked the teacher to report back to her. This, apparently, is what Tieran thought of the experience: It was hot, I was boiling. I enjoyed wearing it in front of the school. It was exciting when the choristers’ teacher put it on me.

A positive comment received from primary school children on their reciprocal visit to the cathedral reveals that the choristers had been good ambassadors: All the children were being really friendly to us, showing us around everything even though they didn’t know us. The singing was beautiful to listen to and to join in with.

The order of priority in this statement is very revealing. The choristers were first being friendly, showing their human side. The singing, though beautiful, came second. Quite possibly the positive affect of friendliness influences the cultural judgement about the singing. This tells us a great deal about the ambassadorial role that might be played by children. This particular scheme has progressed further. Choristers were first given roles to listen to the primary school children’s singing and comment on it, giving advice. This went down well, indicating that the children’s singing as well as the choristers’ was valued. Then came a request, ‘why can’t we comment on their singing?’ A perfectly reasonable one in the spirit of entente and one which could even lead to frank exchanges such as ‘Well, why do you sing so high?’ Perhaps even the question ‘why do you sound like a girl?’ might be asked. This need not be challenging if seen as honest dialogue between young people trying to understand each other. That, I think, might be an ambassadorial role but how many choristers would be able to answer it and how many boys attend schools where such honest curiosity is encouraged? There is other evidence that choristers can be ambassadors. In the early days of the scheme, I travelled with a group of Truro choristers and observed them at work with some Cornish primary school children. The warm-up exercises were in some ways the most interesting part of the school workshop as the choristers sang exercises that reached ever higher and higher beyond the range of the school choir. The boys in the school choir seemed impressed, but I was anxious to find out what they really thought. I spoke to three of them later: What did you think of those boys who came into your school today? They were cool. They were way better than us. That’s ’cos they practice every day.

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This, however, has to be contrasted with Vincent’s observation in Chapter 5 that the choristers who came to his school were ‘weird’, or Robert’s observation that ‘they snigger and call us girls’. This may have been linked to other issues of presentation because the choristers Vincent observed had been wearing cassocks and ruffs during this particular visit. Vincent had also reported that his friend had been bemused by the ruffs, wondering how the choristers could possibly breathe in them. This would be typical of the kinds of thing that primary age children notice and the kinds of practical question they ask. If children are to be ‘ambassadors for singing’, too much ‘cultural strangeness’ is likely to be counterproductive. There has to be a meeting at least half way between the familiar and unfamiliar in both repertoire and dress, which we seemed to achieve successfully in the case of Yniold’s tour and the dressing of choristers in ordinary uniform. It is, where it exists, full-in-the face cultural imperialism and the associated arrogance of any who would not see the necessity for sensitivity and respect for differing cultural backgrounds that is likely to be counter-productive. I use the word ‘arrogant’ by the way, on the authority of one of my young informants. I was intrigued to be advised by a fifteen year old who had volunteered to contribute his opinion about choosing boys as ambassadors for singing that ‘You must vet for arrogance’. I did not need him to explain where he was coming from, though he did with some eloquence. I think this is very sound advice. I have met some delightful boys during my research but not all of them have had the social maturity to realize that they might come across as arrogant in an ambassadorial role. It is worrying if they grow up and reach positions of authority and influence without ever attaining this maturity. The danger then is that the ambassador role might be confused with the missionary role, perhaps through nothing more sinister than naivety or lack of cultural awareness. Choristers’ outreach singing becomes missionary when it is undertaken on a deficit principle that the choir school knows everything and the primary school nothing. The job of the choristers is thus seen as spreading light in a world of darkness and the missionary analogy is a good one for such enterprises are generally likely to be undertaken in the same ignorance of other peoples’ culture as were the nineteenth-century missionary attempts to condemn indigenous cultures as heathen. The cathedral organists I speak to vary in their understanding of this. Some are very good with primary school children and have an instinctive understanding of the ambassadorial role. Others have viewed the whole outreach scheme with distaste – something they are compelled to do by the ever present threat of chorister shortage and the need to present a public face of ‘political correctness’. At least one I have interviewed, however, has been directly under this impression that his role is a specifically missionary one. His understanding of outreach seemed to be quite genuinely that the government had turned to the choir schools in despair because the state schools, or more to the point, the children attending them, knew nothing at all about music. I suspect there may be more than a few others.

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At the time of writing, there has been no quantitative study against a base line of whether chorister outreach programmes have led to a significant shift of attitude toward singing by boys in the crucial eleven-to-fourteen age group, although an important evaluation study of the National Singing Programme by Welch is in progress (Welch, 2008). I am not often in favour of the randomized control trial approach to social research, but this might be one of the times I am prepared to make an exception. Such data would be useful in countering the tendency to allow the agenda to be controlled by positively spun publicity stories that capitalize on the thank you letters primary school children can be compelled to write. What we need to bear in mind here is that choristers, typically aged eleven, twelve or thirteen, are singing to boys and girls just a few years younger. The eight-to-ten age group is absolutely crucial in the case of boys for it is during that time that many boys drift away from choir as they see increasingly that girls dominate the scene and that other boys will call them names for not being sporty enough. I call this swamping – the problem is not that no boys want to sing, but that girls are so keen to and so much more assured in doing so that boys are crowded out. The assurance of the bigger twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys who are not normally seen in primary school can be very effective in countering this, but if there is no cultural connection with the singing and no understanding of the vocal technique, the process of swamping by girls might even be exacerbated. Many girls will be inspired by what they recognize as ‘beautiful singing’ and will want, enthusiastically, to do more of it themselves. Boys, however, might simply be confused because insufficient attention has been given to explaining to them what happens to their voices as they go through puberty and why choristers, like some adult men falsettists (including rock stars such as Sting or Jeff Buckley), can sing so high. A growing alternative to the Choir Schools scheme is the increasing seriousness with which state funded performing arts specialist schools are taking their own primary outreach role. Such schools are required to make contact with their feeder primary schools to promote their specialism. Generally, these state maintained high schools offer a much more eclectic musical outreach than chorister singing. Not only might there be drumming workshops for boys or other kinds of instrumental try outs, but all kinds of singing by bigger boys and girls that is likely to be much more culturally familiar. This might include rap or beat-boxing and when undertaken by fifteen and sixteen year olds the effect on ten year olds can be awesome. One exceptional success story is that of Guildford County School in Surrey which, at the time of writing, has some 180 boys in its own boys’ choir. Some of these boys, like choristers, are involved in visits to primary schools to promote singing. The effect in Guildford has been significant. It was never the intention to audition for the boys’ choir, but this has become a necessity as a result of the numbers of new eleven year olds wishing to join. It is likely that the effect of bigger boys making it ‘cool’ is a significant part of this phenomenon. The bigger boys, however, do not sing in high chorister voices. The sound of the choir is a mixture of new baritones and cambiata. The singing is pitched in the modal range and is a good illustration of how this can be discovered by descending four

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semitones from the speaking pitch centre and exploring the approximate octave range from that point. Guildford County provides a good example of how high boys might sing if it is only the modal register that is to be exploited and the sound is undoubtedly ‘boyish’. An example on their CD which has been well received in the schools I have visited is the Johnny Nash song I Can See Clearly Now. Once again, cathedral choristers are left as the only significant live demonstration of the upper register. Another of the main issues to be overcome, apart from the ‘swamping’ referred to above, is that for both boys and girls, school singing can be perceived as ‘babyish’ and the transition to secondary school is often seen as a rite of passage when such things can be put behind. The problem here can often be the words more than the music itself or the use of voice. One secondary school head of music summarized it well when she explained to me ‘They don’t want to sing songs about eat up your vegetables any more’. What is being referred to here is the power of music to convey message and the way this is enlisted in the education of young children. Once again, it is the message that adults want, whether a religious one or one about eating vegetables. The age of eleven is the beginning of the age of rebellion and, like it or not, young people take great notice of the lyrics of songs. If these are not seen as authentic in relation to young people’s interests and concerns, rebellion to some degree is almost a certainty. Often it is the young people’s own lyrics that serve this purpose best. Secondary school heads of music often say to me that the music publishing industry is biased toward primary schools. Whilst these teachers can be criticized for offering their pupils a diet of recycled, dated ‘pop’, many of them complain of a surprising dearth of alternatives unless the teacher is prepared to roll up his/her sleeves and create in-house arrangements. Another successful example of outreach is the Sage Gateshead’s Creative Transitions project and a case study of success with boys illustrates this point. Apparently at a school in Newcastle the music teacher had noticed that ‘during singing assemblies the older boys often messed around’. A successful solution to this was to bring in Creative Transitions to work with the Year 6 boys on writing a piece of music with a R&B groove backing track: ‘So they wrote a song – it had this cool rhythm – with a bit of a singalong chorus and a rap and they took it to assembly … with the result that these young men were out the front leading’ (Music Manifesto, undated)

This project, on the one hand, illustrates the importance of creativity and ownership in children’s music. The UK National Curriculum, after all, stresses the three equal activities of listening, composing and performing and there is little doubt that songwriting inspires children’s interest. On the other hand we have seen that it was the invention of new forms of music by young people themselves that drove the inter-generational split that has become so significant in boys’ singing. To limit aspirations to a ‘singalong chorus’ and rap illustrates a classic failure to engage with the issue of dealing with boys’ voices and their full potential. These boys are

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not really behaving as eleven-year-old boys, they are imitating the behaviour of the young men they aspire to be and, as we have seen so clearly in earlier chapters, this cannot really count as authenticity in boys’ singing. It is of possibly considerable significance that the word ‘young men’ is actually used in the write-up of the event – the young people have transitioned from ‘boys who mess around’ to ‘young men’ through their participation in this particular composing and singing project. It is as though ‘boys’ are irrelevant to singing and a profound statement is made here about the significance of boyhood. A growing strand within the National Music Manifesto is the use of young vocal leaders. This is another initiative that requires a full and proper investigation and evaluation. There is little doubt, however, that it is based on a valid principle – older boys and young men hold the key to resolution of the inter-generational split that has bedevilled boys’ singing with issues such as ‘posh’, ‘religious’ and ‘for grannies’. Extremely challenging questions thus arise. Which older boys and young men will act as vocal leaders, how will they be trained and prepared and what will they say to younger boys about voices? It seems unlikely that young vocal leaders will offer much more than rap or R&B without some form of adult mediation. Indeed, there is a whole literature to draw on here of the behaviour of young trainee teachers in schools. We have, therefore, also to face the question of which adults will mediate, what ideas they will come up with and how they will relate to the young vocal leaders and the audiences they will reach. References Boy Choir and Soloist Directory, (21 March 2007-last update), Darren Burn, available at http://www.boysoloist.com/artist.asp?vid=467 (accessed 15 August 2008). Frosh, S., Phoenix, A. and Pattman, R. (2002), Young Masculinities, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kroker, A. and Cook, D. (1988), The Postmodern Scene: Excremental culture and hyper-aesthetics, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Mechling, J. (2008), ‘Paddling and the Repression of the Feminine in Male Hazing’, THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, 2 (1), 60–72. Music Manifesto (undated), ‘Getting Engaged’, available at http://www. musicmanifesto.co.uk/features/details/getting-engaged/21972 (accessed 20 February 2008). Sax, L. (2005), Why Gender Matters: What parents and teachers need to know about the emerging science of brain differences, New York: Random House. Walker, B. (2007), ‘No More Heroes Any More: The “older brother” as role model’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 37 (4), 503–18. Walker, B. and Kushner, S. (1999), ‘The Building Site: An educational approach to masculine identities’, Journal of Youth Studies, 2, 45–58. Welch, G. (2008), ‘The SingUp Survey’, Sing Up: The magazine for the Music Manifesto National Singing Programme, (Summer), 14–15.

Chapter 10

The Future This chapter is really a postscript, but one in which I inevitably give in to the temptation to make some at least tentative predictions about the future of boys’ singing. The title of the book is in the form of a question; how high should boys sing? It is not unreasonable therefore to expect by the last chapter an answer. Of course, there cannot be a simple, numerical answer. We cannot say that the answer is ‘900 Hz’ and the thought is amusing in its absurdity. I did point out in the first chapter that numbers can seldom give satisfactory answers to very much at all in the social sciences. One answer that I am going to give is one that I find painful but have become resigned to accepting. It is that there are in fact two answers, one for a wealthy and culturally narrow minority, one for the large and culturally diverse majority. For the former, the answer is as high as the full exploitation of the human voice in its immature male form will permit. For the latter, the answer is as high as songs from the shows and charts that can be transcribed for young male voices normally range. Those show songs specifically written for boys because a child part is actually called for (Oliver! Smike or Joseph being obvious examples) have the advantage of not requiring transcription or transposition. It is painful, nevertheless to have to give two answers that are not always compatible because it is so much an issue of the divisiveness of social class, and I think the reader will by now have realized that I find the idea that so many boys are excluded in this way largely repugnant. I still recall the brashness and naivety of my own youth as a teacher when I set arbitrary targets for ‘fifty per cent boys and fifty per cent girls in the choir’. The wisdom of years and the insights of research have taught me that boys will always be a minority in relation to girls when it comes to singing. There are more subtle questions to be addressed and explanations to be given and I earnestly hope that I have explored them with some lucidity in the preceding chapters. What I think really matters is the relative size of the boy minority, the way it waxes and wanes, the way it is so unevenly distributed across the different social classes and the degree to which a postcode lottery operates in respect of the chances any boy has of coming into contact with a singing leader who will inspire him and know how to develop his voice. I hope I have not made a cultural judgement with regard to the relative worth of the two answers I have proposed. One point that I have made is that middle-class boys can be surprisingly eclectic in their tastes. The contents of their iPods might include Mozart arias and grunge in the same file. I don’t think I run to grunge, but my CD collection is more eclectic than readers who imagine I listen only to sacred choral music might think. My real point here is that, as a middle-class male I, like middle-class boys, have been empowered to make choices and do so

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from a position of high cultural capital. I think I have argued during this book for such opportunities to be generally more widely available and the possibility of choosing boys’ singing in any genre that is authentic for that resource to be more often included. It is worth also reiterating that my argument is more that singing is good for boys (and thus, ultimately, everybody) than that the boys’ voice is indispensible as a musical resource. If music were to unite the world and do away with divisions of gender, class, ethnicity, belief, place and generation, I should be a happy person. Let me deal first with the second of my two answers, for it is the one that applies to the large majority of boys, numbered in tens of thousands rather than mere hundreds. For boys of any social class or background who do not sing, I have reached the conclusion that an introduction to singing has to be through the modal voice, possibly extended a little into the higher register if a teacher or trainer who understands how to do this is available. For boys of around eleven years of age, this is going to give a working range of approximately the A below middle C to something like the A or B above it. Possibly the C or even D above middle C might be available but this is pushing the limit of the range and there is a danger of strain or break into a weak falsetto for the last few notes. Some boys with naturally lower voices will find it less comfortable to reach the top of the range than others and my inclination would be always to err on the side of a lower and smaller range unless the boys have elected to join a singing activity and are up for vocal adventure. I am well aware that there will be perhaps more than a few who disagree with me and there may be some potential criticisms to answer. The first point I would make is that this kind of singing is not, and must not be seen as, second best to extended singing in the across-the-full-potential range. It is the dominant mode of singing in our culture at the present time and any attempt to dismiss it is an attempt to dismiss nearly all the music with which most boys will be not only familiar but also disposed to sing. This puts me particularly at variance with those earlytwentieth-century writers who have been so concerned to stress that children’s singing, if not undertaken in purely the ‘head voice’ is ‘rough, strident and harsh’ (see Chapter 4). The world has moved on hugely since then. Bad singing, however produced, can be rough, strident or harsh and I would agree that primary school teachers can damage tone if not voices through an insistence on singing as loudly as possible because that is about the sum total of the knowledge they are able to impart about vocal technique. Good singing in the modal voice, however, is possible and to deny this now is to dismiss the work of many artists and composers in a variety of genres that is bound to invite accusations of narrow mindedness. It is worth reiterating that few of the many boys I have spoken to in writing this book have shown such narrow mindedness – eclecticism and cultural omnivorism would be good key words. Here again is the advice that was given to me by the young men (age range thirteen to eighteen) of the youth choir I have worked with on how to interest boys

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in singing. These were young men who only a small number of years ago were singing high treble parts in some of the most demanding and difficult pieces of the classical choral repertoire: • • • • • •

fun, enjoyable to sing mostly already known (current but perennial) not ‘classical’ not ‘little boys trying to be rock stars’ easily singable in chorus, i.e. fairly square/metric rhythms (with drum kit?) not idiosyncratic solo vocal (e.g. have you tried transcribing Let It Be for voices in chorus?) extended chest register? Well, not choirboy head voice, whatever that means!

My contact with these young men came late on during the research and I was struck time and time again during conversations both formal and informal by the degree to which they were simply reiterating so much of what I had already found out. I think they are giving first-class advice and it is all the better that it comes directly from boys rather than an ageing academic. The admonition ‘not little boys trying to be rock stars’, for example, is so consonant with the stories told in Chapter 8. These young men, furthermore, are not being patronizing. Indeed, they themselves brought this topic up and were categorical in their insistence that few things put boys off singing more than a combination of trite childish songs presented in a way that ‘talked down’ and insisted that ‘you must be happy because this is singing’. Again, I have heard this from so many boys so often before but older primary school children are still often offered a diet of mainly ‘babyish songs’. I think it really important to make a distinction between ‘fun and enjoyable to sing’ and the trite and childish. Let us not forget how many boys enjoy the thrill of risk taking, and that can be in difficult vocal passages as much as on the saddle of a fast moving mountain bike. I would like to go further than these young men, however. I would want to stress the intrinsic value of the well-produced boy modal voice itself. I have long believed the sound of ten- to fourteen-year-old boys with unchanged voices singing in the lower part of their register to be both beautiful and unique but this seems to be a minority view. This has to be, I suspect, largely because this sound is not the ‘voices of angels’. However, let us be bold in making a virtue out of this. It is the sound of boys. After all that has been written in preceding chapters about the problems of ‘cute’ and the vocal existential crisis I do so wish that more composers, arrangers and song writers would take it seriously. I have given some space in preceding pages to the cambiata principle because it is one of the few systematic attempts I have found to create singing and repertoire specifically for boys as if boys mattered. The Cambiata Vocal Institute of America, under the leadership of Don L. Collins, maintains this tradition and continues to publish music designed to keep boys singing during voice change (see CVMIA, undated). I have not, in

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the final analysis, been convinced that the fitting of the voice to Cooksey’s stages in quite as much detail as seems to be done in cambiata is always necessary. Boys who are already trained singers often have a sufficient range to move down to a conventional alto part, but for boys who might be new to singing at the age of eleven I think more attention should be paid to the principle in the UK. There is a passage in Britten’s Missa Brevis that exploits superbly the low boy register and I find it as spine tingling as any high angel sound, but this is rare. What is needed is for some of our best composers and arrangers perhaps to study the cambiata principle, but certainly to give really serious thought to the boy modal voice during the years of puberty as a largely untapped musical resource. These composers might then produce a repertoire that boys can begin to learn in the top years of primary school and be enthusiastic to develop in the lower forms of secondary school, perhaps with the promise of harmony parts added by the bigger boys. In saying this, I am perhaps updating and interpreting Kodaly’s golden principle that music for youth should be either good arrangements of the best of national folk culture (and here I include many of the ‘classics’ that have come from a broad range of genres that I shall refrain from calling ‘popular’) or good composed music written specifically by skilled composers who understand and value the resource they are writing for. Children feel unvalued if they are made to wear only second-hand clothes that do not fit properly. Does the analogy with boys’ singing need to be spelled out? What are the prospects for this kind of development and thus the future of boys’ singing? I believe that they are potentially good. In the words of another fourteen year old who hugely enjoys his singing: I think that music is a natural part of life and it’s really unnatural for boys to just say, just think that it’s unnatural because it really is something that’s completely pure.

If he is right and boys are presented with the right material in the right way, they will ‘naturally’ join in. I believe he is right because I have seen this happen, in secondary schools where ‘boys don’t sing’. From time to time, windows of opportunity arise and one of the most significant in recent years in the UK has been the SingUp National Singing Campaign, funded to the sum of £40m by the New Labour government to which I have referred from time to time in previous chapters. This has been targeted up to the time of writing exclusively at primary schools, and I think this could be a huge lost opportunity if it is not extended to secondary schools. It might be imagined that secondary schools do not need as much support but the one constant complaint I have heard from secondary school music teachers throughout my research is that they do. Too often they are faced with a choice of the unsuitable, their own arrangements (for which they have little time) or nothing at all. Not that many of them are vocal specialists and, paradoxically, their specialist musical training can make them more aware of shortcomings in singing than primary teachers.

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To reiterate the main point then before moving on to consider my other answer about the prospects for ‘head voice’ singing, it is that most boys will sing up to an A or B above middle C in their modal voices. Good singing and natural singing in this register is possible. We need to hear more of it and enough good composers and arrangers need to study boyhood and take the boy modal voice much more seriously as a resource. Most importantly of all, boys themselves will be much more likely to accept it without the ‘sounds like a girl’ objection that applies to the head/falsetto voice. Turning now to the boy voice, in its full range of capability from head/falsetto downwards, my conclusion is that this is a small, specialist niche and a particularly difficult one to fill. It cannot be the model to be held up to all boys as the example of how they should sing. First, boys must become interested in singing. When an interest is captured and loyalty and respect earned, the voice can be extended by those who know how to do this. But what is the repertoire for this? At the moment we have a choice between the great classics of sacred choral music and ill-fitting second hand clothes. Once again, there is a need for good composers to find new ways of exploiting the boy head/falsetto voice that do not rely on the purely sacred repertoire and are not recycling of music written for other kinds of voice. Film music is one such genre that some good composers have tackled, but often a boy who has had chorister training is needed to perform it. As we have seen, the adult audience is important. I have written much about the so-called ‘grannies’ and I have tackled such difficult issues as the role of nostalgia and homoeroticism in adult male audiences for boys’ singing. If I have at any time been perhaps a little unkind in what I may have written about such audiences, it is only because I have tried to write the book from the viewpoint of boys, to present the world through the eyes, ears and feelings of the young singers who have been its subject. Boys are not without their faults and if some of them hold private feelings of contempt for ‘grannies’ who like John Rutter, they need to be reminded that ‘grannies’ brought their mothers into the world and that John Rutter is a very highly respected musician to whom they might aspire. That has always been the task and privilege of caring for boys. It is clear, however, that without the adult audiences, the sound of the high boy voice would probably not be heard. We would certainly not have the amazing collection of CD recordings of boys’ voices that it is possible to access. In looking to future prospects, I see the need for the adult role to be extended from that of passive audience to active mediator. I have devoted a lot of space in preceding pages to expounding the idea that the generations have grown apart and that it is the very enthusiasm that adults have for ordering boys’ singing to their own tastes and fantasies that has made much of it ‘uncool’. It cannot be right, however, to dismiss the wisdom and experience that older generations can pass on to the young. It is not that we truly live in a society of complete non-communication between boys and adults. It is more the case that the rules of engagement have changed. The best youth–adult dialogue has become more a dialogue of mutual, earned respect than deference demanded by right. A difficulty that I see here is that the

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adults that have adapted most successfully to this are usually younger themselves and the pool of such adults who value and understand the boy voice in a way that is useful to boys is a very small one. It does not include that many teachers. Outside traditional men and boys’ choirs (usually sacred), there are now very few opportunities for boys to strike up friendly mentoring relationships with knowledgeable adults. Whilst I have emphasized the importance of protecting boys from adults with malign intentions towards them and would stress that again, it cannot pass without comment that the way we currently handle child protection has been largely destructive of youth–adult relationships. Some means of moving beyond this impasse will have to be found and this may well include the development of technologies and protocols that allow safe and responsible communication between boys and adults on the internet. If these difficulties can be overcome, I think the boy head/falsetto voice will continue long into the future. It is not, like the defunct castrato voice, something that has had to pass into history for the obvious reason of severe physical abuse. It is a minority taste, but that I now see as a strength. Minority tastes are part of the rainbow panoply of life’s diversity. Biodiversity, as any biologist will say, is more resilient than monoculture. The history of totalitarian states seems to be that they always fall to the rebirth of diversity. Even if it died out altogether, future generations would rediscover that boys had voices. We have seen how the English cathedral tradition has played such a huge part in boys’ singing. The outreach of cathedrals in this day and age has probably grown rather than shrunk. Behind the scenes and largely unsung they provide the training of the choristers who are then selected to play roles in film and opera or record albums such as those of The Choirboys. Choirs rehearsing whilst growing numbers of tourists and visitors of no religious persuasion either photograph them or perhaps sit quietly to hear and wonder at the ‘sound of angels’ in the unique setting of a great medieval building have to be significant. Cathedrals, however, are going to have to face harsh economic realities. The buildings are becoming ever more expensive to maintain and the relative means of chapters and dioceses ever smaller in relation to this. Yet still music foundations remain one of the highest costs of any cathedral and the absorption of girl choristers into the economics of the system has placed it under severe stress, whether this be simply the provision of twice as many bursaries or the even greater challenge of building new accommodation for girls in expensive city centres. One thing that I can foresee is a split between the big, prestigious cathedrals such as Canterbury, St Paul’s or Winchester and the less well known provincial ones. In this split it is only the former that continue to maintain traditional boys’ choirs whilst the latter reluctantly face up to the need to amalgamate boys and girls, either for financial reasons or because the fight to recruit good boy choristers from a scarce pool when so many able and enthusiastic girls present themselves is lost. This is a prospect I face with dread because if it is only the wealthiest cathedrals that maintain boys’ choirs I can only see it as a further enhancement of the social class divide about which I have written so much. For me, it would be a

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step too far down the road of social division and one that would detract too much from the prospect of the boy chorister as a meaningful part of our culture – unless, perhaps, the government stepped in to fund the places. The subsidy of cathedral music in ways similar to the subsidy of opera would hardly, though, be a robust answer to my concerns about social class. A church choir is behind the phenomenon that is known as Libera. I have to confess that I do not feel confident that the Christian church, for all that it has contributed in the past, is an entirely safe pair of hands for the future of boys’ singing. In my own lifetime I have seen too often the destruction of a good parish church choir. Sometimes such choirs have simply faded away for want of a leader able and committed enough to continue recruiting boys against harder and harder odds. At other times, however, destruction has been a wilful and calculated act characterized by all the bitterness, envy and spite of the human heart that sustains popular TV soaps. Indeed, the ‘culture wars’ that have been fought between guitar strumming clergy, obdurate organists and their respective supporters probably overshadow such soaps. They certainly confirm the power of music in the forming and sustaining of human identity. Perhaps they are symptomatic of an ancient institution in painful and protracted death throes. I must admit that a lifetime of such experiences have destroyed for me much of the credibility the Church has as a force for good, though I still know and admire many good and committed individuals within the Church. I still believe though that the opus dei of choristers, the idea that they are singing for a purpose higher than mere entertainment, self-glorification or the acquisition of wealth is a noble thing. Indeed, it becomes more and more so, whether or not there is a god, as the vanity of so-called celebrity culture grows daily in its vacuity. This personal belief, however, will not sustain boys’ singing in the head register. Setting aside the reissue of old recordings, I see two possibilities for the future here. First, there is the creeping secularization of sacred music itself. We have seen that there are some choristers who do not themselves believe in the god to whom they sing and many others who have doubts. I know from a number of personal conversations with choirmen and lay clerks that this is true of some adults too. We have Walters’ study (1992) that tells of how the great sacred choral works are appreciated in a ‘spiritual’ though non-religious way by many singers in choral societies. We have my own study with which this whole programme of research began. Boys can value music and singing in a deeply spiritual way that, if not the opus dei, is certainly not the triviality of wanting to appear on X Factor. There are, of course, many concert performances of smaller works in the sacred repertoire. Some take place in concert halls, some in cathedrals or churches functioning in that role, and many of course over the air waves or in iTunes downloads. The great question here of course is that of how many of these will be by boys’ voices. There are not many at the moment. To the question of how many in the future, I supply with confidence the frustrating answer ‘some’. My point is that all the research I have carried out with boys confirms over and over again the fact that there are many young boys who would grow to love

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this music were they given the opportunity. We do not, as I have said, know how many boys there are like this but I suspect the answer to this question is almost certainly more than ‘some’. Controversially, I will suggest that the numbers might even rise were the singing of this music to be detached for more boys from religious obligation, but this is still, I suspect, some time in the future. It is clear to me that some sorting and repositioning of the cultural capital that is the music teaching force between private and state schools in England may need to be part of this process. Second, there might, as I have suggested several times, be a reappraisal amongst serious composers of the boy voice. This is something I have looked vainly for over recent years, even to the extent of committing significant sums of money for commissions from composers who clearly have not understood the brief. It is all the more extraordinary given the regular use of male falsetto voice in so many genres including mainstream pop, but I have had much to say on this subject throughout the book. Perhaps the world awaits another Benjamin Britten. What a second coming of Britten might be like in today’s world is a profound question but I would like to conclude all that I have written about boys and singing with a sympathetic reference to Britten’s pacifism. I cannot honestly say whether or not I would be a pacifist were another war to break out. My generation is the one that ‘never had it so good’ as boys during the 1950s and ’60s and, notwithstanding whatever may happen in the years I have left to live, it has been the generation after world wars and before the real possibilities of climate change and massive readjustment of the global economy have to be faced by everybody. Perhaps that makes it one of the most privileged of all generations. I am against war, but that is a bit of a motherhood and apple pie statement. I am even more against the brutality, inhumanity and injustice that leads to wars and such a position can demand a principled stand that might not absolutely exclude a fight if the call were ever to come. What then of ‘a boy sings … a beautiful thing’ and the War Requiem? At least equal to the pain of social class division, I feel the pain of boys who are badly treated. For if we treat boys badly, we must not be surprised if so many of them grow up to inflict that pain on the next generation, whether it be the knifing to death of an innocent sixteen year old or more traditional forms of male violence such as wife-beating or the invasion of other countries. Fundamentally, the conditions, attitudes and beliefs through which unkindness and brutality toward children happen are in place today as much as they have ever been. We have created mountains of child protection bureaucracy but we cannot legislate for the human heart. Only the day before I drafted this chapter, a fourteen year old poured out to me his experiences of sustained, spiteful and abusive bullying by a housemaster who had taken a dislike to him. It happens. In the year 2008, it happens to choristers in spite of child protection. According to the boy, it happened because he had dared to question the teacher’s racist behaviour. I believed this boy and I admired his resilience and determination to treat younger boys better himself as a result of his experience. At least we now have boys who stand up and question racism.

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So yes, perhaps it is true as the Boychoir website says: “a boy sings … a beautiful thing” (Boychoir, undated). Sublime, pure, noble – and beautiful too. But why does such innocent beauty co-exist with brutality and spite? That is the subject of another book about boys which I do intend to write and I do not expect the answer to be 666 or any other number that might be found at the end of the universe. References Boychoir (undated), Boychoir website, available at http://www.boychoirs.org/ (accessed 3 November 2007). CVMIA (undated), Cambiata Vocal Music Institute of America website, available at http://www.cambiatapress.com/CVMIA/cvmia.htm (accessed 21 May 2009). Walter, T. (1992), ‘Angelic Choirs: Why do people join choirs and sing texts remote from their individual beliefs? A sociologist looks for answers’, The Musical Times, 133 (1792), 278–81.

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Index

1843 Theatre Regulations Act 32 1944 Education Act 35 1964 Education Act 36 Adams, Cliff 33 adolescent 139 Adorno, Theodor 38 agency 44, 57, 66, 68, 69 Albertsson Wickland et al. 67 Alexander, Robin 16 All our Futures 38 ambassadors 108, 117, 149, 158, 160, 161 amplitude 52 Anderson, Lindsay 35 angels 2, 23, 25, 50, 61, 111, 115–18, 130, 133, 167, 170 Appleby and Fowler 80 Archer, J. 6 Arnold, Mathew 28, 29 Arnold, Thomas 29 Arundale 31 Ashley, M. 10, 20, 59, 62, 88, 97, 100, 102–4, 112, 115, 127 Ashley and Lee 9, 18, 80 Askey, Arthur 33 Aspbury, Patrick 62, 80 audiences 66, 73, 103, 111, 119, 122, 125, 126, 135, 141, 151, 164 adult 73–6, 106, 108, 133, 136, 156, 157, 169 adult male169 boy 73 cognoscenti 75, 125 elderly 100, 103, 125, 127, 129 girl 74, 120, 129 granny 75, 111, 116, 119 middle aged 125 older 123, 127 peer group 73, 88, 100, 121, 127, 128, 137, 139

school 107, 158, 159 secondary school 140 teenage 156 young 118, 119, 127 Auty, Peter 37 Baden-Powell, Robert 30, 79, 80 bands 20, 105, 117, 118, 124, 136, 142, 147, 149 boy 74, 76, 86, 119, 121, 130, 146, 159 rock 100, 101, 138, 144 baritone 30, 43, 46, 48, 68,107, 162 Barsham, Derek 34 Barthel, Denis 34, 64–6 Bayton, M. 141 Beale, R. 81 Because 33 Beck, J. 112 Beet, Stephen 31, 33, 34, 58, 61, 63, 64, 68 Behr, Mark 85 Bennett, A. 38, 116, 141 Better Land 34, 68, 125, 129 Billsborough, Matthew 36 Binder, Steve 76 blend 61 Bonner, John 34 Bourdieu, Pierre 9, 12, 13, 15, 116 Bowman, M. 115 Boy, The 76 boy artists 61, 62 bands 74, 76, 86, 119, 121, 130, 146, 159 Boy Choir and Soloist Directory 150 Boy George 89 boyhood 5–8, 17, 23, 27, 28, 30, 34, 39, 60, 69, 74, 75, 83, 139, 147, 149, 154, 156, 158, 164, 169 Breen, Bobby 34 Brett, J. 88 Bridcut, J. 83–5

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Brigg, Raymond 37 Britain’s Got Talent 130, 151, 152, 154 Britten, Benjamin 53, 59, 82–6, 88, 89, 168, 172 Brock, Stevie 77, 118 Brownlee, N. 118 Buckley, Jeff 53, 162 Buffery, John 33 Bulger, James 113 Burman, E. 89 Burn, Darren 150 Burt, Sir Cyril 35 Button, S. 81 Byrd, William 159 cambiata 46, 48, 49, 69, 107, 162, 167, 168 Cambiata Vocal Institute of America 167 Carey, J. 13, 112 Carpenter, Humphrey 84, 85 castrato 63, 64, 66, 170 cathedral organists 48, 49, 97, 161 Celtic Women 32 Chanticleer 68 Chapel Royal 25 Chapman, J. 51–3, 57, 62 Chapman and Morris 52 child protection 33, 82–4, 170, 172 voice 42, 43, 46 Children’s Rights Alliance for England 8 choir directors 3, 17, 81, 100, 105, 146 masters 60, 62 trainers 61, 65 Choir, The 37 Choir, The: Boys Don’t Sing 70, 103, 123 Choir of the Year 95 Choir Schools Association 93, 101 choirboy 17, 18, 27, 28, 32, 33, 77, 78, 82, 86, 93, 100, 103, 104, 106, 108, 122, 167 Choirboys, The 37, 80, 105, 117, 118, 125, 152, 170 choirs boys’ 1–3, 24, 29, 30, 69, 74, 81, 95, 97, 98, 123, 125, 127, 135, 149, 156, 162, 170

cathedral 12, 17, 37, 44, 46, 66, 69, 97, 101, 111, 125, 129, 146, 152, 157 chapel 67 children’s 68, 96 church 17, 75, 171 girls’ 60, 61, 73, 76, 97 gospel 144 junior 18, 158 men and boys’ 1, 29, 30, 74, 95, 156, 170 sacred 3, 152 school 61, 124, 152, 160 single sex 37 youth 20, 69, 93, 106, 124, 134, 143, 145, 146, 166 choral music 3, 6, 100, 107, 144, 165, 169 choral specialists 10 Chorister of the Year 36, 69, 96, 99, 118 choristers 3, 18, 20, 25, 28, 30, 32, 33, 36, 46, 50, 53, 60, 62, 64–7, 69, 75, 80, 81, 83, 93–106, 108, 112–14, 118, 119, 122, 125–8, 136, 138–40, 145, 152, 158–63, 170–72 Church, Charlotte 32, 139 Clapton, Eric 16, 73 class blindness 14 middle- 8, 13–15, 31, 97, 143, 144, 152, 165 social- 8, 9, 12–15, 19, 37, 69, 93, 97, 127, 136, 143, 144, 155, 165, 166, 170–72 working- 8, 12–14, 28, 31, 32, 35, 97, 144 Cleobury, Stephen 59 Cohen, S. 38 collagen fibres 50, 52 Collins, Don L. 49, 54, 68, 69, 167 colonialism 29 commercial music industry 77 Connell, R.W. 10 Connolly, P. 9, 97, 98 continental tone 59, 60, 66 Cooksey, John 44–7, 49, 53, 64, 65, 136, 154, 168 Cooper, Irvin 47–50 Cooper and Wikstrom 48 Cope, J. 26 Cornysh, William 25

Index Corpus Christi Carol 53 Crabbe, S. 9 Crawshawe, William 26, 27 Creative Transitions 163 Criddle, Thomas 33 cultural awareness 161 capital 13, 14, 126, 144, 166, 172 norms 39, 68, 78 culture(s) celebrity- 158, 171 commercial- 38 musical- 32, 53 national folk- 168 tavern- 33 western- 10 youth- 31, 35, 38 Curwen, John 51, 58 Daddy 31 Davidoff and Hall 30 Davies, Iwan 31 Dawkins, Richard 114 Day, Leslie 34 Death in Venice 86 Dennis, J. 80 D’Ewes, Simonds 26 Dewey, John 113 Dickens, Charles 28 Dillon, J. 39 directors of music 152 Doyle, Paddy 78, 79 Drew, W. 51 electrolaryngograph 45, 53 elitism 15, 36 Elliott, George 33 Elvis Australia 76 Embrace 85 Epstein et al.. 9 ethnicity 9, 12, 166 Evans’ Supper Rooms 32 Evolution’s Rainbow 78 father figures 81, 82, 84 fathering 6, 81, 84, 85, 149 fathers 11, 75, 81, 149, 150 feminism 10, 61

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Fiennes, Dean 97 Fiennes in Woodward 96 Firth, Freddy 34 Foucault, Michel 10, 15, 27 Francis and Skelton 9 Frank and Sparber 44 Freke, M. 29 frequency (sound) 43, 45, 52, 53 Fron Male Voice Choir 32 Frosh et al. 156 Fuchs et al. 67 Furedi, F. 33 Gackle, L. 67 Galbraith, Declan 62 Garcia, Manuel 53 Garner, R. 16 gay 80, 86, 134 gender 5, 6, 10–12, 18, 23, 31, 37, 41, 88, 97, 166 generation 8, 10, 15, 16, 34–6, 38, 41, 142, 144, 149, 166, 169, 170, 172 Gill, J. 85, 86 girls 1, 2, 6, 8–12, 16, 23, 24, 30, 36, 41, 42, 48, 49, 53, 58, 61, 63, 67, 73, 74–8, 83, 86–8, 93, 96–8, 101, 103, 104, 118–22, 126, 128, 129, 133, 136–8, 140–42, 145–7, 149, 150, 152–4, 158–63, 165, 170 Gittens, D. 24, 25, 118 Glaser and Strauss 99 Graham, D. 27 Green, Lucy 9, 13, 127, 142, 144 Green, Paddy 32 Greer, Germaine 76 Greg et al. 99 Grew, T. 135 Groth, M. 6 growth boys’- 45, 46 of the folds 44 physical- 41, 42, 64, 155 pubertal- 44 spurts 44 testicular- 45 Guest, George 59 Guildford County School 123, 162, 163

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Hackett, Maria 33 Haddock, Master 31 Harries et al. 45, 46 Harris, Robert 62 Haunch, Bernard 60, 61 Hawkins, S. 134 Hawtrey, Charles 33 Hayley, Bill 34 Headington, Christopher 84 heads of music 163 Hear my prayer 33, 157 hegemonic masculinity 10, 58, 79, 96, 102, 141 height 9, 42–6, 64, 67, 83 Hemmings, David 84–6 Hendrix, Jimi 35 Henrich, N. 51–3 heterosexuality 78, 85, 86, 89 Higginbottom, Edwin 73 Hill, David 59 Hill, Roger 38, 116 Hird, Thora 111 Holland, P. 77 Holly, Buddy 34 Holm, Ann 114 Holy City 32 homosexuality 79, 80 Horton, Douglas 80 Howard, Francis 51, 57, 58, 70 Hughes, T. 29 I am David 114, 115 Ibson, J. 80 I’d Do Anything 151 identity generational- 15 vocal- 139, 155 If 35 image 14, 15, 27, 28, 32, 37, 38, 54, 70, 75, 77, 82, 99, 112, 116, 120, 121, 123, 134, 140, 142, 156 imaging 107, 118, 120, 125, 126, 139–41 imperialism 28, 29, 161 Incroyable Talent 151 Indianapolis Children’s Choir 68 innocence 2, 24–6, 28, 83, 86, 87, 89, 118, 125, 133, 154

Jackson, C. 77 Jagger, Mick 133 James and Simpson 67 Janssen, D. 6 Jeal, T. 79 Jenks, C. 24 Johnson, Al 33 Jones, Aled 37, 111, 112 Jones with Henley 111 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 17 Jung, Carl 113 Juul et al. 67 Keble, John 28 Kehily, M. 10 Kendrick, Graham 159 Kincaid, J. 24 King, James 80 King’s Singers 68 Kings College Choir 59 Kingsley, Charles 28 Kodaly, Zoltan 147, 168 Kroker and Cook 118, 150 Langfeldt, T. 25, 27, 85 Langston, Harold 34 larynx 42, 51, 107 Last Choir Standing 151, 152 Last Rose of Summer 32 Leck, Henry 68 Ledes, A. 24 Lee, E. 32 Lemon-Behrend 31 Lennon, John 16 Leppard, Raymond 84 Libera 74, 75, 105, 112, 171 ligaments 50, 51 Lightfoot, Gordon 33 London Weekend 76 Long, K. 83 Longhurst, B. 34 Lough, Ernest 33, 34, 37, 64, 76, 77, 80, 129, 157 Love with Frazier 9 Luff, A. 59 Lumsden, Sir David 59 lungs 63

Index Mac an Ghaill, M. 6 MacManners, Joseph 37 Madge, N. 38 Malcolm, George 59, 60 Mallet, Ronald 80 Mangan and Walvin 29 Marlowe, Christopher 26 Marston, John 26 Martino and Pallotta-Chiarolli 9, 89 Martinson, F. 87 Maslow, Abraham 113 mass 42–5, 50, 52, 63 Massey, Roy 36 McCrary, J. 12 McVicker, W. 59 Mechling, J. 80, 150, 156 melancholia 6 Mendelssohn, Felix 33, 129, 157 Mercer, J. 115, 116 Mika 53, 135 Mills, J. 144 Mills et al.. 9, 67 Morris, Harry 82 Morris, J. 83, 86 mothering 6, 37, 133 mothers 6, 7, 29, 75, 104, 107, 114, 119, 120, 125, 128, 129, 133, 157, 169 Mould, Alan 1, 24–6, 33, 75, 93, 97 musclemass 44, 63 power 9 vocalist 9, 52 music – cathedral- 14, 36, 59, 171 choral- 3, 6, 100, 107, 144, 165, 169 classical- 12, 13, 35, 87, 112, 119, 128, 130, 158 film- 169 gospel- 12 halls 32 indie-punk- 136 industry 77, 123, 130, 135, 150, 154, 156, 158 pop- 87 R&B- 119, 135, 163, 164 rap- 127, 128, 135, 136, 138, 142, 162–4 religious- 159

179 rock- 36, 37, 39, 99, 100, 111, 119, 133, 136, 138, 141, 142, 146 rock and roll- 34, 35 sacred- 28, 99, 100, 105, 113, 114, 124, 171 serious- 87, 112, 118, 126, 127 teachers 10, 36, 168 techno- 127, 128 technology 9

Naidr et al. 44 nasal cavities 51 National Curriculum 155, 163 National Curriculum Council 113 National Music Manifesto 14, 164 National Singing Programme 18, 70, 107, 162 National Song Bank 106 Neely, Billy 34 Negus, 38, 40 Neslund, Douglas 9, 22, 80, 81, 82, 91 Nethsingha, Andrew 59 Newman, K. 38 Newton, Wayne 48 Night Nursery, A 31 Oakley, A. 23 O’Donnell, Daniel 159 O had I Jubal’s Lyre 31 Oliver Twist 28 oral cavity 42, 51 Orme, N. 25 Ousely, Sir Frederick Arthur Gore 28 Oxford Movement 28-30, 36, 93 Oxley, Harrison 97 paedophilia 79 Palmer, S. 38 passagio 51, 53, 54, 68, 129 patriarchal power structures 77 patriarchal society 23 patriarchy 24, 76, 156 Payn, Graham 34 Pears, Peter 84 peer pressure 97 peers 7, 9, 20, 37, 68, 89, 97, 103, 105, 112, 114, 120, 122, 124, 128, 130, 135, 139, 142, 150, 151, 156, 158

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Pehrson, B. 60 perceptual tests 61, 62 performance 9, 15–17, 25, 33, 46, 53, 65, 73, 76, 87, 96, 99, 100, 105, 112, 127, 128, 130, 133, 135, 136, 139, 140, 152, 156, 157, 159, 171 performer 16, 34, 39, 41, 46, 69, 73, 75, 85, 122, 133, 134, 137, 139, 142, 156–8 pharynx 42, 51 Phillips, A 103, 112 Phillips, Peter 61, 73, 97 physiology 41 pitch adolescent- 47 singing- 47, 68 speaking- 42–4, 46, 47, 49, 50, 64, 65, 69, 70, 163 voice- 46, 47, 107, 134 Pleck, J. 6 Pop Idol 151 Pope Gregory 24 Presley, Elvis 34, 76 puberty 41-43, 46, 57, 61, 63–8, 70, 78, 83, 105, 107, 156, 162, 168 Pugh, R. 81 Puritanism 26 Rachmaninov 50 range baritone- 49 modal- 50, 64, 68, 69, 107, 162 soprano- 66, 68 Reay, D. 77 register – chest- 63, 106, 167 high- 62, 63, 68, 107, 108, 153, 156, 157, 159 higher treble- 140 low boy- 168 lower- 66, 106, 107, 134, 139 lower treble- 63 modal- 69, 107, 163 thick fold- 57 thin fold- 57, 63 upper- 163 Reiter and Lee 67 religion folk 111, 115, 116

Renold, E. 87 repertoire – choral- 18, 32, 36, 48, 64, 93, 95, 167 classical- 36, 106, 108 crossover- 37 sacred- 169, 171 Rich, Adrienne 78 Richard, Cliff 133 Robinson, K. 38, 116 Robinson Report 38 Robison, Clayne 51 rock bands 69, 100, 101, 138, 144 music 37, 99, 111, 133 stars 106, 136, 162, 167 Rock School 136 role models 11, 70, 81, 121, 129, 147, 150, 151, 153, 154, 158 Rolling Stones 133 Roughgarden, Joan 78, 79 Royal Chapel of the Savoy 31 Rugby School 29 Rutter, John 126, 152, 169 Sage Gateshead 12, 163 St Augustine 24 St George’s Chapel 26 St Michael’s College 28 St Paul 24 St Paul’s Cathedral 26, 170 Salisbury and Jackson 10 Savage, M. 13, 14, 116 Sax, L. 157 SCAA Forum 113 Schindler and Holbrook 74, 75 Schlotz, Robin 50 Schofield, Trevor 34 schools choir- 2, 3, 19, 28, 62, 66, 85, 93–5, 97, 100, 103, 127, 161 comprehensive- 19, 36, 103, 138 grammar- 19, 35, 36, 143 independent- 36, 106, 158 maintained- 35, 48, 106, 127 modern- 35 performing arts specialist- 19, 144, 162 primary- 9, 18, 19, 70, 95, 101, 102, 105, 113, 118, 121, 157, 162, 163, 168

Index private- 94 public- 29, 30, 34–6, 48, 66, 69 secondary- 19, 105, 121, 151, 163, 168 single sex- 70 state- 13, 18, 36, 95, 161, 172 schoolwork 7, 8, 35, 74, 142, 143 Scott, John 59 Scott, Tony 76 Scout Association 98 Sederholm, E. 42 Shakespeare, William 25, 26 Shapiro, M. 26 shouting 59, 136 Sinatra, Frank 76 Sing and See 42 singing – choral- 3, 12, 48–50, 61, 129, 146, 156 classical- 52, 100, 159 leaders 150 rock band- 100 teachers 42, 44, 46, 49, 65, 66, 105, 108 SingUp National Singing Campaign 101, 168 Slater, Christian 76 Snowman, The 37, 152 Songs of Praise 111, 112, 159 sopranos 6, 16, 31–4, 36, 37, 50, 62, 64, 66, 68, 73, 84, 125, 129, 158 speaking – fundamental frequency 43, 45 voice 41–3, 47, 49, 107, 134, 135 spirituality 12, 39, 111–16 sport 1, 9, 10, 18, 70, 77, 86, 94, 102, 103, 151, 157 Stewart, A. 60 Sting 162 Swain, J. 9 Talbot, Marianne 113 Tanner, J. 45, 64, 67 Tate, Nick 113 teachers music- 10, 36, 168 primary school- 166 singing- 42, 44, 46, 49, 65, 66, 105, 108 Tears in Heaven 16, 73 Teddy boys 34, 36, 38 teenagers 77, 100, 103, 136 tessitura 48, 50, 68

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testosterone 45, 134 Thalben-Ball, George 33, 64 Thompson, M. 62 Thompson et al.. 102–3 Thornton and Bricheno 80 Timberlake, Justin 53 Tissot, 27 Tito Schipa Bel Canto tradition 51, 128–30, 157 Titze, I. 42, 46, 65, 70 Tolzer Knabenchor 94 Tom Brown’s Schooldays 29 tone continental- 59, 60, 66 head- 60–63 Top of the Pops 152 Tosh, J. 29, 31 treble 6, 19, 24, 25, 30, 36, 44, 46, 64, 67–9, 107 Trollope, Joanna 37 True Romance 76 Trundle, Dierdre 53 Turn of the Screw 69, 84, 85, 87 Tweedie, Thomas 34 Uncommon Caring 80 underachievement 8, 9, 38, 143 UNICEF 7 vibration 50–52 Vienna Boys Choir 94 vocal apparatus 97 coach 65, 139 folds 42, 44, 47, 50–53, 61, 63, 107, 134 identity 139, 155 mechanism 42 music 9 technique 15, 162, 166 voice alto- 48 angel- 27, 115, 116, 126 baritone- 50 boy- 42, 43, 48, 58, 60, 116, 118, 125 broken- 41, 42 cambiata- 48 change 46, 48, 64, 67, 69, 137, 139, 167

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changing- 1, 47, 49, 125, 134 chest- 51, 57, 58, 60, 104 child- 42, 43, 46 coaches 44, 49 falsetto- 51, 53, 57, 65, 134, 135, 169, 170, 172 girl- 49 head- 51, 53, 54, 59, 60, 68, 73, 104–8, 133, 134, 139, 166, 167, 169 high- 24, 25, 30, 33, 34, 39, 78, 88, 89, 103, 107, 127, 128, 134, 135, 137, 139 infant- 43 low- 108, 139 modal- 41, 50, 51, 59, 62, 69, 70, 107, 139, 166–9 pitch 46, 47, 107, 134 pre-mutational- 108 scientists 65 singing- 41, 49, 58, 59, 74, 134, 157 soprano- 49, 63, 105, 127 speaking- 41–3, 47, 49, 107, 134, 135 specialists 105 thin fold- 58, 70 treble- 16, 19, 35, 46, 69, 73, 74, 83, 114, 118, 125, 130, 135, 145, 149–51, 155 unbroken- 1, 2, 41, 44, 137 unchanged- 46, 111, 119, 136, 146, 167 whole- 107 young male- 18, 41, 57, 165 youth- 43 Wald, G. 118 Walker, B. 156

Walker and Kushner 5, 156 Walking in the Air 37, 157, 158 Walter, T. 12, 113, 171 Watts, B. 17, 117 Way, Anthony 37 weight 37, 42, 44–6, 64, 67, 83 Welch, G. 70, 162 Welch and Howard 61 Welch et al.. 42, 44, 61 Wesley, Susannah 27, 28 Wesleys 28 Westenra, Hayley 32 Western culture 10 society 10 Westlife 76, 133, 159 Wicks, Allan 81 Whitehouse, Mary 33 Whiteley, Sheila 76, 133 Williams, J. 60, 66, 134 Williams, Robbie 134 Williams et al.. 67 Willis, Paul 35, 97 Wing Chan and Goldthorpe 14, 116 Winston, J. 77 Wogan, Terry 111 Wordsworth, William 28 Wright, Denis 34 X Factor 123, 124, 151, 171 Youth Music 8, 18, 136