How High Should Boys Sing?

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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

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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