Boys and Singing: Background History
This page is a brief historical introduction. It is dominated by pictures of church choirs, and that's because the church was once the main patron of boys' singing. It is certainly how I became involved back in the 1960s. Part of the issue today, indeed, is filling the vacuum in boys' singing left by the decline of church patronage.
There are also some sound files and you will need to have Quicktime installed to listen to them. Quicktime can be downloaded for free from www.apple.com/quicktime/
The main photograph shows a section of the men and boys' choir of St. Stephen's Church Chatham, where I was organist during the 1970s. The choir in those days was run by Keith Millar ("Jake") a very charismatic figure who had been a choral scholar under the legendery Boris Ord at King's Cambridge. The choir had over 40 boys and 30 young men in it. During the 1970s, this was not that unusual, though chill winds were beginning to blow. The 1970s was probably the last decade before a rapid decline in the significance of parish churches for boys' singing which is described in my book.
This photo is of some choristers I taught at Lincoln Cathedral during the 1980s. This was a happy period during my life as a young teacher and it was a great privilege to work with such talented boys. Cathedral choirs continue to be important sources of training for boys' singing. Many of the case study boys in my books were trained as choristers before starting their recording careers.
The next photograph shows the choir of St Mary Redcliffe Bristol outside the west front of Washington National Cathedral during their 2001 USA tour in the aftermath of the Twin Towers attack (I'm in the back row!). It was during my ten years as a singer with that choir that I undertook the groundbreaking ethnographic study of how boys value music that was to become the basis of all future work.
The picture that appears on the front of my monograph is of Louis Desire.
Louis, from Paris, was one of twelve highly talented young artists profiled in depth during my AHRC funded fellowship Young Masculinity and Vocal Performance. This study examined what happens when the boy unchanged ("treble") voice is exploited by the commercial music industry and how such recordings are received by peer group audiences in schools (badly). It raised some profound questions about the audience for boys' singing which are seldom addressed. Swing and Sadness was a demo album we recorded with Louis to try and find alternatives to the Danny Boy and "something by John Rutter" repertoire that, in the boys' own words "gets them the grannies". I was delighted when Louis returned to the UK to sing at my inaugural professorial lecture.
You can still view a streaming video of this lecture by going to the events page of the research centre website and scrolling down to inaugural lecture.
Publications on Boys and Singing
