Boys Keep Singing

What became known as "Boys Keep Singing" was officially known as Widening Young Male Participation in Chorus - a title chosen to reflect its fundamental intention and avoid the word "choir", known to be a disincentive for many young people. It was funded by the AHRC as a knowledge transfer project, that is to say a project that aimed not to create new knowledge, but to transfer existing knowledge to practitioners in the field. It was a collaboration between myself as principal investigator and co-investigators Professor David Howard and Dr Jenevora Williams. David was at the University of York when he was co-investigator, moving to become Head of the Department of Electronic Engineering, Audio, Biosignals and Machine Learning at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is widely recognised as an expert in voice and acoustics. Jenevora was singing consultant and teacher-in-residence for the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain when she was co-investigator. Her PhD study of the vocal health of boy choristers was a landmark in the discipline. My contribution as PI was the result of my work on gender justice.

Values Behind the Actions

Of course I cannot speak for my colleagues, but why should I have devoted so much time and effort to keeping boys singing?

Gender equity - Now in Western culture an absolute, so girls should enjoy science science and boys should enjoy singing.

Knowledge - Knowledge is power. Teachers should have good subject knowledge of boys' voices, particularly when they are changing.

Leadership - a strong, committed leader is to be found wherever boys buck the trend and sing, so a highly valued quality.

Time - a key principle of BKS was that sport and singing should not clash in the timetable, so time management by schools must not necessitate sport to be missed for choir.

Emerging Voices

Emerging Voices was the name given by Oxford University Press to the choral leaflet series that developed from the Boys Keep Singing Project. The series follows closely the cambiata concept, and composers and arrangers invited to contribute to it were given a set of guidelines to follow adapted from the Cambiata Institute of America. Indeed, Emerging Voices was conceived as a UK Cambiata. The whole process is fully described in Chapter 10 of Singing in the Lower Secondary School. The first 13 pieces in the series were recorded by eight of the twenty schools that had been recruited as the "practitioner group" for Singing in the Lower Secondary School. The result is the sound that was intended, unlike other recordings in circulation that have used adult professionals, thus somewhat defeating the object! This is all explained with illustrated examples of voice types on track 14 of the CD. In 2023, I revisited the NYCGB National Boys Choir to record Populating the Parts, a film that shows how the different voice types were allocated to the parts of Oly Tarney's cambiata version of Shenandoah. Well worth watching if you want to know how it all works.

Twenty Years On

It is probably a brutal truth that things have not really changed much. Girls still greatly outnumber boys in singing, most boys still think it's uncool to be in a choir and there is still a postcode lottery whereby in the majority of state funded secondary schools there is little or no singing and where there is, it is heavily dominated by girls. There are a few notable exceptions to this where boys do sing, currently perhaps Balcarras School in Gloucestershire but at the time, Guildford County School, which was featured prominently in the project. Other than that, most boys' singing is found independent schools where it is now threatened in some by VAT on school fees. The point of schools such as Balcarras and Guildford is that they demonstrate that where the knowledge and leadership exist, boys do sing in choirs. When they do, somebody will say "Ah, so it's wrong to say boys don't sing", but this is part of a repeating pattern that has been going on over decades. So in terms of monetary value was it "worth it"? At the time, reviewers for Youth Music and the AHRC thought so (twice), but now I have my doubts. For one thing, though the full Emerging Voices catalogue is still available, sadly there are to be no further commissions. The reason? The series does not earn enough to pay the composers. There could hardly be ant clearer measure of the low value attached to boys' singing than that. This despite the argument the boys need to be civilised and choirs are one of the best ways of doing this. It's on record that we tried!

Key Publications

2008 How High Should Boys Sing? gender, authenticity and credibility in the young make voice. Aldershot: Ashgate.

2008 Boyhood Melancholia and the Vocal Projection of Masculinity, THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, 2(1): 26-45.

2010 Slappers who gouge your eyes: vocal performance as exemplification of disturbing inertia in gender equality', Gender and Education, 22: (1), 47-62.

2010 “Real Boys” Don’t Sing, But Real Boys Do: The Challenge of Constructing and Communicating Acceptable Boyhood. Thymos: Journal of Boyhood Studies, 4(1), 54-70.

2010 The Angel Enigma: experienced boy singers’ perceptual judgements of changing

voices. Music Education Research, 13 (3): 343 -354.

2013 Broken voices or a broken curriculum? The impact of research on UK school choral practice with boys, British Journal of Music Education, On-line first, May, 1 - 17.

2013 The English choral tradition and the secular trend in pubertal timing, International Journal of Research in Choral Singing, 4 (2): 4 – 27.

2015 Singing in the Lower Secondary School. Oxford: Oxford University Press

2018 What voices have emerged? Lessons on boys’ vocal dispositions and choral tone from a new choral leaflet series, Music Education Research. On-line first, 1 - 15.