A forthcoming article of mine refers to the pole position of John Cooksey in research on boys’ singing. If one takes as one’s measure a citation count, the number of times an author’s work is cited in other papers, then Cooksey undoubtedly is in pole position. I was sitting in a coffee bar outside the Guildhall School of Music and Drama recently, debating the issue with a highly regarded authority on the singing voice who ventured the opinion “Cooksey’s got it all buttoned up.” Well, as my current project to examine the voices of 1000 boys reaches boy number 409, I have to say that Cooksey does seem to have it “all buttoned up” …almost.
But there are nagging doubts. Every scientific discipline has its seminal writers and “grandfathers of theory”. We are all familiar with Einstein in the physical sciences and perhaps Bourdieu in the social sciences. Anybody who has a passing familiarity with physics will know that Einstein replaced Newton as the grandfather of theory. They will also know that, setting aside the quantum world, Newton’s laws still work admirably well to explain an awful lot of everyday things to do with gravity and motion. They might know of recent work that has attempted to challenge Einstein’s crucial ideas on the speed of light. (We don’t serve neutrinos in here. A neutrino walks into a bar.)
Perhaps a comparable challenge to the orthodoxy of Cooksey comes from Henry Leck. Cooksey is clear that the most important pitch ranges for the development of changing voices are the newly emerging primary ranges in the various stages he describes. He cautions against encouraging boys to sing falsetto whilst ignoring the new voice that is developing below the habitual treble range. Leck appears to disagree, calling Cooksey’s stages “hypothetical”. He says they “perpetuate the myth that once the voice changes the high voice disappears” and argues for an expanded range of three or more octaves during mutation. The two appear to have rather different solutions for the boy’s future vocal health.
This is intriguing because I have two boys right now with quite spectacular three octave ranges! What’s more, contrary to Cooksey’s claim that at the age of thirteen or fourteen they will not want to use their high voices, they absolutely do! I’m still drawn to Cooksey as clearly the more substantial body of thorough scientific investigation, but Leck leaves that nagging doubt. Are we on the cusp of a scientific revolution in boys’ singing? It’s uncertainties such as this that not only define science but drive science forwards. Beware of gurus peddling certainty!
