Emerging Voices is a choral leaflet series published by Oxford University Press to engage young male singers with changing voices in choral music. These pages document the full story. This page is mainly about early beginnings with the Boys Keep Singing Project. Go to Populating the Parts for more recent material and how to use the series. The aim is to keep the series fully up to date with developments in understanding of the young adolescent voice and how the series is used by youth choirs and schools in the UK and around the world.  The original inspiration was the Cambiata Press, established by the late Don Collins to realise the cambiata principle of Irvin Cooper.  The last few years have seen Emerging Voices come of age and develop its own distinctive style, different from Cambiata Press material but still faithful to Cooper's original tenet The music must be made to fit the voice, not the voice the music.  On this page you will find not only the history of the series but detailed guidance on the kinds of voice it is intended for and how to make music fit those voices.

The story began in the late 2000s when I was called in by ABCD's North West region who were concerned about the loss of boys at ages eleven and twelve from their North West Honour Choir. This highly successful children's choir, directed by Bob Chilcott, was a case for Boys Keep Singing if ever there was one.  The boys were not keeping singing!  The solution was a lecture on the boys changing voice, illustrated (as always) by some live boys and witnessed by several ABCD members who also happened to be parents of some of the boys concerned and music teachers.  Out of this grew ABCD's Cambiata North West choir which has boasted as many as 160 members over the years.  In the early days, there was hardly any repertoire available for the voice parts outlined in my lecture, so the conductors wrote their own arrangements.