Historically Informed Performance with Boys
The strangest of paradoxes
​
Richard Taruskin wrote that "Whatever the [early music] movement's aims or claims, absolutely no one performs pre20thcentury music as it would have been performed when new". He was undoubtedly right, but this does not mean we should give up trying because in the trying we learn. Much of the efforts and energies of the HIP movement have been directed at the recreation of historic instruments and the discovery of how to play them. Much less attention has been paid to singers, yet for music written during the Renaissance, singers were the main performers. The soprano Emma Kirkby was a pioneer and it is generally accepted that the more naïve, vibrato-free, cleaner and lighter sound she pioneered is what is appropriate for early music. One reason for the naivety is that early music pre-dates modern operatic training and theories about singing. Another is that the original performers of the part sung by Kirkby were boys. On this page there is information about how the Early English organ project has transformed pitch standards. What might happen to pitch standards if we use boys, the original performers? Is it not the strangest of paradoxes that so much scholarship is devoted to almost every aspect of early music except to its original performers? Read Looking for sopranos that can sing high and not wobble.
The English Reformation
If we are to examine the role of boys in the music of the renaissance and the baroque, then it is vital that we appreciate the significance of the English reformation and its consequences for boys' singing. Before the Reformation, up until about 1540, there were two boys' parts. The more common one was the medius or meane, but in England there was also a higher part called the triplex or treble. Both of these vocal parts vanished with the 1549 Act of Uniformity and the first Cranmer prayer book. After some turmoil when there was little if any singing by boys, the meane part, though not treble, returned. The post-Reformation meane part however differed in a fundamental way to the pre-Reformation meane. Of more limited range, it did not go below our modern middle C - a fact that we shall see on these pages is absolutely fundamental to using boys in historically informed performance, and to learning more about historically informed performance through the use of boys. Read the Curious Case of Thomas Weelkes's Fourth Evening Service.
Edward VI 1537 -1553
Living Boys and Longitudinal Study
The entire raison d'être of this site is the study of living boys. Elsewhere you can read about the longitudinal studies of boys I conducted between 2005 and 2024. Huge amounts were learned from those studies with results such as the Boys Keep Singing project and the Emerging Voices choral series with its accompanying CD, intended to "engage young male singers with changing voices in choral music". Those singers might be found in school or youth choirs, but only rarely in the kinds of choir that sing music by Tallis or Byrd. Therein lies another strange paradox. Boys in choirs that do perform Tallis are almost invariably required to sing as trebles, even though the most common part for boys was the meane! Read about the disagreement between Andrew Parrott and Roger Bowers.
Longitudinal study as it happens!
Jerome is the latest participant and at ten years old not yet far into the process. Like his predecessors he is recording both vocal tests and demonstration pieces at regular intervals, but he is also contributing significantly to the work on historically informed performance. He was asked to perform the top line of Gibbons' madrigal The Silver Swan first at mean pitch and then at treble pitch. Read this account of the lecture Treble or Meane? during which this took place to find out which he preferred and why!
Treble or meane? Jerome contributes
Jerome performs some "early music"
Bonus track
Jerome sings with Libera, a superb choir of world renown but not exactly an early music ensemble! He is, of course, learning and recording the full range of repertoire that any talented boy would record. So here's a bonus track from that repertoire. I will change the bonus track regularly as we move towards the final collection from which we might make choices for a possible album.
Watch here for regular updates!
Pitch Standards and the Early English Organ Project
It is generally accepted by scholars that most choirs today perform renaissance choral music at a higher pitch than it would have sounded when written. During 2017 I was invited by Dr Andrew Johnstone to undertake a residency at Trinity College Dublin where we undertook work together on "quire pitch". The term "quire pitch" refers to the fact that the organs of the sixteenth century sounded at a pitch well above that of the voices. In order to accompany a choir, an organist had therefore to transpose. Andrew's paper 'As It Was in the Beginning': Organ and Choir Pitch in Early Anglican Church Music' remains the most comprehensive analysis of how this was done and the pitch standards of Tudor organs. My interest, or course, is more in the singers and it was during the 2017 residency that I became convinced that quire pitch is unsuitable for adult male falsettists, hence the upward transposition by today's choirs. Much has been written on this topic by scholars such as Andrew Parrott and Simon Ravens. Almost nothing has been written about boys and quire pitch. Here I describe a project undertaken with boys and the St Teilo historic organ during 2018 and another that is planned for 2026 with the Wetheringsett historic organ and boys' voices. Read about Edmund Fellowes and countertenors.
Boys and Quire Pitch at Romsey Abbey
​
In June 2017 I conducted research in Romsey Abbey whilst the choir of sixteen boys and eight men were recording for the Convivium album Tudor Choir Book Vol II. The St Teilo historic organ, a 5' instrument pitched approximately a semitone above A-440Hz was used in conjunction with Andrew Johnstone's new historic edition of Byrd's Second Service, which is written in the modern equivalent of G minor. The sounding pitch with the St Teilo organ was a semitone above this. The boys were treated as meanes and I had the opportunity to assess and analyse their individual voices. A great deal was learned, resulting in new research questions hopefully to be answered during 2026 through research in Newcastle cathedral where the Wetheringsett historic organ is currently housed. Read Upward Transposition and Boys. See also Chapter 9 of Dead Composers and Living Boys.​
A high modal tenor and not a falsettist sings the contratenor verse
A boy aged 11:10 with unchanged voice (SF0>220Hz) sings the medius verse
Blackfriars and the Paule's Boys
An unanticipated bonus of my Trinity College residency was the opportunity to work with a PhD student researching the Elizabethan boy actor/singers from the Blackfriars Theatre and St Paul's Cathedral. The Elizabethan chorister/actor troupes were popular at a time when the post-Reformation meane voice was prominent and, if a scene in John Marston's 1602 play Antonio and Mellida is to count as evidence, somewhat preferred to the treble voice. The composer Richard Farrant is known today for his short anthems Call to Remembrance and Hide not Thou Thy Face, but was chiefly active as a theatrical entrepreneur, founder of the Blackfriars theatre and later the Children of Windsor. He was significant in the early development of the verse anthem. When as we sat in Babylon, which Andrew had been working on, has a prominent meane verse which is a very suitable subject for meane voice research. The paper A high-stretched minikin or a good strong mean? Young masculinity, identity and voice in the late sixteenth century was one of the outcomes of my time in Dublin.
​
Bioarchaeology
Modern reproductions of historic instruments are very carefully researched. Authentic materials are painstakingly sourced and manufacturing techniques are faithfully copied. Read about the St Teilo organ! But do they really create the sounds that would have been heard five hundred years ago? Some scholars doubt that. What, then, about singers? We cannot reconstruct a boy who would have lived five hundred years ago, so we must rely on the fact that living boys are not that much different to their forbears of the sixteenth century. Can that be a reliable assumption? Paradoxically, some scholars seem to think it can! However, there are undoubtedly some key differences. Perhaps the most significant of these is the timing of puberty, a subject about which I have written a great deal. It is a common belief that puberty came several years later in historic times than it does now, but much of what is written on that topic is speculation and sometimes little more than nonsense. Our understanding of historic puberty has taken a quantum leap forwards over the last decade through a proliferation of ground-breaking bioarchaeological studies that have been able to determine with unprecedented accuracy when puberty began and how long it lasted. The topic is covered in Chapter 4 of Dead Composers and Living Boys, and in this more recent essay Peak Height Velocity: time to bury a persistent musicological myth?
Small Choirs Big Boys and Bach
But is he big enough?
This page is mostly about the Renaissance, the glorious age of choral polyphony. "Early music" though does not conventionally end until 1750, the death of J.S. Bach. In 2024 a paper of mine was published in abcd Choral Research Journal entitled Small Choirs, Big Boys and Bach. I quote from it "The German boys’ choirs, excellent though many of them are, seem reluctant to participate in the research necessary to solve this really quite fundamental conundrum". Well, no longer! The Tolzer Knabenchor is now participating in exactly the kind of research that I lamented the lack of. Check it out.
What is the fundamental conundrum?