Early Music and Boys
I was once accused by a campaign that aimed to keep cathedral choirs free of girls of “wanting to make boys sing pop music”. Nothing could be further from the truth! In my ideal world, rather more boys than do would sing early music. Of course, Tallis, Byrd, Taverner, Shepherd and a host of other renaissance composers are included in the repertoire of our cathedrals and collegiate churches, but the early music movement almost never uses boys. Given the theme of this website, only one conclusion is possible. Boys are not valued in historically informed performance. This seems odd to me since the historical part played by boys is both substantial and beyond dispute. Of course, as Richard Taruskin famously observed, "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 there are very good reasons for not leaving things solely in the hands of our cathedral and collegiate choirs. For me, the alarm bells begin to ring whenever I consider the fact that when boys do sing music from the renaissance they are almost invariably required to sing as trebles, even though the most common part for boys was the meane. Read Looking for sopranos that can sing high and not wobble.
Just coincidence?
The range of the medius part, given in this instance by Magnus Williamson in his edition of the Shepherd Magnificat, and the "cambiata" voice in the first stage of change identified by Irvine Cooper and later confirmed by John Cooksey are almost the same. The considerable experience of boys' voices at the early stage of change that was accumulated during the Boys Keep Singing and Emerging Voices projects has convinced me that this voice and not the unchanged "treble" was indeed the most common boy voice during the renaissance (and beyond). Were this knowledge to be more widely valued, interesting opportunities for research and historically informed performance would surely open up. Read about a significant disagreement between Andrew Parrott and Roger Bowers.
The English Reformation
If we are to explore this possibility, 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, the more common medius or meane existed in England alongside the rarer and 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
Bioarchaeology
Modern reproductions of historic instruments are very carefully researched. Authentic materials are painstakingly sourced and manufacturing techniques are faithfully copied. 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, though we can suppose that in most key aspects, the vocal mechanisms of living boys do not much differ from their forbears of the sixteenth century. The theory that the most common singing voice, the meane, was that of a boy who was just beginning puberty and whose voice had therefore just begun to change very much stands or falls on the timing of puberty in history. Until recently, it was commonly believed that puberty came significantly later during previous centuries than it does now. If this were true, boys of twelve or thirteen would have been more, not less likely than currently living boys to have had unchanged treble voices. However, our understanding of historic puberty has taken a quantum leap forwards over the last decade through a proliferation of ground-breaking bioarchaeological studies. These have been able to determine with previously unattainable accuracy when puberty began and how long it lasted. There is a strong level of agreement that it began during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries between the ages of ten and twelve, much as it does now. The most common voice, the meane, may well therefore have been that of a ten to fourteen year old whose voice had just started to change as a result of the first onset of puberty.
Read Peak Height Velocity: time to bury a persistent musicological myth?
Pitch Standards and the Early English Organ Project
Historic pitch standards create a further issue. 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. Read about Edmund Fellowes and countertenors. 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. There are good grounds, however, to believe that upward transposition also makes it easier for boys trained to sing a soprano line (still referred to as "treble) as has became the normal practice from the nineteenth century onwards.
Boys and Quire Pitch at Romsey Abbey
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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 about the consequences of singing in the range C4 to D5. The boys who were most able to do this were those whose voices had just begun to change. Unchanged voices suffered a weakness towards the bottom of the range which resulted in a danger of their lowqest notes being masked out by the organ or another part at similar pitch. Read Upward Transposition and 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.
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Small Choirs Big Boys and Bach
But is he big enough?
Possibly, yes!
Belief in a much later puberty is most commonly encountered in writing about Bach’s time in Leipzig. We have learned from the bio-archaeological studies that, though boys began puberty at a similar age to today, progress through puberty was generally slower. The few exceptionally able boys who lasted long enough with Bach to sing a cantata would, therefore, very likely have been bigger than the equivalent boys today, though at least some would have been falsettists. n 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! I have had to write an update! Read this essay But is he Big Enough? An update on Small Choirs, Big Boys and Bach. Then bookmark and check regularly the progress of Concerto Vocale.