Values and Singing by Boys
The seminal moment
I had been involved with boys' choirs for many years and had always thought that to get boys to join choirs it was necessary to offer bribes - pizzas, camping trips, a choir football team and, oh, a bit of singing too. Then I carried out the post-doctoral research project on value as a reason for action that changed the entire course of my career. I discovered that boys join choirs because they love singing. There are boys for whom music has an infinitely high value. It is a deeply spiritual thing which they are quite capable of articulating. These pages reflect the value I attach to supporting boys who love to sing and improving our knowledge of how to get the best from and for them
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Read this extract from The Spiritual, the Cultural and the Religious, what can we learn from a study of boy choristers?
On the pretext that speaking voice pitch is a surrogate for progression through puberty, the speaking voices of over one thousand boys aged between nine and fifteen were sampled and analysed in order to create a baseline of where boys were at in the year 2012.
Thirty six boys from varied backgrounds and locations have participated in a full vocal assessment at either monthly or three monthly intervals. This is one of the most comprehensive and revealing of such studies undertaken and the page contains many diverse voice samples.
Go to this page if you still think voices "break". They don't! This page draws largely on the work of John Cooksey and there are four films featuring boys from the longitudinal study that illustrate and explain key phases of adolescent voice change.
Contrary to popular belief, a boy is not the hapless victim of biology when his voice starts to change. Boys are authors of their own destiny and have sovereignty of their own voices. Three boys in middle adolescence have made very different choices, illustrated on this page.
I was founding and series editor of OUP's choral leaflet series that follows the cambiata principles established by Irvine Cooper "The music must be made to fit the voice, not the voice the music". This page explains the how and why of how it all works and includes some interviews with composers who have written for it.
How did the National Youth Choir of Great Britain (boys' section) use Emerging Voices and how did they allocate boys with changing voices to parts? The film on this page answers these questions and includes revealing interviews of selected singers with analysis of their voices.
"the idea of boys singing the mean part in modern performances almost never happens, whichever pitch is chosen" (Peter Phillips). WHY NOT? This is a live page constantly updating with my latest, ongoing research. Let's have If Ye Love Me down a minor third!
Time and time again the same questions get asked by worried parents or their sons. On this page I have assembled a series of short case studies of the most common worries. Consult this first, but feel free to send in a query if it doesn't answer your question!