Vocal Agency
“Critical to our human existence is the fact that our voices define who we are. My voice is me. Your voice is you.”
​David Howard, vocal acoustician
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“The phonic emission of the voice communicates the true uniqueness of the one who emits it.”
​Adriano Cavarero, philosopher
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A boy's voice belongs to him and is one of the most intimate and personal elements of his identity, yet also one of the most public. The sovereignty he exercises over it is what I call his vocal agency. The purpose of this page is to demonstrate that once adolescence is reached, boys have considerable vocal agency. They are not the hapless victims of a biological "voice break". In Chapter Two of Dead Composers and Living Boys there is a lengthy discussion of the potential conflict between traditional practices that have evolved from the work of the "old masters" and modern voice science. The two versions of Where 'er You Walk below were recorded by the same boy on the same day. The soprano version is a traditional "head tone". The baritone version is what science says he should be doing. The boy's agency was initially to sing soprano because his voice had changed relatively early and he was embarrassed to be singing noticeably lower than his classmates. He then to changed to baritone after the science had been explained to him.
I recently contributed a chapter to the new Routledge Companion of Voice and Identity entitled Doing Voice My Way: renegotiating male vocal identity at adolescence. The three boys featured, unlike the transitory example above, made long term career decisions about the vocal identity during the years of middle adolescence (14 - 17). Cormac is well-known on these pages, Cai and Eric less so. Each is now progressing well in their young adult careers, developing the vocal identity chosen at a critical time in their lives. The examples are of their teen, not young adult voices.
​Cai represents the traditional classical route. Encultured as a young boy into a church choir, he became "the superstar treble of the moment" when his album Seren was released. His last professional recording in a pre-baritone voice was of Suo Gan for the ITV series Pembrokeshire Murders which he sang a fifth lower than the treble version in Seren, an excellent example of voice deepening before "breaking". As a teenager he did not want to "do some crazy pop thing" but neither did he want to cling on to his former identity as a treble. The price to be paid was several years in the wilderness between child superstardom and adult singing career.
Eric took a very different view to Cai, believing that teenage baritone voices are dull and lacking beauty. It would not be right to say that he was reluctant or unable to let go of his former unchanged voice. At age 15, his desire to be a "teen boy soprano", inspired by his childhood hero the late Derek Barsham was an entirely positive choice, one that preceded in his mind his eventual ambition to become an adult male soprano, an ambition he has now achieved. Eric insisted in interview upon the identity of "soprano" and not "sopranist", a term that is more often used by men singing in the highest vocal range. This was very much related to technique, Eric's being the old "head tone" learned through imitation of teen sopranos such as Ernest Lough, though in Eric's case particularly Barsham. The voice is not as unusual as is often supposed. Adult male sopranos were not rare in the eighteenth century and some voices, once thought to have been castrato, were perhaps more like Eric's. Just in case there be any doubt, he speaks in a completely regular baritone!
Cormac's early teen years saw him taking increasing control of his vocal identity. As an eleven-year-old recording for Decca, Cormac had been "not that bothered" to let his parents and the record company choose repertoire which, inevitably, gave him the identity of "cute little boy". With the advent of teenage came increasing vocal agency and the desire to construct his own identity which, in Cormac's case was as a ballad singer/songwriter inspired by Ed Sheeran. One issue of identity that bothered him a lot on moving to senior school was to assert amongst his peers that he was absolutely not an opera singer. He had discovered for himself a fact in How High should Boys Sing? - any accomplished high voice is perceived as "opera" by the peer group. Cormac was fortunate to pass quickly through the difficult midvoice IIa stage and achieve much the kind of vocal identity he sought far more quickly than the lengthy path to classical adult voice that Cai had chosen. Amply demonstrated by Country Roads!
And so . . .
"Of all the angles that have been examined, the one that it seems to me that endures and trumps even voice science is vocal agency, which gives us the answer “as high as they like.”
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