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Boys Singing Togther: A Brief History
by
Andrew Marr, OSB
It seems a fair assumption that boys
have sung together and singly for as long as there have been
boys in the world. But how many people have really heard
boys singing and taken note of the particular quality of
sound that they produce? The numerous boychoirs scattered
throughout the world and the many recordings these choirs
have made show that many people today do take notice of
boys’ singing. Such people might think that boychoirs have
existed at all times and places. They have not. There are
many boys who, if potentially interested in singing in a
boychoir, would have no such choir to join in their town,
sometimes not even in their state and, in some instances,
not even in their own nation. Even in our time and place,
there are is surprising number of professional musicians and
critics who seem unaware of what well-trained boys can
accomplish vocally. I recently heard of a boy who, seeking
voice training, was turned down by several teachers because
they did not think it was worth while to train a male before
his voice changed! And yet, just a few months before this
quest took place, a thirteen-year-old boy named Lorin Wey
had made a breathtaking recording of Handel’s Gloria.
Taking sufficient notice of boys’ voices to cultivate their
sound and channel it into high quality performances and
recordings takes huge expenditures of effort and resources,
not to speak of a great willingness to nourish the young and
an overpowering love of music. When we add the traumas of
war, social injustice and gender issues, we can see that the
boychoir as in institution is highly fragile.
Before Christianity
An institution such as a boychoir can
only occur in a society with a fairly complex level of
social differentiation. For all of the singing and dancing
that takes place in tribal societies, there is little
opportunity for specialized performers to emerge. Even when
a society does evolve to a high level of complexity, it does
not necessarily come to include boychoirs. Ancient China,
for example, developed a musical culture so sophisticated
that they had 300-piece orchestras, but they did not
cultivate boychoirs. The record is no different for the
ancient civilizations of Egypt, India or Japan. The
Jerusalem Temple Cult in Judaism lead to the development of
specialized musicians, but this was restricted to men from
the tribe of Levi. The Talmud does make a reference to the
adding of a few boys’ voices to that of the men “to add
sweetness.” This practice hardly amounts to a choir of men
and boys as we know it today, but it does hint at some
appreciation of boys’ voices in ancient Jewish culture.
The Classical Culture of Greece and
Rome did cultivate choirs of boys for their worship,
especially on festive occasions. A choir of boys was often
considered necessary at sacrificial ceremonies and were also
employed to sing the peoples’ entreaties to the gods in
supplicatory processions. Many singing schools were founded
to train the boys in these duties. Lucian of Samosata surely
spoke for many in his own time as he speaks for many today
when he said that a boy’s voice is “perfectly delicate, not
so deep as to be called masculine nor so fine as to be
effeminate and lacking power, but falling soft, mild and
lovely upon the ear.”
Early Christian Centuries
Christian worship in the first three
centuries was highly congregational and differentiated
choirs did not normally occur. The hymns were almost always
sung in unison on the grounds that unison singing embodied
the unity of the Church in Christ. It is noteworthy that the
active participation of children was explicitly called for
by many early Christian writers. The great fourth century
theologian Gregory Nazianzus noted that the singing of
children “excites compassion and is most worthy of the
divine mercy.” Gregory’s colleague, Basil of Caesarea,
commended the fervent singing of the children and contrasted
their enthusiasm to the lukewarm participation of their
elders.
When the Emperor Constantine
transformed Christianity from a persecuted sect to the
established religion of the Roman Empire in 325, the
organization of the church became more elaborate and
hierarchical structures were solidified. This is also the
time that when women were eventually disenfranchised not
only from active ministry, but also from singing in church,
contrary to much church practice up to that time. One of the
last holdouts of earlier ways was at Edessa where Ephraim
the Syrian wrote hundreds of hymns that were sung by a
women’s choir of virgins and a choir of boys. It became the
practice to train boys as lectors, usually as part of their
formation as future priests and bishops. Singing was part of
a lector’s job and so these boys became choirs that played
an important role in the Church’s liturgy. The Schola
Cantorum in Rome was first formed late in the seventh
century to train their boys in reading and singing, and this
became the model for similar institutions throughout Europe.
Monasteries, an institution that had its beginnings in the
fourth century, often accepted boys among their ranks to
educate them to be the monks of the future. As part of their
monastic formation, these boys sang the Divine Office with
the monks.
By the sixth century, the Roman Empire
had disintegrated in Europe and the resulting social chaos
was not conducive to cultural activities of any kind. For
several centuries, the monasteries were the prime
cultivators of culture and most of the education that
occurred took place in their houses. It was primarily in
this milieu that boys continued to sing the church liturgy
with the monks and priests as part of their education. The
many convents that were also established during these years
took in girls and educated them in much the same way as boys
were educated in the monasteries. Although the nuns were in
a marginal position in the Church, they developed an
impressive subculture that reached its greatest height in
the writings and music of St. Hildegard of Bingen in the
twelfth century.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
As Europe’s slow recovery of social
structures finally gained momentum starting with the tenth
century, urban cathedrals became more important places for
education than the monasteries. This meant that boys’
involvement in sung liturgy also shifted to the cathedrals.
One of the earlier instances of this shift occurred in 957
when Bishop Wolfgang separated his diocese from the Abbey of
St. Emmeran Abbey and moved the choir to his cathedral in
the center of the city. This date is the basis on which the
Regensburger Domspatzen (“Cathedral Sparrows”), as they boys
are called, base their claim to be the oldest continuing
choir of boys and men in the world. Other examples of this
trend nearly two centuries later are the first choir school
founded at old St. Paul’s Cathedral, London in1127, and a
choir established at St. Thomas’ Church in Leipzig in 1212.
A boarding school for choristers at the Kreuzkirche (Church
of the Holy Cross) in Dresden is first mentioned in 1300.
This choir is known today as the Dresdner Kreuzchor. These
schools were among very few alternatives these boys had to
being trained for the noble profession of warfare.
The two basic services in both
monasteries and cathedrals that the boys participated in
were the Eucharist and the Divine Office. The Eucharist is
centered on a ritual re-enactment of Jesus’ Last Supper in
which the bread and wine are consecrated at the altar. The
texts that make up the Ordinary of the Mass which are the
basis of numerous musical settings are mostly peripheral to
this main action of the Mass, but when the Ordinary is sung,
it provides a recurring musical thread for the liturgy. The
Divine Office derives primarily out of the monastic
tradition and is comprised mostly of the Psalms plus
Biblical canticles, of which the Magnificat and Benedictus
taken from Luke’s Gospel are the most important. (In his
Rule, St. Benedict required his monks to chant all 150
psalms at least once in the course of each week.)
The music sung by the boys all this
time was plainsong, commonly called Gregorian Chant, named
after Pope Gregory I. Contrary to popular belief, the pope
did not compose the music himself; he used his position to
order other people to collect and collate the available
liturgical materials, including the music, during his
pontificate of 590-603. Gregorian Chant is meant to be sung
in unison in a fluid manner where the rhythm is governed by
the text rather than musical considerations. The boys in
monasteries and cathedrals would normally have sung in
unison with the men, and so did not really function as a
choir of boys and men as understood today. However, the boys
were also assigned certain appropriate texts to sing by
themselves, usually texts that mention children, such as the
Palm Sunday antiphon: “the children of the Hebrews spread
their cloaks in the road and cried: Hosanna to the Son of
David.” An increasing devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary in
the fifteenth century lead to the creation of Lady chapels
where boys from the local almonry school were trained to
sing at the masses. In 1429, when the boy singers at the
Cathedral in Augsburg are referred to for the first time,
they are called the “Marianer.”
Monophonic chant had ruled the Church
for over a thousand years by the time polyphony broke out in
the music of composers such as Léonin and Pérotin in the
twelfth century. They still based their music closely on
plainsong. Usually they would take a traditional chant
melody and add first one independent voice singing a
descant, and later, a second and sometimes even a third. The
effect was startling. Then, as now, there were some who
complained bitterly of this modern music, but it became too
popular for even the most powerful bishops to squelch it. In
the 1360's, Guillaume Machaut wrote his Messe de Notre
Dame, the first integrated polyphonic setting of the
Ordinary of the Mass. This new-fangled music flowered in the
fifteenth century in the works of Guillaume Dufay, Johannes
Ockegem and Josquin Desprez.
These exciting developments had little
or no effect on the Church’s singing boys for about three
centuries. These “Ars Nova” works, as they were called, were
mostly pitched in the range of men’s voices, and even works
such as those of Josquin Desprez that are sometimes sung by
boychoirs today are in range for counter-tenors to sing the
top parts. That is to say, although boys trained in singing
and liturgy were at hand in the cathedrals and other central
churches, music masters were slow to take the time to teach
the boys the new, difficult skills this music required. In
England, the first polyphonic works involving the use of
boys were written during the 1450's and 60's. By 1469,
Canterbury Cathedral had a small group of boys and monks who
were called “singers of this church.” A splendid Magnificat
by Canterbury’s choirmaster John Nesbett survives as an
example of a monumental repertoire that has since been
mostly lost. Once the boys were given the chance to join
this musical movement, they rewarded the world with their
singing of John Taverner, Thomas Tallis, Tomas Luis de
Victoria, Orlando di Lassus and the incomparable Palestrina.
The sound typically produced by boys’ voices proved highly
suitable to the increasingly complicated threads of
polyphonic music where each voice-part needs to be heard.
Once the boys were invited in to the Polyphony Club, they
responded in enough spades to fill the cathedrals in Europe.
Otherwise, many great choral works would not have been
written as they were. This episode suggests that boychoirs
today, too, can rise to this sort of challenge when it is
offered them.
This musical explosion resulted in the
founding of many important choral foundations for boys and
men that retain their importance to the present day. In
1446, King Henry VI laid the cornerstone for the chapel of
King’s College in Cambridge. The choral foundation for
Magdalen College in Oxford was established in 1480, and
Cardinal Wolsey founded there Christchurch College in 1526
with an endowed chapel choir. The first documentary evidence
of boys singing at Westminster Abbey in London comes in the
job description for William Cornyshe when he assumed duties
there as choirmaster in 1479. In Vienna, the Emperor
Maximilian established his Hofmusikkappelle in 1498 with a
choir of twelve boys and eight men trained to sing in the
“Brabantine” Style made popular by contemporary Flemish
composers. This is normally considered the beginning of the
present-day Vienna Boys’ Choir. High quality choirs of men
and boys also spread to Russia where rich settings of the
Orthodox liturgy were composed.
The Reformation
Many things changed in Europe after
Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on October 31, 1517, and
these changes had huge effects on choristers throughout the
continent. Some of the effects were destructive but, over
all, European music culture became much richer for the
tumult, and boy sopranos were among the major actors of this
resurgence.
Of the three major branches of the
Reformation, the Reformed Church founded by John Calvin had
much the most destructive effect on church music. Musical
instruments and choirs were abolished and only simple
congregational singing, mostly of metrical psalms, was left.
Choristers in the affected areas had to stop singing or go
elsewhere. It needs to be said, however, that Calvinists
were not necessarily philistines and many of them had a high
appreciation of music. They just didn’t want to mix artistic
music with worship. Instead, they cultivated music in their
homes and other places in the community. Although the
English Puritan Oliver Cromwell abolished choirs in England
for a time in the 17th century, he included two
choirboys in his entourage to entertain him after dinner. So
it is that the Calvinists laid the social groundwork for
civic music ensembles that were to dominate the musical
scene a couple of centuries later.
Martin Luther had a huge respect for
and knowledge of music, and he made sure that music would
continue to play a major role in the church that bears his
name. In his reforms, he redirected the use of music in
major ways that greatly enriched ecclesiastical music.
Although Martin Luther retained a good deal of the
traditional Catholic liturgy in his new orders of worship,
these liturgical texts played a small part in the Lutheran
Church music. The return to the Gospel in Luther’s
theological outlook lead to settings of many Biblical texts
that caught the drama of these passages of scripture. We can
see these qualities in the multi-choral settings of psalms
by Heinrich Schütz as well as in his small-scale
Geistliche Konzerte for small ensembles of solo voices,
where he demonstrated his ability to pack a wallop in a
small space. For many years, Schütz had no alternatives to
using small vocal forces because the Thirty Years’ War
(1618-1648) disrupted much more than church choirs. Dramatic
settings of the Passion narratives became popular,
culminating in the monumental St. Matthew Passion of Johann
Sebastian Bach. Luther’s belief that faith in Christ
overcomes one’s bondage to sin was dramatized time and again
in the cantatas of J.S. Bach that were the heart of worship
in Leipzig. With women still not allowed to perform in
church (Martin Luther was not famous for his pro-feminist
views), men and boys assumed the heavy duties of these
musical programs in places such as the Dresdner Kreuzkirche
and St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, as well as in the court
chapels of the Lutheran nobility.
The English Reformation was launched
by Henry VIII when Pope Clement VII would not annul his
marriage to Catherine of Aragon and allow him to marry Ann
Boleyn. The king had little interest in changing either the
structures or theological outlook of the church except to
close all of the monasteries for the sake of material gain
rather than any pious disposition. In most cases, cathedral
and collegiate choirs remained intact at this time. Sympathy
with both Lutheranism and Calvinism was high in England and
Henry’s death in 1547 opened the door to religious culture
wars that convulsed the island for over a century. Under the
brief rule of the young Edward VI, the Calvinistic outlook
gained the upper hand. This threat to England’s musical
heritage was prevented by Edward’s early death in 1553.
Queen Mary, a Catholic, returned England to the Papal fold,
but her death in 1558 prevented a consolidation of that aim.
Queen Elizabeth I presided over the Elizabethan Settlement
that established the Church of England as a compromise
between Roman Catholicism and Calvinism under the headship
of the Crown. Neither hardened Calvinists nor devoted
Catholics accepted this settlement, but it provided enough
stability for the Church of England to flourish.
Thomas Cranmer was assigned the task
of compiling a new prayer book for the new English Church by
Henry VIII and, with some modifications, his work was
enshrined in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer of the
Elizabethan Settlement. Cranmer was very Protestant in his
theological outlook but, as a great liturgical scholar, he
had a strong respect for the structure of Christian worship
over the centuries. As a result, the Book of Common Prayer
features an Order of Holy Communion that retains the
Ordinary of the Mass except for moving the Gloria to the
end, and daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer
influenced by the monastic offices. Up to the late 19th
century, Communion services were too rare to inspire any
musical settings, but the canticles for the offices,
especially the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis of Evening
Prayer have received so many settings that all the
manuscripts could sink the royal yacht. Cranmer also allowed
for the singing of an anthem towards the end of each office,
with the result that enough English anthems have been
written to sink the Queen Mary. Queen Elizabeth’s
appreciation of music ensured a high level of quality in
England’s church choirs.
The influence of the new theology in
the English Reformation brought about a major change in the
style of church music. The reformers’ concern that the
Christian message be clearly proclaimed in worship lead to
the jettisoning of complex polyphony for a much plainer
style that would have “a plain and distinct note for every
syllable,” in the words of the Lincoln Cathedral injunctions
of 1548. Although Thomas Tallis and William Byrd remained
tenacious Catholics and continued to write in the older
style, they also lent their talents to the new Anglican
music, with Byrd’s Great Service being a particularly fine
example. Over the next eighty years, composers such as
Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tomkins and Thomas Weelkes provided
an array of masterpieces in a dignified style where, indeed,
the words are clear and distinct, and the music fits itself
to the emotional content of the words in a restrained style.
Some “full anthems” were written where the full choir sang
throughout in a polyphonic texture, but much more popular
were “verse anthems” where solos and solo groups alternated
with responses by the full choir. These verse anthems gave
the more outstanding boys and men in these choirs the chance
to show off their vocal skills.
All this time, the culture war between
the Calvinistic Puritans and the Anglicans that had been
smouldering for about a century exploded in Oliver
Cromwell’s revolt in 1641 and the establishment of his
Commonwealth in 1649. True to the Calvinistic form of the
day, the church choirs were disbanded and the organs were
destroyed along with much church fabric. The biggest and
most permanent loss was the pillaging of church music
libraries and the subsequent destruction of many precious
manuscripts. Thankfully, the sumptuous and dynamic Euge
Bone Mass of Christopher Tye survived, but its survival
signals the loss of many masterpieces and the subsequent
obscurity of a great composer.
After the death of Cromwell, most
English people had had enough of Puritan rule and the
monarchy was restored in 1662. The Elizabethan Settlement
was reestablished and the choirs were reassembled. In the
midst of this revival, a chapel choir was established at St.
John’s College in Cambridge in 1670. Restarting boys’ choirs
was quite a challenge, but England was blessed with
choristers of the caliber of John Blow, Pelham Humfrey, and
the incomparable Henry Purcell to furnish much-needed
leadership for their generation. While the new generation of
boys were being trained, the verse anthem evolved with much
longer verses and shorter choral responses, almost always
with men singing the solos. Understandable as this
development was, it retarded the development of choral music
and the use of boys’ voices as a “star” system took over
where individual singers, especially counter-tenors, were
showcased and the bit parts for the full choir became
smaller. Like other kinds of human beings, boys are
encouraged when they are given something significant to
sing.
Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church
underwent a widespread reform of its own. Much of this
reform was a retrenchment of its tradition, but it was also
a revitalization of the Church’s spirituality. Palestrina,
Victoria, and William Byrd gave powerful musical expression
to this renewed passionate faith. Church leaders also
devoted much attention to correcting many practices called
into question by the Protestant Reformers. They called
polyphonic music into question in Rome for the same reasons
that the Reformers questioned it, most particularly the
tendency of such music to obscure the text. Out of this
tension comes the now-discredited story that Cardinal
Borromeo threatened to ban all polyphonic music from
Catholic worship unless somebody a polyphonic mass was
presented to him in which all the words could be heard.
Palestrina rose to the occasion with the Missa Papae
Marcelli and saved the day. Historical myth aside, A
decree of the Council of Trent in 1562 did call for clarity
of text in liturgical music and Palestrina took these
decrees quite seriously as we can see in his majestic
Missa Papae Marcelli where each word of the Latin text
comes through with full clarity.
The fervor of the Catholic Reformation
drove missionary outreach that extended to all the corners
of the earth. Of particular interest here are the reductions
set up by the Jesuit missionaries in the Amazon Forest in
the 17th century. These reductions were formed as
autonomous settlements for the Guaraní tribes so as the
shield them from the depredations of the Conquistadors. The
Jesuits, highly competent in the fine arts, taught the
native boys to sing the intricate church music being sung in
Europe at the time. Accounts say that the boys were quick
learners who became so proficient that their singing
astonished Spanish visitors. Unfortunately, “political
realities” lead to the demise of the reducions as anyone who
has seen the movie Mission knows.
Church Choirs in Modern Times
Starting with the late eighteenth
century, a new concert culture flowered throughout Europe.
Symphony orchestras and community choirs comprised of men
and women were organized and, more often than not, they
displaced the churches as civic centers for music. Adult
choirs of women and men were clearly much more suited for
the large-scale choral works composed during this era such
as Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Verdi’s Requiem.
Boys, however, did not participate in this new movement at
the time, although some still sang in churches. It was at
this time that the belated admittance of women into church
choirs took place. This act of justice helped diminish boys’
opportunities to sing, but the growing indifference to
religion was a much bigger factor. Not only did church
attendance drop significantly during the Enlightenment, but
those who did go to church usually wanted less of it than
before. By the time J.S. Bach became the cantor at St.
Thomas in Leipzig in 1723, the extensive liturgical and
musical life in that city was already exceptional, and it
did not long outlive him.
In its anti-clerical backlash, the
French Revolution abolished the cathedral choirs in its
country. Napoleon’s subsequent tour of Europe caused further
irreparable damage to church institutions elsewhere. The
recent brave revival of the Maîtrise de Caen is one of only
a few attempts of recovery from this loss in France. Both
the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches allowed their
boychoirs to dissolve and only a few such choirs remain
today. The sound of boys ceased at the Augsburg Cathedral in
1865, not to be reinstated until 1976. After having sung in
the Riga Dom in Latvia since 1240, the boys there were
disbanded, and did not return until 1990. Among Lutherans,
St. Thomas Church in Leipzig still holds up the heritage of
J.S. Bach and, thanks to the strong leadership of Rudolf
Mauersberger during forty years of totalitarian rule, the
Dresdner Kreuzkirche is a thriving institution. The choir’s
biggest trauma occurred in February, 1945 when allied
bombers attacked Dresden. The church was destroyed and
eleven choristers were killed. A bomb that struck the
chorister’s dormitory at Westminster Abbey would likewise
have killed many choristers if the boys had not been
evacuated during the Blitz. Besides the revived choir in
Augsburg, the age-long traditions of the Regensburger
Domspatzen and the choir school at the Spanish monastery of
Montserrat are among the few remains in Europe of that
Church’s former glory. In Vienna, the Empress Maria Teresa
lacked enough interest in music to be willing to pay for it.
Because of the stinginess of her purse, the boys who sang in
the Hofmusikkappelle during her time, among them Josef and
Michael Haydn, were on loan from St. Stephen’s Church. The
building of Westminster Cathedral in London at the turn of
the twentieth century is a different story. Thanks to the
vision of Cardinal Herbert Vaughan and the musical sense of
its first master of music Richard Runciman Terry, this
cathedral became the home of a choir of men and boys that
has since become a world-class ensemble under the
extraordinary leadership of George Malcolm, David Hill,
James O’Donnell, and Martin Baker.
The heavy lassitude that overcame the
Church of England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries all but gutted that church’s glorious choral
tradition. With ministers seriously derelict in their
duties, it was no wonder that there was little life in the
choirs. Only a tiny repertoire of simple music was in use.
In 1849, Sebastian Wesley summed up the situation: “No
cathedral in this country possesses, at this day, a musical
force competent to embody and give effect to the evident
intentions of the Church with regard to music.” Wesley put
his money where his mouth was and he dedicated his life to
improving the salaries and working conditions of organists
and choirmasters. Meanwhile, Maria Hackett devoted fifty
years to inspecting the choir schools where the boys
suffered neglect and abuse. She harassed bishops and deans
about these conditions until improvements were made, and she
visited each school time and again to make sure that her
standards were maintained. A return of religious fervor in
the Church of England and a renewal of liturgy through the
Anglo-Catholic revival also increased interest in fostering
high-quality choirs throughout the Church. John Stainer,
choirmaster at St. Paul’s in London starting from 1872,
enlarged and improved the choir there and set a new standard
for choir schools throughout England with the organization
and discipline of his own school. It is unfortunate for John
Stainer, then, that he is mostly remembered for almost
drowning the nascent choral revival in the molasses of the
music he and other contemporaries composed. It fell to
Charles Stanford and Charles Wood to raise the standards of
music for the Anglican liturgies. The wealth of their
compositions and that of their numerous students, such as
Herbert Howells, created an abundance of church music which,
if not at the cutting of the music world as a whole,
provided high quality music well-fitted to its liturgical
context.
The twentieth century saw Anglican
choirs of boys and men raised to new heights. Cathedral
choirs such as St. Paul’s, London and Winchester and the
collegiate choirs of Oxbridge have filled the naves of
churches with their voices and provided a wealth of sterling
recordings. Even at the time of this writing, this flowering
of quality continues unabated, in spite of the small numbers
of people currently involved in the Church of England, and
the nearly total demise of boys’ choirs at the parish level.
King’s College Choir in Cambridge is one of the most famous
choirs in the world, and at least a dozen other British
choirs deserve to be at least as famous. The Church of
England has enriched the world with an array of commissions
from the country’s leading composers written for her
choristers that have made their tradition more vibrant than
ever. The fragility of the present glory and the need for
constantly renewed commitment is illustrated, however, by
the story of St. John’s College Choir in Cambridge. In 1955,
the college came very close to a decision to close the choir
school rather than incur the expense of buying a nearby
building that was needed to continue the choral foundation.
This catastrophe was averted because a multitude of letters
were sent from all over the world in the choir’s defense,
crowned by a telegram from Ralph Vaughan Williams. The
legacy of George Guest, Christopher Robinson and now David
Hill shows us what great treasures we almost missed.
The frontier conditions in North
America were hardly conducive to the formation of church
choirs of any kind. Most churches resorted to hiring
quartets to furnish music over and above congregational
singing. Most of the Protestant churches in America had no
tradition of boychoirs and neither the Catholics nor the
Lutherans had enough left of that tradition to bring with
them across the ocean. William Augustus Mulhlenberg began
what became a modest rise of boys’ and men’s choirs in the
Episcopal Church of the United States when he organized such
a choir in Long Island in 1828. Sadly, this rise waned after
World War II and very few Episcopal churches have such
choirs today. There are a few bright spots here, however.
The National Cathedral in Washington formed a men and boys’
choir on the British model in 1909 and Grace Cathedral in
San Francisco did the same in 1913. St. Thomas Church Fifth
Avenue in New York assembled a boys’ choir in 1902. Under
the tenure of T. Tertius Noble, a choir school was opened in
1919, with the result that this choir has become one of the
most accomplished church choirs in the country.
The Rise of Concert Boychoirs
At the end of World War 1, the
Habsburg dynasty and the Austro-Hungarian Empire came to an
end. A much bigger loss was looming: the Hofmusikkappelle
which had depended on imperial support. Austria’s Ministry
of Education took responsibility for the choir, but it had
no money to support it. Josef Schnitt became the rector of
the Imperial Chapel in 1921 and re- organized the boys'
choir at his own expense. By September 1924, Schnitt had a
choir of thirteen and the Wiener Sängerknaben (Vienna Boys’
Choir) as we know them today were born. With funding still
scarce except for Schnitt's generous pocket, the choir
started to give concerts outside the chapel, performing
motets and secular pieces, and—at the boys' request, short
operettas. Within a year, the boys were performing in Berlin
and soon after, all over the world. The choir’s highly
acclaimed activities nearly ground to a halt after the Nazis
annexed Austria. They arrested Father Schnitt for refusing
to allow the choir to be used for propagandistic purposes,
and Schnitt’s colleague, Ferdinand Grossmann took charge the
of the choir. He did what he could to shield the boys from
Nazi ideology, but he could not spare them from having to
wear the swastikas on their uniforms. After 1945, Schnitt
and Grossmann picked up the pieces and built the choir back
to its pre-war standards of excellence. In the early 1960's,
Hans Gillesberger became the director and maintained this
height with many performances of the world’s choral
masterpieces. Today, with four touring choirs, the Vienna
Boys’ Choir is the best-known of all boychoirs.
In 1937, Herbert Huffman, a young
graduate of Westminster Choir College chose to pursue his
dream of creating a boychoir in Columbus, Ohio. Over a dozen
boys responded to his first call for tryouts and the choir
was born. Only two years later, a day choir school was
formed to maximize the potential of the boys’ musical
talent. With the popular Vienna Boys’ Choir unavailable to
America in 1943, the Columbus Boychoir stepped into the
breach with its first trip to New York where they sang at
the Town Hall. The CBS, realizing the importance of raising
the country’s spirits with the sound of the boys’ voices,
broadcasted their singing to the whole nation. In 1946, the
choir made their first tour and they have been touring ever
since. In 1950, they moved the choir school to Princeton,
New Jersey, a location more fitting for what had become a
national organization. They completed their transition to
being a national choir in 1981 when they changed their name
to the American Boychoir.
In 1939, Eduardo Caso, a singer who
was called “the tenor of the American airwaves,” moved to
Tucson, Arizona in the hope of recovering from tuberculosis.
When he recovered, he rewarded the city and its climate by
fulfilling his dream of creating a boys’ choir. The result
was the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus, an ensemble that has
maintained its high standards for over sixty-five years.
Another pioneering effort in America began in 1946 when
George Bragg founded the Denton Civic Boys Choir, which
moved to Fort Worth in 1956 and became famous as the Texas
Boys Choir. Among their past glories are a set of
blockbuster albums of Gabrielli’s music made with Organist
E. Power Biggs at St. Mark’s in Venice. Since his
retirement, George Bragg has been a mentor to countless
choirmasters throughout the country.
The founding of concert choirs gained
more momentum after the second World War. The Petits
Chanteurs de Versailles were founded in 1946, and they
continue to offer excellent performances of French baroque
music. Also in 1946, Hans Thamm, a former member of the
Dresdner Kreuzchor, founded a boys’ choir in the small town
of Windsbach in southern Germany. Today, under the
high-strung direction of Karl-Friedrich Beringer, the
Windsbacher Boys’ Choir gives electrifying performances of
both baroque and modern music, including jazz. Soon after,
in 1950, Heinz Hennig founded the Hannover Boys’ Choir and
formed a world class choir out of his boys. Most impressive
is the Tölzer Boys’ Choir, founded in 1956 by Gerhard
Schmidt-Gaden in Bad Tölz, a small town in the middle of
High Bavaria. Remarkably, without benefit of a choir school,
Schmidt-Gaden has created one of the best vocal ensembles in
the world for baroque and classical music, an ensemble just
as capable of singing modern works as well. Not only does
the choir sing with an excellence most choirs only dream
about, but it has produced many outstanding soprano and alto
soloists who have shown the world that boys today can
accomplish vocally much more than many had thought possible.
They were central participants in the Bach Cantata Project
under the direction of Gustav Leonhardt and Nicholas
Harnoncourt, a responsibility shared with the Hannover Boys’
Choir and the Wiener Sängerknaben, among others. Not only
did the Tölzer Boys’ Choir sing many of the choral
movements, but they furnished a large number of the soprano
soloists to the project as well.
In the years following, concert
boychoirs have been formed in many places in the world, many
of them in the United States. There is not the space to
mention them all. The Maryland Boys’ Choir, The Singing Boys
of Florida, the North Carolina Boys Choir, and the Keystone
State Boychoir (Pennsylvania) are named after their states.
Cities such as Chattanooga and Phoenix have leant their
names to their concert boychoirs. Close to where I live, the
Battle Creek Boychoir in Michigan is celebrating its
twenty-fifth anniversary. Since 1969, the Boys Choir of
Harlem has given new hope to countless youths in that part
of Manhattan. The Pacific Boychoir, founded as recently as
1998, gave the first U.S. performance of a full Bach Cantata
(#150) using boys both for choruses and treble solos in
2004. Let us hope this will be the beginning of more and
greater things for this choir and many others.
Elsewhere in the world, the Australian
Boys Choral Institute was founded in 1939. In addition to
repertoire from their British heritage, they have enriched
the musical world with performances of many Australian
composers who deserve to be better known than they are. In
1967, John Tungay opened the doors of the Drakensburg Boys’
Choir School with twenty carefully selected boys from all
over South Africa. To form a choir representing all the
ethnic groups in a country that was still under Apartheid
rule was surely as bold a move as it was socially and
musically significant. It is unlikely that any choir in the
world sings in more languages than these boys do. Not only
are they proficient in European classical repertoire, but
they also specialize in Anglo-American pop music and, more
important of all, music from the heart of Africa. Boychoirs
have recently become exceedingly popular in Japan, a
popularity that lead to the creation of the Boys Air Choir,
centered around the singing and now the conducting talents
of Connor Burrowes, formerly a head chorister of St. Paul’s
Cathedral in London. With just eight boys at a time, this
group has concocted many inventive performances and
recordings. It is hoped that this interest in Japan will
flower into the creation of native boychoirs alongside the
notable Hiroshima Boychoir that was founded in 1960. Among
the few boychoirs to exist under Communist rule in Easter
Europe, the Moscow Boys’ Choir and Moscow Choral College in
the Moscow Academy of Music under the direction of Viktor
Popov have kept alive Russia’s musical heritage. The latter
institution was reorganized as part of the Academy of Choral
Arts, of which the boys’ choir is a separate part. The Boni
Pueri of the Czech Republic, formed in 1982, has achieved
much international recognition. Until its tragic demise in
2003, the Polskie Slovicki (The Polish Nightingales of
Poznan) had achieved exceptional excellence in the most
challenging of choral works.
These concert choirs are, for the most
part, non-sectarian, and they do not have regular liturgical
responsibilities, although most of them accept invitations
to sing at church services. Traditional sacred music,
however, is a significant part of just about every concert
choir’s repertoire, which is not surprising, given the
richness of this tradition. In addition, most of these
choirs include lighter fare in their programs, such as show
tunes and folk songs in ingenious arrangements. More often
than not, some of their numbers are choreographed in
ingenious ways that add to the charm of their concerts.
There’s nothing like a boy who can twirl a lasso while
singing “Riders in the Sky.”
Many of the ecclesiastical choirs
mentioned earlier take time out of their liturgical
responsibilities to bring the sound of their voices to the
far corners of the world. Much of what these choirs perform
in their concerts is music they sing in their own churches,
although Barry Rose, retired choirmaster of St. Alban’s
Cathedral Choir, was not above adding light music to his
concerts that presumably were not used as church anthems.
The choir of St. Philip’s in London, one of few surviving
boys’ choirs at the parish level in England, has embarked on
one of the most intriguing musical ventures in recent years.
Although they normally sing traditional Anglican fare in
church, their concerts, under the name of Libera, are
devoted to the lush and haunting compositions and
arrangements of the director Robert Prizeman. Their unique
and sophisticated religious pop style can have an
overpowering effect on the heartstrings.
The early music movement offers many
opportunities for boychoirs who are willing to do the work
that boys did in earlier centuries, even if we grant that
attempts to restore early music practice do not exhaust the
legitimate possibilities of their performance. The Bach
Cantata project mentioned above is one sterling example.
Another impressive accomplishment is the set of the complete
anthems and service music of Henry Purcell sung by specially
chosen boys with the King’s Consort under Robert King. Much
music composed in the twentieth century has turned away from
the opulent style of romanticism and returned to a leaner
style more typical of earlier music. As a result, much
twentieth-century choral music is suitable for boys’ voices,
if not exclusively so. Igor Stravinsky stated a clear
preference for boys’ voices in his Mass and Symphony of
Psalms. Leonard Bernstein asked the same for his Chichester
Psalms, as did Francis Poulenc for his Seven Tenebrae
Responses, his last work. Many composers have made use of
the distinctive timbre of boys’ voices as a contrasting
sound to that of a large mixed chorus. The eighth symphony
of Gustav Mahler comes to mind here, as do the Spring
Symphony and War Requiem of Benjamin Britten and
Stravinsky’s Persephone. This recognition by some of
the last century’s greatest composers should be all the
apologia that boychoirs need for their continued existence.
But will we listen to these composers
and listen to boys sing in the future? At a time when
thousands of children starve to death needlessly every day,
it is not surprising that children are starved of music and
much else as well. And yet, the resources for feeding
everybody are available, and surely resources are also
available to provide choirs for those who can thrive in that
kind of environment. In fact, with the professional polish
which boychoirs are capable of achieving, the investment of
time and money leads to the almost instant gratification of
hearing top-drawer performances of works such as Schubert’s
G Major Mass. Liturgical renewal that has affected just
about every church has emphasized congregational
participation with the result that choirs, regardless of the
makeup, are rarely asked to furnish very much service music
except in historic cathedrals and choral-oriented parishes
such as St. Thomas Fifth Avenue. This makes concert venues
all the more important for the preservation of this music.
These days, many civic boychoirs have sister choirs where
girls, too, are given the opportunity to gain choral skills.
Some English cathedrals have added a girls’ choir to their
programs, a move that is threatening to some. Taking such
belated notice of girls’ talents doubles the effort and
expense that it takes to offer training to all children in a
way that makes space for their differing qualities. Mixed
children’s choirs are not a substitute for boys’ choirs;
they are a niche with its own gifts. The only substitute for
a boys’ choir is a boys’ choir. We will have to make some
sacrifices if we are going to provide for our children
physically and artistically. One such sacrifice we can make
is to cut down on our production of bombs. The hurt
experienced by females from centuries of exclusion from the
music and ministry of the church and from the wider society
is sometimes directed at the boychoirs that exist today,
especially those which hold notoriety and prestige.
Considering, however, the very low percentage of choirs
today where boys alone sing the treble lines, one could
argue that if there is any oppression now, it’s in the other
direction. Moreover, one could argue that an institution
that brings boys together in a cooperative venture, one that
does not seek to defeat an opponent, is one means among many
of creating the kind of reconstructed masculinity the world
needs. One of the most important concerns of feminism is to
give women their voices and allow their voices to be heard.
Surely this concern needs to be part of a broader project of
giving voices to all people and learning to listen to them,
among them the voices of singing boys.
Copyright © 2005 Andrew
Marr, OSB |
