Singing Life After Boyhood: The Choir 5. Feb.

[doversoul]

Re: being sent away from home
One thing my friend was absolutely sure was that her son would have been very unhappy if he’d been kept at home. He wasn’t packed away by any means. He wanted to go and sing in 'that choir’.

I think that is what was so hard for the mother. She kept saying, ‘should I have kept him at home even if it would have made him unhappy?’

[DracoM]

Most choristers boarding or not - and let's remember that these days quite a lot attend day schools or are day pupils at boarding preps - are so fantastically busy that in term time at least they hardly have time to turn around.

[Brassbandmaestro]

This most certainly is true a boarding/day schools. At every level, at the school I work in, the pupils are kept busy from the moment they arrive till home time. Then at home they have enormous amount of prep to do as well!!

[secret squirrel]

I agree with nearly all of what has been said above, but I would like to add that were it not for a particular schoolmaster at Ardingly College who understood former choristers (he was once Head Boy at Winchester) then I would have been expelled in my first term!

That master had been through it himself and could empathise (he then went to Rugby, thence to Trinity Cambridge, thence to Ardingly) and, of course, had seen dozens of former choristers pass through under him over the years (including some very notable adult musicians).

One has to accept, though, that the chorister life and usual secondary education in Public schools (not always before you all jump at me!) is very insular compared to 'real' life outside and unless one goes back into the music industry, one will ALWAYS have a piece of you missing (there will always be a corner of a cathedral that will be forever 'mine', so to paraphrase).

We were made fully aware of what was to come in our last year or term or so and perhaps today's so-called choir schools with their non-singing pupils helps no end towards the transition at 13, but still, it is the sacrifice one makes: after all, we're not castrati !!!!

SS

[DracoM]

Top post, SS.

[Vile Consort]

Life after Cambridge can be something of a let-down, too. It took me years to recover.

[decantor]

Life after Cambridge can be something of a let-down, too. It took me years to recover.

On that - and many a similar - matter, I always thought that Julian Slade got it absolutely right in Salad Days: "Oh no, it's not that we want to stay; it's just that we don't want to go." The tug in two directions is just as distressing as a hopeless yen for the status quo.

[jean]

The problem as it affected choristers in the sixteenth century has been briefly touched on in today's Early Music Show.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tn49

[DracoM]

Interesting about the Loughs, GTB, and above all the sound of a treble from that era. A kind of light, gentille trilling, lots of vibrato, and from a 15 yr old. But voices changed a lot later than now by and large.

[cloughie]

Interesting about the Loughs, GTB, and above all the sound of a treble from that era. A kind of light, gentille trilling, lots of vibrato, and from a 15 yr old. But voices changed a lot later than now by and large.

Indeed and I benefited from the other side of that coin. My voice broke at 12, and I had the benefit of singing bass in the Senior Choir at school from 2nd year (year 8 in new money) through to sixth form. This has given me a love of harmony singing, and never having a deep bass voice, in recent years finding the comfort zone of baritone in male choirs.