I Saw Eternity the Other Night by Timothy Day

Author:Timothy Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241352199
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

5

The 1960s: Beyond King’s

CHANGING VOICES AND CHORAL SCHOLARSHIPS

If it was true, as Provost Austen Leigh claimed in 1899, that the choir at King’s was reckoned among the best in the Kingdom, and that this improvement had been achieved in part at least through the introduction of choral scholars,1 why were greater efforts not made to create such scholarships at more of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge?

The advertisements for the first choral scholars at King’s stipulated that candidates must ‘not be more than 25 years of age’. In 1914 St John’s College, Cambridge, advertised their choral studentships as open to candidates who were under twenty-four at the time of examination’.2 Should schoolboys between the ages of, say, fifteen and eighteen, be singing at all? Some nineteenth-century teachers did seem to have considered it treacherous for an adolescent boy to sing very much. Some thought that the voice could be used very gently. Some thought that every voice was different and the adolescent boy’s voice had to be individually monitored.3 In 1892 George Martin articulated the widely held view that the voice should never be used for singing as the treble voice was being lost. ‘It is likely to injure the vocal tone for ever after. Many otherwise fair musicians have been deprived of vocal power by this reprehensible practice. A boy whose voice is changed or broken, ought no more to be allowed to sing than a man with a fractured limb ought to be permitted to walk or use it. There is no doubt that many valuable voices are lost through overstraining their powers at the period of the break.’4

After a lecture on English choristers that Sir Sydney Nicholson gave in 1944 a member of the audience said he was very pleased indeed to hear that this eminent church musician was sure that singing during the change of voice did no harm at all. The chorister, he said, was often at sea when he lost his voice and was forbidden to sing with the men, and permanently lost to music and the Church.5 Another member of the audience reported that a great nineteenth-century laryngologist, Sir Morell Mackenzie, had always insisted that there was no evidence to show that singing during the change of voice caused damage. He would say that it was only like using your arms and legs when they’re growing.

Nicholson himself wondered whether in fact the term ‘break’ – he himself preferred ‘change’ – had not been propagated by all those Italians who flooded into England in days gone by when it was assumed that anything good in music had to come from abroad. This must have been the reason, he thought, and no wonder that they thought boys’ voices ‘break’, considering the strangulated kind of noises they forced their trebles to make.6 During the earlier years of the School of English Church Music, Nicholson had concentrated on the trebles in parish church choirs. But in the later 1930s he made a special point of encouraging teenage boys to sing.

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