The Supernatural Voice by Simon Ravens

Author:Simon Ravens
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782043560
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

EXTEMPORE 5

Into Man’s Estate: Changing Boys’ Voices and Nascent Falsettists

Many choirmasters are timid about ‘bringing the boys through the break’ and developing the counter-tenor alto. But the process is simple and almost guaranteed.

William J. Finn1

BY this stage in our history, it has become clear that the question of whether someone sang with a modal or a falsetto voice is often a spurious one: with countless singers from Ziryab to Amorevoli, the answer is not one voice or the other, but probably both. Related to this, there is another insidious false dichotomy which we should now bring out into the open, and that is the question of whether certain singers were boys or men. Sometimes the answer is clear – Coryat’s ‘middle-aged man’, for instance, or perhaps Bach’s fourteen-year-old Neucke – but often the distinction is less obvious. From medieval Cambrai to our own day, we find numerous singers who seem to wander across an ill-defined border region between these two states.

For us, there are two obvious reasons why we instinctively find the idea of accomplished adolescent male singers difficult to accept. The first is that modern society tends to insist on an artificially clear demarcation between children and adults. The second is that received wisdom suggests that when a boy’s voice begins to change, he should sing no more until his adult voice has stabilised. So today, when we read of historical singers in their late teens still singing soprano parts, we tend to assume that their voices were unchanged. This, in turn, has led to the commonly held belief that in earlier centuries voices changed at significantly higher ages. Taken together, these factors have fogged our understanding of how a great many males have sung high. Navigating through this fog is not easy. The problem with understanding the history of vocal mutation is not just that the data is incomplete and inconsistently acquired. More fundamentally, mutation is in itself a complex process – psychologically as well as physiologically.2

Can we establish any reliable historical data for the ages at which boys’ voices changed? Encouragingly, in The Problemes of Aristotle we come across the question, ‘Why are boyes apt to change their voice about fourteene yeeres of age?’ However, our relief at finding a precise mutation age from Antiquity lasts only as long as it takes for us to wonder why we are reading this question in an Elizabethan spelling. Sure enough, in the primary source of this information, Aristotle’s Generation of Animals, the age is not specified; it therefore appears to have been added by the anonymous Elizabethan translator on the basis of his own observations.3 But even if it fails to give us the information it promises, The Problemes of Aristotle does at least seemingly offer us a figure for the mutation age in late Tudor England. And happily, this figure tallies precisely with the most thorough research of Tudor choir records.4 The most reliable recent study suggests that by the time of Bach the age of mutation was fifteen to sixteen.

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