Very few sounds are as pure as those of the voices of English choirboys filling the lofty spaces of a medieval Gothic cathedral. Or, for that matter, as when those choirboys are brought to our shores and perform in a nineteenth-century Victorian brick church in Washington, D.C. Such was the pleasure for the audience that packed St. Mark's Church on Capitol Hill to hear the Choir of Lichfield Cathedral last April.
The choir, which toured the eastern seaboard for eleven days, consisted of fifteen youngsters, angelically attired in scarlet robes with Elizabethan ruffs around their necks. It was supplemented by the nine adult males of the Cathedral's Vicars Choral, a guild of singers that has performed more or less without interruption since the middle of the thirteenth century.
Young boy sopranos just don't sound like the female sopranos we are more accustomed to hearing. Their trained, as yet unchanged voices have an otherworldly quality: direct, clear, occasionally piercing, and entirely lacking in vibrato. Individual character is almost totally absent from the tone they produce, which only lasts for a few years. Developed as the boys reach preadolescence at eight or nine, the characteristic tone disappears when their voices change at the age of twelve or thirteen. Interestingly, outstanding vocal quality does not necessarily persist as their voices mature.
This unique tone has inspired a choral literature written expressly for boy choirs, either unaccompanied, or together with lower voices or instruments. The two parts most often associated with their sound are the treble cantus firmus, which carries the melody above the lower mixed parts, and the descant, which is the lovely high harmony that soars above the melodic or polyphonic parts sung by other voices.
Lichfield Cathedral has stood about a hundred miles north of London in Staffordshire, in the ancient kingdom of Mercia, since the year 700, although the present Gothic structure dates from the mid-thirteenth century. Damaged extensively during the Reformation and the Cromwellian wars of the seventeenth century, the edifice has long since been restored to its medieval grandeur. It serves as a fitting backdrop for the magnificent choral tradition it has inspired.
That choral tradition originated in 1241, when the then Roman Catholic cathedral established the Vicars Choral corporation, a guild consisting of priests and laymen charged with singing the daily choir services (known as "offices") for the Canons of the cathedral. The boys' participation is more recent, dating from approximately the mid-fifteenth century, about the time King Henry VI established a similar choir school at King's College in Cambridge.
The eighteen boys, whose lives are totally circumscribed by the demands of four years of daily choir services, attend the cathedral's school. They are selected at an annual voice trial, and are rewarded with a music scholarship to a senior school upon completing their boys' choir years. Music rules their lives; in addition to their ordinary studies and choral training, they are expected to become proficient players of at least two musical instruments, one of which is generally the organ. In fact, one of the concert's highlights occurred when one of the boys, his legs barely long enough to reach the pedals, went to St. Mark's less-than-overwhelming
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