boys changing voices

[Yorkie]

You always take everything personally and fail to see the humour in anything javerylibe.

So boys aren't singing because of the term 'voice breaking'? And choir masters believing the term 'voice breaking' means boys shouldn't sing through a voice change is down to a word and not their stupidity and ignorance (and changing the word fixes that)? I don't buy it.

There are many reasons boys don't sing and I suspect there are more relevant factors involved than a word (and by the way as the term was used in the past when boys did sing it clearly isn't the word that is the problem but the people involved now).

And forgive me but you seem to be linking two separate issues 1) boys are not joining choirs and 2) that is because when the voices of boys in choirs break they are told not to sing. How is the decline in the number of trebles related to the boys post voice break being told not to sing? Because once their voice breaks they cant sing treble so they wont sing treble before their voice breaks - queer logic indeed. Clearly dedicated boy's choirs are able to recruit boys who want to sing - if they are good at what they do and know how to engage boys and keep them interested.

Finally, off you go again with your hysterical, ranting accusations. Please take a pill and chill out love before you have a stroke. We all know your passion for defending the poor down trodden and ill treated singers of the world. However, you did make me laugh out loud so thanks for that. I find it wonderfully ironic that my view of trying to promote boys singing as being a normal male behaviour and not as something that needs to be cherished as something delicate or to have special attention to help boys the through the trauma of voice break being portrayed as the reason for the decline in boys singing.

I'm still interested in expanding my knowledge though so I actually would like to read up on why choir masters believe that the word 'break' is suddenly stopping boys from singing in this country if you can point me in the right direction.

[paul]

When my voice broke, it broke it did not change, all my friends voices broke all there friends voices broke. "Broke / Break" is just a term used.

[javerylibe]

You always take everything personally and fail to see the humour in anything javerylibe.

On the contrary. I entered the conversation with good humour and a wink. You'll have to forgive me for responding without lol's and smiley faces when a harmless post of mine is ridiculously sensationalised.

So boys aren't singing because of the term 'voice breaking'? And choir masters believing the term 'voice breaking' means boys shouldn't sing through a voice change is down to a word and not their stupidity and ignorance (and changing the word fixes that)? I don't buy it.

No; they believe that the term 'voice breaking' is less reflective of what actually happens to the vocal apparatus during adolescence and so use 'voice changing' as not to deal in colloquialisms that misrepresent (to children and adults alike) what actually is going on. Though a boy going through voice mutation might make squeaky, cracking, or breaking sounds (or lack of sound, in the last case), these are only symptoms of what is actually going on: a change in size of the vocal mechanism and therefore a change in the voice. As for why boys 'aren't singing'— did you even think about what I wrote before?

How is the decline in the number of trebles related to the boys post voice break being told not to sing? Because once their voice breaks they cant sing treble so they wont sing treble before their voice breaks - queer logic indeed.

Like this: children are known to absorb much, much more from their peer-set and from children 1-3 years older than them than they do from anyone else, and they establish a great portion of their understanding of the social world and 'appropriate' identities based on what that slightly-older age bracket is doing. When those mid-century fourteen-year-old trebles are told to cease and desist at the first sign of voice change for fear of a 'broken voice', the fourteen-year-old treble population dwindles; seeing no fourteen-year-olds, the twelve-year-olds dwindle; and seeing no twelve-year-olds, the nine- and ten-year-olds, in turn, have very little interest in or courage to join. Reading between the lines should show you what this means over the course of several decades. It might not be the word 'break' itself that scares kids away; but the word, like all language, can have a great deal of social power, whether that is immediately obvious or not. That is all I'm trying to say.

Finally, off you go again with your hysterical, ranting accusations.

More hysterical than seeing some kind of subversive social threat to the masculinity of ten-year-olds who hear 'change' rather than 'break'? More hysterical than going on about how the dropping off of a colloquial word in educational settings is 'lefty, mollycoddling, politically correct nonsense'? What sounds 'hysterical' to someone of your stripe sounds perfectly natural to someone of mine, Yorkie (love), and vice-versa.

I'm still interested in expanding my knowledge though so I actually would like to read up on why choir masters believe that the word 'break' is suddenly stopping boys from singing in this country if you can point me in the right direction.

Educate yourself reading the Sing Up literature, then. Or slog through libraries and databases like I've done for the past year and make note of dates and trends in usage, staying aware of colloquial and technical settings. I can't get inside an individual choirmaster's head to find out the intricacies of why he elects to use 'change' rather than 'break', but I have seen the former used in writing (Higginbottom) and in video (Carwood), to cite just the two that I mentioned earlier. The BCSD database uses it to reference recordings made by former trebles as adults. A quick Google survey seems to suggest that church and cathedral choirs favour the term (advertising for 'boys age nine through voice-change', etc.).

'I would add that it remains well within a contemporary choirmaster's competence to ensure that boys' voices are properly handled. This means training them in a healthy fashion, and using their full resource. It includes building a ‘falsetto' (call it head voice if you like) that will normally remain intact (though perhaps a little capricious) during the period of voice change. It also means involving the child’s emotional response'. [Higginbottom.]

Lefty, mollycoddling, softie slave of the feminist takeover is Higginbottom, clearly. His voice, like mine, must have 'changed' rather than 'broken'.

That's all I have to say on this. Who would have known that answering a casual question about regional variation could lead to such a stupid explosion?

[Yorkie]

And yet nothing in your quote of what the great Mr Higginbottom says relates to the term 'voice breaking' stopping boys from singing. So which of us two drama queens has put an overblown spin on things? As to me trawling the net to find evidence to back up your claims please get real - it was me politely inviting you to put up or shut up. You made the claim that two famous choir directors linked the word 'break' to boys stopping singing; it is traditional in arguments to provide the evidence to back up your claims. As somebody who deals in science rather than the colloquialisms that us plebs use that shouldn't be too difficult a concept to grasp.

None of your reply backs up the issue that you raised:

Increasingly, though, choirmasters, voice trainers and music educators—particularly if they are especially invested in building up music programmes or in getting/ keeping boys singing—are loath to use the term 'break', as it can imply to a child that there is something wrong with him (a 'broken' voice) and may prevent him from joining in with music that he might otherwise enjoy.

I find it difficult to believe that a simple word has the power to destroy over a thousand years of English history. As to stupid explosions, it seems to me that it takes two to play that game And by the way, the wink and it's context was quite deliberately to mock or rile me. As a child I had to put up with bullying, as an adult I'm not so easily beaten down. However, I actually like an argument and I find these little spats of ours to be good fun. In life javerylibe people don't always agree with you - you don't have to take it personally. No need to saddle up and ride out of town on your high horse because nobody was killed or injured in this discussion.

[Sue]

Does anyone know if Samuel Moriarty meanwhile has been a man's voice?

[javerylibe]

And by the way, the wink and it's context was quite deliberately to mock or rile me. As a child I had to put up with bullying, as an adult I'm not so easily beaten down. However, I actually like an argument and I find these little spats of ours to be good fun. In life javerylibe people don't always agree with you - you don't have to take it personally.

I'm only responding to this bit because I won't be likened to a bully.

In my original post here, I was responding to someone's question as to whether voices 'broke' in Britain and 'changed' elsewhere (or the other way around; I can't remember which) and trying to clarify that the term 'voice mutation' is technically valid but not very widely used outside of the literature. My statement with the wink was this:

Say it with me, ladies and gents: 'Voices don't break; they change... voices don't break; they change.... voices don't break...'

That was not in any way intended to mock or rile you. It had nothing to do with anything you'd said. I reckon you find me a lefty little gob-----, but I really don't enjoy going after people, and I wouldn't blow up a perfectly peaceful thread just for the sake of riling you or anyone else. I don't entirely know how you got the sense that I was mocking you with that, but I'm sorry that you did. In fact, though, the wink and the repetition were my way of showing a bit of my amusement at having encountered the 'voices don't break; they change' mantra over and over and over again in my work this year. From readers and advisers. From texts. From interview subjects. And it was always put exactly like that: 'voices don't break; they change'. After the sixth or seventh time, it starts to be a bit amusing, and it got to a point where hearing it another time would make me grin. That's all I meant by the wink.

With regard to the bullying: after that first post, I did get angry and start addressing you directly, and most of my anger at your response to me was that your statement ('My voice broke, all my mates voices broke. None of us needed hospital treatment or therapy...') absolutely smacked to me of the kind of talk that I hear regarding bullying in schools— talk that I, as someone who (a.) took no end of vile sh--- for who I was as a kid and (b.) advocates, as a young adult, for those younger than me who could use help or support, find reprehensible and irresponsible, particularly when coming from adults.

If you read response threads on news articles, that you've likely seen comments like these on stories these past few years related to bulling and/or child and teen suicide:

How is it anyone's fault if some sad kid kills himself? We can't expect schools to police this kind of thing. In my day, teachers and heads let boys be boys, and boys sometimes boys get hit and harrassed. It's fine. It's normal. It's healthy. It's part of being young. I was picked on, and I picked on other boys right back, and I turned out just fine. All these queer whinging child-savers are just coddling these kids today. No self-respecting young boy would go running to mummy and daddy because other lads were mean to him or called him a name. Any real boy would get hit and hit right back. Kids today need to learn that. Anyway, if a child is being harrassed by a whole group of others, he'd better well learn to fit in, oughten't he? It's his choice if he's making his life miserable, and if he's too much a sissy to cope with a little bit of bullying, then he has problems far bigger than being bullied.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm not saying that you've ever said any of those words, Yorkie, or that you ever would, but other people certainly have, and your original comment set off alarm bells in my mind for its resemblance to some such comments. Believe me: I know perfectly well that not everyone will agree with everything that I say or do; and I don't usually take our arguments personally, but this one, for predictably personal reasons, is one that I take very personally. And very seriously. Not about a semantic issue of 'breaking' or 'changing' voices, mind—frankly, I'd be hard-pressed to care much less about that—but about placing socially-constructed value judgments on kids like this: implying that someone is 'lesser than' or 'stupid and ignorant' or worthy of contempt, etc. for being soft/weak/sensitive/'not man enough'/whatever have you. Words may be simple, but they really do have the potential to be powerful things— and sometimes very, very harmful things.

Which is why I responded to you the way that I did, Yorkie. As I've said, the issue is one that I take very much to heart, and as your signature tag goes, well...

All of this might just cement me in your mind as some sort of blind, mollycoddled, cotton wool-dwelling, sissy-boy banner-waver; and I have nothing left to say if that's the case. I only wanted to set out that I was not out to rile you and to explain why I myself did get riled. Take that for whatever it's worth. That's it, really.

James

[viabuona]

Well, back to topic

Here the video of an interview with RP. The interesting part starts around 3:00

You have to view it on YT because embedding is blocked.

[youtube][/youtube]

[dani]

Does anyone know if Samuel Moriarty meanwhile has been a man's voice?

Yes you can clearly hear him in the back row in the Moody Church thing and his voice has clearly " broken" .

And i have to side with Yorkie. The correct term in the U.K is " Breaks" . My brother's voice broke and all my male friends at school used that term as in the U.K that is the term used.

[maartendas]

Also, on a side note, it might be fun/interesting to know that in Dutch, we don't say change or break but - "getting the beard in your throat" I always found that a good - and poetic - expression.

Correction - I was just on the web page of the Utrecht cathedral choir and they use the term 'voice break'. However, I think that's a more technical term used by people involved in music - colloquially, we use the phrase mentioned above.

Maybe in the UK it's the other way round - colloquially people say 'break' but in the music world this has become 'change'.

Yorkie, javerylibe - your discussion made for some exciting prose It was interesting to see how I could relate to both of you and use that to shape my own point of view. I really hope one day at a Libera concert we can all share a pint together

[fan_de_LoK]

The correct term in the U.K is " Breaks" . My brother's voice broke and all my male friends at school used that term as in the U.K that is the term used.

In France the term is "muer", that can be translated to "molt" (or "moult" ?)

[maartendas]

In France the term is "muer", that can be translated to "molt" (or "moult" ?)

I think you mean "mold"? > http://www.thefreedictionary.com/mold" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Yorkie]

In France the term is "muer", that can be translated to "molt" (or "moult" ?)

I think you mean "mold"? > http://www.thefreedictionary.com/mold" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

No, I think FDL is probably right with moulting as this implies shedding something (the high voice for a lower one?) although in English it is usually reserved for shedding hair or skin or a bird changing its feathers.

Mold would be the fungal growth that appeared on Grandma's pasty ("thank the Lord, I thought they'd eaten it"). Or it could be the process to shape something I suppose - hey maartendaas you could be right after all! That's the problem with English, so many ways to say the same thing that it is easy to be misunderstood.

I have made my reply to javerylibe via a PM as I think our discussion is best continued in private. Move along please, there's nothing more to see here

[hannah_kirstin]

My first post here, so be nice!
Yorkie & javerylibe/ James, interesting discussion! You both raised some good points. Let's just leave it at that, shall we?
I'd like to think that the Libera community is a peaceful, bully-free one!
Getting back to topic, I'm happy Libera has decided to showcase the older boys' broken/changed/molted voices with songs like Te Lucis. Wish they thought of this when Tom Cully was still with the group though.

[dani]

My first post here, so be nice!
Yorkie & javerylibe/ James, interesting discussion! You both raised some good points. Let's just leave it at that, shall we?
I'd like to think that the Libera community is a peaceful, bully-free one!
Getting back to topic, I'm happy Libera has decided to showcase the older boys' broken/changed/molted voices with songs like Te Lucis. Wish they thought of this when Tom Cully was still with the group though.

I doubt that would of made much difference as not all boys want to stay in Libera once there voices break. I am guessing for some leading soloist's in Libera to be the main star for years and then to go to the back row is not always something you want to do. It must be a big change and also when you're voice changes not all the boys then want to continue with singing. Ed Day has said recently he prefers not to sing now and plays i think in a band and he plays the guitar for example. Whereas others boys want to stay , we had that with Ben C , Steven G and Sam Coats for awhile. But it does seem more boys choose to move on than stay in the back row for a years , all tho there are exceptions to that rule.

[hannah_kirstin]

I doubt that would of made much difference as not all boys want to stay in Libera once there voices break. I am guessing for some leading soloist's in Libera to be the main star for years and then to go to the back row is not always something you want to do. It must be a big change and also when you're voice changes not all the boys then want to continue with singing. Ed Day has said recently he prefers not to sing now and plays i think in a band and he plays the guitar for example. Whereas others boys want to stay , we had that with Ben C , Steven G and Sam Coats for awhile. But it does seem more boys choose to move on than stay in the back row for a years , all tho there are exceptions to that rule.

Hadn't really thought of that. I guess you're right, about some boys having conflicting feelings of either singing in the back row or moving on to ventures outside of Libera. As you can probably tell, I'm a huge Tom fan (see Avatar!) and was greatly disappointed when I found out about his voice breaking before I could see him in concert. Oh well, thank God for YouTube and RP/EMI for recording that beautiful treble voice!