Hearing voices

One of the most persistent and tiresome misunderstandings about how sacred music was performed in the past is that boys’ voices were always involved. In any number of places this was simply not true: male voices, yes, always; children’s voices, not at all necessarily. The country where boys seemed to have been used most standardly was England, which, typically, has encouraged us to assume that everywhere else was or should have been modelled on what we were doing. We have no licence to rush around the world insisting that Church music without boys is a debased currency.

There is a study waiting to be written about this — I am not going to do it — during which the author will have fun detailing what went on in the Sistine Chapel in the 16th and 17th centuries. I don’t know when boys were first introduced there as choristers; I guess it was in the 19th century; but whenever it was they have been a byword for low standards.