Other stops along the line

Posted by Jessa Gamble

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The purity of the unchanged treble loomed large in my English childhood. It might been something to do with the 500-year-old tradition of May Morning, seen here in the earliest known recording. At the tolling of six in the morning, Oxford’s townspeople gather to hear the Magdalen College choir sing Hymnus Eucharisticus from the Great Tower, those boy soprano voices soaring in the dawn stillness. The strings of a Stradivarius could not produce a sound as fine, we believed, as the well-trained larynx of a pre-pubescent male.

But what likely did it for me was actually a Channel 4 animated film that came out when I was tiny: The Snowman. It featured a boy whose snowman came to life, then took his hand and flew with him to the North Pole one night to visit Father Christmas. The pivotal scene featured an absolute banger, if you’re a little girl being raised in the classical music tradition: “Walking in the Air”.

I wore out the family record player listening to the recording, which turned out to be sung by a different treble (Aled Jones) than had performed for the film (Peter Auty), the reason being that the first boy’s voice had broken in the brief window between the film and the album. The bottled perfection of that voice proved as ephemeral as the snowman, who melts at the end of the film with Velveteen Rabbit-style pathos.

Embellishments to this type of choir music come in the form of trilled R’s—no slides, no scoops, no vibrato. In fact, I grew up feeling that the warbling of vibrato, so prevalent in American singing (and, of course, in opera), masked a failure to properly hit and hold a note. It was all about ethereal, glassy, focused notes for me.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that with properly controlled conditions, nobody can reliably tell a girl chorister from a boy one. The elevation of the boy treble turns out to be mostly about the exclusion of girls and women from yet another sphere of the church. I hope you’ll forgive me, then, for setting aside that inconvenient truth.

I hope you’ll allow for my delight when I discovered that little treble Aled Jones is now a baritone in his 50s who has taken to recording duets with the recordings of his own unbroken voice.

It strikes me both as a radical act of love for his own inner child and, equally, an act of acceptance for his less sought-after “broken” voice with its gentler, supporting role. Is the result so harmonious because both tracks are the same voice? Is he the same person?

Am I? I’m back in Oxford this week and now have decades of cultural experience outside the place to give me perspective. I no longer unquestioningly venerate one particular tradition. But I can still hear the echo of my childhood values, sing a duet with my younger self—and find meaning in the harmony.

Image: May Morning on Magdalen College, Oxford, Ancient Annual Ceremony, by William Holman Hunt (1888)

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