Boy Choir Magazine

The choirboy’s eyes scan the faces before him during each performance. Many of them are key to his performance – his Director and his parents. But there are other faces to consider that stare back at him. They are the eyes and faces of his community who have come to hear him sing. Later on, as he matures and learns more and more about his choir, he also learns that these people are a key part of why he is here. They are his nearly invisible support network that is collectively responsible for the choir’s very being. He learns that without all these outsider’s faces, his choir would disappear like powdery snow on a sunlit trail.

The community at which the boy stares forms the backbone of the choir’s existence in that it is the agent of demand for the boy choir performances. Whether it is an Anglican Evensong performance in the steeped traditions of the United Kingdom or a holiday performance in the deep southern United States, it is the community that forms the driving mechanism that keeps the choir in place.

In nearly every choir that Boy Choir Magazine has interviewed and spent time with, the most common thread among them is the oft stated dependence on community support. It is the community that supplies not only the opportunity for performing, but that typically provides the boy choir with its place to practice, its many and varied venues for performances, and its connections to symphonies and other choirs. It is ultimately the community that supplies the choirboys and their parents!

Yet it is not only the boys and the choirs that derive benefit from this association – it is the communities as well. From this perfect symbiosis of being, the community gains the opportunity to experience unparalleled beauty, expressed as the deepest kind of innocence, and an opportunity to participate in an art form that has existed for millennia.