Boy Choir Magazine

There is a theme to this issue that you should get in your mind before you begin. It is this timeless passage from Thomas Wolf’s Of Time and The River (1935):

“Man’s youth is a wonderful thing,
So full of anguish and of magic.
And he never comes to know it as it is
Until it has gone from him forever.”

That passage stands at the head of this issue and - I sincerely hope - defines each page and image here. The questions that I asked myself as I cleared the pages and before I began were these: What is the choirboy’s view of his boy choir world? What is his perspective? How does he see it?

This was a manifestly difficult assignment I made for myself. As Thomas Wolf so eloquently expressed, the choirboy cannot articulate it properly because he cannot see it for what it really was until it is behind him. The adult cannot articulate it properly because of the haze of time that separates his experience from today and the maturity that filters, and even disables, what he saw and the way he experienced it. But it is what I wanted (if not needed) to keep on editing and publishing Boy Choir Magazine. The power of the boy choir is mercifully fixed to the boy, not all the attendant adults. All the other actors in the boy choir world are but extras. After interviewing many choirboys, directors and parents, I have a keen understanding and appreciation of this.

I felt like that Boy Choir Magazine had done a good job at its task, to be sure. But I was not altogether convinced that all I had accomplished was striking repeatedly around the bulls eye and never really hit it dead center. So this issue I wanted to get closer – a LOT closer! Drawing on the lessons we had learned, we put together this view of the boy choir experience (as much as was possible) with every page a new vignette speaking from the perspective of the choir boy himself.

From that view, we also interview Donald Collup, the choirboy that the Dean of the American Boy Choir, Maestro George Bragg, told us face-to-face was his most accomplished chorister. We interviewed Donald with that perspective in mind, attempting to draw out of the man the boy inside who remembers. In this issue we also feature-interview a reader: Mr. Adrian Chapman from Kent, the United Kingdom.

I also wish to thank Douglas Neslund, my dear friend, once again for the assistance in developing the Director’s article. And, as I have in previous issues, I wish to call your attention to the masterful website BCSD – The Boy Choir and Soloist Directory - which is the exhaustive, well done and accomplished site for Boy Choir information. Mark’s site was a wonderful help in putting this issue together.

We also wish to thank young Stephen Z. Biller for all the wonderful support and generosity. Stephen is a constant source of encouragement from issue to issue.

This issue is closed by quite an amazing interview with the editor of the THYMOS Journal of Boyhood Studies, Dr. Miles Groth. I have interviewed many people in my journalism career from 1974 until today, and this interview is without question the most exciting I have ever done. I believe it was so exciting because of what it represented – the goal of this issue, as well as the goal of every man and the boy who still lives inside of him. Please do not skip this one!

As always, it is my hope that you are blessed by this issue as well as informed and entertained and enlightened. From Time and the River, allow me to frame the ultimate intent of this issue of Boy Choir Magazine, again with the words of Thomas Wolf:

"At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being--the reward he seeks--the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity."