Column
Illuminations
Hymns of the Ages
Recently I challenged some friends of mine to name two forms of art—not works of art, but the very forms themselves, for which children are both necessary and of the essence. They couldn't think of any, and that's remarkable, since our children are supposed to be introduced to art in school, and since the highest praise that you can give a child now is to say he is "creative."
One of the forms I was thinking of is Shakespearean drama, in which boys played most of the women's parts, and sometimes played women in disguise as boys. I might have been stretching things there, since we can easily imagine the more natural theatrical convention, which is to have women play the parts of women. And except in those comic or tragicomic cases (Rosalind, Viola, Imogen) in which the disguise came into play, the sex of the actor was of no consequence; though there must have been some child-geniuses romping about in Shakespeare's time for him to write for them such parts as those of Juliet and Cleopatra and so forth.
The Boy's Vocal Instrument
I can make a stronger case for the other form, polyphonic chorales from the late Middle Ages to the early eighteenth century. It was a long tradition, still fairly strong in England but almost vanished from the United States. You can find fine marble evidence of it in the museum of the cathedral of Florence, which houses the cantorie or choir-loft sculptures executed by Donatello and Luca della Robbia. The figures are those of children—boys again. That was the convention all over Europe. In one of his sonnets, Shakespeare looks at the trees as winter approaches and, perhaps alluding to the abbeys that the Tudors had seized and put up for auction, laments the "bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang."
It wasn't just that boys sang in the choirs, but that the music was specifically written for them to sing—written for just that instrument that is the immature male voice, which is and is not like the mature woman's voice, just as, we might say, a recorder is and is not like a flute, and a flute is and is not like an oboe. I'm no expert in sonorities, but the boy's voice in the soprano range lacks the richness of the woman's, lacks the color. Choirmasters call it "white" sound. It is not simply high, but youthful.
When men and women sing together, we hear the wondrous mingling of the sexes, making a sound that is profoundly human, and yet not like the sound of any single person we will ever hear. We might say that it sounds like what marriage is. When men and boys sing together, we have instead a mingling of ages, because somehow we hear the boy's voice as like the man's voice, even though the notes they sing are an octave or two apart at least. Listen carefully to the voice of a five-year-old boy, compare it to the voice of his sister, and you will hear what I mean.
So the composers wrote music for that instrument; but that instrument itself affects how we hear not only the music but the words too. We cannot help it. When the boys carry the soprano part, which is usually the principal melody line and therefore most prominent, our minds register youth and innocence; and that means that the words take on a different shading, even a kind of cheerful dramatic irony.
Memories of Men, Anticipation of Boys
Take for example Bach's magnificent chorale, Jesu, -meine Freude, whose hymn is translated into English by -Catherine Winkworth as Jesu, Priceless Treasure. Bach alternates stanzas of the hymn with verses from Paul's letter to the Romans, which is perhaps second to the law code of the Pentateuch for least likely passages from Scripture to be set to music.
The first of the verses from Paul is this: "So there is now no condemnation unto them which are in Jesus Christ; them who walk not by the flesh corruptly, but as the Spirit leads." That's all; but it takes a choir a full three minutes to sing it, with Bach's mighty chords, his weaving of voices not singing the same syllable or word at the same time, his melismatic repetitions, and his key changes that suggest every human mood that has a name and many that do not, as we think deeply about what Paul means. What we hear are the voices of people who have—because they are grown men—some time walked "by the flesh corruptly," led by and subordinated to the voices of children who, though they are not angels, hardly know what the word "corruption" means.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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