There is a voice that exists only for a few years in a human life.
It belongs to a boy before adolescence, when his larynx is still small and his vocal cords are still short and thin. He can sing high notes naturally, sometimes reaching well into the range we normally associate with a soprano.
Such a singer is called a treble.
A treble is not simply a small soprano.
A woman singing soprano possesses the mature voice of an adult. Her instrument has developed with her body and, with training, may continue to develop for many years. A boy treble possesses something different. His voice is lighter and often straighter, with less vibrato. At its best it can have an extraordinary clarity—a silvery, almost transparent sound that seems to float above the other voices of a choir.
It is difficult to describe that sound without using words such as pure or innocent. Part of the reason may simply be that we know, even without thinking about it, that the person producing it is a child.
For centuries, that sound has occupied a special place in the music of the Christian church.
Churches needed high voices. In many of the great European choral traditions, particularly those in which women did not sing in the choir, boys supplied them. Beneath them were the voices of grown men—tenors, baritones and basses. Above them were the trebles.
The contrast could be extraordinary.
A great bass voice seems to come from the earth. A treble seems to come from somewhere above it.
Perhaps that is why the sound proved so perfectly suited to churches. In a cathedral, where stone columns rise toward vaulted ceilings and the human eye is continually being drawn upward, the treble does something similar with sound. It rises above the choir and enters the great empty space overhead.
Generations of boys were trained for this purpose. Some lived and studied at choir schools attached to cathedrals, churches and royal chapels. They learned music, rehearsed daily and sang services alongside professional adult singers. The tradition survives today in places such as Westminster Abbey and the English cathedral and collegiate choirs, although girls now sing treble parts in many of these institutions as well.
The music entrusted to these young voices was often anything but childish.
They sang of death.
They sang of judgment.
They sang of sorrow, repentance, resurrection and eternal life.
In the Requiem, the words Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine ask God to grant eternal rest to the dead. In the Agnus Dei, the choir asks the Lamb of God to have mercy. In the Nunc dimittis, the aged Simeon tells God that he is now ready to depart this life in peace.
And in Psalm 51 come the words:
Miserere mei, Deus.
Have mercy on me, O God.
Perhaps nowhere is the peculiar beauty of the treble more apparent than in Gregorio Allegri’s setting of those words, the Miserere.
Most of the music is restrained. Voices answer voices. Plainchant alternates with polyphony. The atmosphere is penitential and solemn.
Then a treble separates himself from the other singers.
His voice begins to climb.
Higher.
And higher.
Until it reaches the famous high C.
The note is exposed and almost impossibly clear. Below him are the other voices of the choir; above him there seems to be nothing at all.
Then he descends and disappears among them again.
Today that high C is one of the most famous moments in all choral music, and boy trebles are still chosen to sing it. One treble from St John’s College, Cambridge, described the nervousness of wondering whether the note would come when the moment arrived. His choirmaster had watched the boys carefully, gradually selecting those whose voices seemed capable of it.
There is something else, however, that makes hearing such a performance strangely moving.
The boy cannot keep the voice.
A pianist may begin playing at seven and still possess the instrument of his art at seventy. A violinist may spend an entire lifetime refining what the hands learned in childhood. A soprano’s voice changes and matures, but it remains recognizably the adult instrument she has spent years learning to use.
The treble is different.
The better the boy becomes at using his instrument, the closer he comes to losing it.
Puberty arrives. The larynx grows. The vocal cords lengthen and thicken. The voice begins to break and descend.
And one day the notes that once came naturally are no longer there.
The boy who stood beneath a cathedral roof and sent a high C floating above an entire choir may eventually become a tenor, a baritone or a bass. He may become a professional singer. He may become a conductor or an organist. Or he may leave music altogether.
But he will never again possess precisely the voice with which he sang as a child.
That knowledge gives recordings of great boy trebles a peculiar quality. We are not merely hearing a performance from the past. We are hearing a voice that no longer exists.
Even the singer himself can never reproduce it.
Somewhere today, meanwhile, another boy is standing in a choir stall. He has been practicing his scales. His choirmaster has noticed something unusual in his upper register. Perhaps one day he will be given the solo.
The church will become quiet.
The other voices will begin.
And when his moment comes, the boy will breathe and send his voice upward.
For a few years, he can sing like that.
Then the voice will be gone.
The boy will remain.
P.S. The boy treble has an unlikely counterpart in the Kumari, the living goddess of Nepal. One belongs to the Christian churches of Europe, the other to a Hindu-Buddhist tradition in the Kathmandu Valley. They arose in different worlds and have almost nothing historically to do with one another.
Yet both depend upon the same brief condition: childhood.
One day the Kumari ceases to be a goddess because the little girl has begun to become a woman. One day the treble ceases to be a treble because the little boy has begun to become a man.
Nothing has gone wrong.
They have simply grown up.
Yego’s Chronicles 