Giving Boys a Positive Vocal Identity
Article for Primary Music by Martin Ashley
We need PVI for boys!
I drafted this article the morning after watching Lord Winston’s latest Child of Our Time which dealt on this occasion with the gender identities of children, born in the year 2000, who are being intensively studied until they reach the age of twelve. I have to say I found it depressing and part of me wanted to leap inside my TV and make all the boys sing! The girls who chose sponge bricks with “health” and “kindness” on them seemed instinctively to know that throwing the word “clever” into the bin and desiring to be “rich” as the boys did will usually take you nowhere.
This really matters. Boys should sing because singing is a fundamental part of identity, a fundamental part of who and what we are. If boys don’t sing, that’s a big contribution to an unhealthy boy identity. Society needs boys with a healthy identity and boys need a PVI, - a positive vocal identity. I’ve been researching this problem for some time and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two absolute fundamentals to PVI
1. Identifying with other boys who sing
2. Understanding the voice
With the editor’s permission, I’m going to talk about the first of these in this article, and address the second, which is quite a technical subject, in a sequel.
Identifying with other boys who sing
Whenever I visit primary schools and find a teacher who is fun, enthusiastic about singing and able to make the most of resources such as the SingUp CDs, then I do find that the boys sing – certainly in class. This, furthermore, has absolutely nothing to do with teacher gender. You do not need a male to get boys to sing! It has everything to do with the boys’ identity as members of that class. It goes something like this:
I’m in 5HD →
→5HD is a cool class and we like our teacher
→Our teacher does fun singing
→We sing!
All that can change if there’s a school choir. One of the greatest difficulties we face is not that boys are unwilling, but that girls are so willing. Plenty of boys are willing to sing, but unless we nurture and protect this quality, many of them will be intimidated by what some described to me as “girls en masse”. Although the stereotype of boys is as tough, they’re actually very vulnerable once they’re out of their comfort zone of sport and rough & tumble. Gender identity is extremely fragile in the upper primary years and lower secondary years and the evidence is overwhelmingly that boys become embarrassed by their voices unless they get a clear message that singing is a normal thing that plenty of others boys choose to do. The process is something like this:
In Y3, lots of new children enthusiastically join the school choir, many of them boys. →
→In Y4/5, some boys begin to drop out. Others notice that the choir is more girls than boys.
→By Y6, only a few exceptional boys have remained loyal to the choir. The remainder now think it’s “not cool”.
→In Y7, there are virtually no boys in the newly formed choir. An NQT thinks it would be good to have more boys, but they won’t come.
At Guildford County School, a co-educational 11 – 18 comprehensive, there is a boys’ choir of almost 100 voices from age 11 to 16+. Some of these boys visit primary schools on outreach. The choir is “cool” and the new Y7s are queuing to join it. Why? Here’s what some of the boys said to me:
Why don’t other schools have choirs like this?
Other schools aren’t cool.
We’re manly men in this choir!
We’re a specialist music department.
We’ve got great teachers. (There is much assent to this answer).
Yeah, other schools don’t have staff like we do.
In other schools, teachers are scared in case they do it and no boys come.
As soon as some start coming more join because they can see there’s nothing wrong with it.
Many of these statements are statements of positive identity (“cool” ”specialist”, “manly men”!) The last statement is the crux of the matter. The boys are telling us that “cool” is not so much to do with repertoire as it is with solidarity in numbers. “ … more join because they can see there’s nothing wrong with it”. Taken at face value, the logical implication here is that far too many younger boys elsewhere must be forming the view that there is something wrong with it, because they can see that not many are joining and some of those that do are leaving. Those images of lots of girls every time the word “choir” is mentioned are fatal for boys’ singing.
Provide positive images
Of course I’m not against girls. My own daughter (a former cathedral chorister) is one! But to reiterate the point, girls come anyway. Performing arts is what they do! Some years ago, it was quite rightly pointed out that science text books were full of pictures of brainy men, or of boys investigating science through cars or skateboards. To attract more girls into science, pictures and stories of women scientists were needed. More illustrations of girls achieving and showing interest in science were needed. Equally, if we provide unbalanced gender illustrations of singing, then we can hardly be surprised if we end up with unbalanced gender participation. It’s a vicious circle. I am talking about pictures on websites, in magazines or on the school noticeboard. I am also talking about the most powerful image of all – the live performance by the choir. Show girls and you’ll get girls. Perhaps it’s time to think outside the old choir box?
Diversify your singing groups, diversify your identities
A crucial part of learning that needs to take place is the very fact that there are musical identities that are also gender identities. It does not have to be about competition with girls unless you make it so. Handled the right way, single gender singing groups can be a very positive educational experience for all concerned. There are such things as boys’ choirs, and children need to know about them as part of understanding cultural identity. There are also boy bands of various shapes and sizes. Most children will know about adult “boy” bands, but what about “boy” boy bands such as Libera or the Choirboys? Then there are boy singing groups such as the “Olivers” on I’d Do Anything which many children will have seen.
Singing has never been about gender androgyny. Today’s young people are surprisingly omnivorous with regards to the content of their iPods. Have you thought of the powerful message that might be sent out by playing recordings or clips, perhaps in assembly, of boys singing? The interest generated might result in some boys wanting to try a bit of singing themselves and it’s here that thinking outside the traditional school choir “box” might well pay rich dividends. How about a boy band, some African drumming songs or even an I’d Do Anything tribute group? Bear in mind that as Lucy Green[1] points out, not only do many boys like drumming, but their vulnerable vocal selves sometimes feel safer hiding behind technology, so why not let them try a recording first?
Make it easier to choose singing
Difficulties also begin to arise with choir when it is organised at a time when other things are on offer, particularly sport. I do a lot of work with boy choristers and most of them enjoy singing and sport almost equally, but it’s finely balanced. For the ordinary boy, it’s not that singing is a particularly bad thing, it’s just that alternatives, usually sport based, are just that bit more attractive. So should we make significant concessions in the way we timetable, particularly extra-curricular activities? The evidence suggests that we should. A diversity of approaches will shift attention from the choir as something that girls go to because it’s organised at a time when the majority of boys would rather be somewhere else. To reiterate my main point, what we desperately need to avoid is ending up with a runaway situation where boys get the message that to develop a boy identity with which they feel secure, they must avoid singing. Let’s be quite clear about why this is. It’s not because singing is seen to be done by girls, but because singing is not seen to be done by boys. The difference may appear subtle but it’s the key that will unlock just what it is with boys.
The answer is not to accept that football is for boys and singing for girls, but to show that singing is a perfectly normal and acceptable part of boy identity. In principle, that’s an easy thing to do. You just have lots of boys singing!
In my second article, I’ll deal with the vexed question of how high boys should sing.
Biographical Note
Dr Martin Ashley is director of the Centre for Study of Learner Identity Studies at Edge Hill University, where he is Reader in Education. Formerly Reader in Education at UWE Bristol, his principal research interests are in boys’ identity and he has researched extensively and published widely on the subject of boys and singing. He teaches music to trainee teachers, directs projects on choral outreach associated with boys and is behind Sounding Edge, an interactive, web based resource to upskill the primary school workforce in singing leadership. After an early career in sound recording with the BBC, he trained as a middle school music teacher and taught for seventeen years in state and independent middle schools, including a period at a cathedral choir school. He is currently working with the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain on an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project to develop a major new resource to educate boys about their voices and stimulate their interest in singing. His latest book How High Should Boys Sing? Gender, authenticity and credibility in the young male voice will be published by Ashgate in early 2009.
[1] Green, L (1997) Music, Gender, Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.