Leipzig Boys Choir Data Show Puberty Advancing 2.5 Months/Decade Since mid-1700s
But maintaining Bach’s legacy has become more difficult. The problem is with the sopranos. At St. Thomas, as in all boys choirs, the oldest of those singers with unbroken voices are the most prized. Like flowers that are most beautiful just before they die, these boys have the most power, stamina and technique. There are scholars who say that in Bach’s day, some boys’ voices didn’t change until as late as 17. Now boys’ voices are changing earlier, a lot earlier. Medical records tracking puberty through history do not exist, but Joshua Goldstein, chairman of the demography department at the University of California, Berkeley, has analyzed mortality patterns among boys, which can show increased risk-taking and, by extension, the onset of puberty. His research suggests that the age of puberty for boys has dropped, on average, 2.5 months a decade since the mid-1700s. That would mean that boys are sopranos for a shorter time. To maintain a well-stocked soprano section, St. Thomas needs to start with and train more boys. To house growing numbers of recruits, the choir has built a new, larger glass-and-steel-frame alumnat.
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“Now we have the possibility of a young boy sounding like Joe Cocker,” Michael Fuchs, an ear, nose and throat specialist and the voice doctor of the choir, told me. “We can have an early adult voice without an adult personality. He sounds like his father when he’s still a boy.”
Fuchs’s own voice broke in 1983, when he was a Thomaner, age 13. He liked the voice doctor of the choir then and decided to follow his career path. Now trim, goateed, in good shoes and fashionable eyeglasses, he’s among the world’s experts on the timing of voice break. Certainly nobody cares more. “We have a problem in the choir,” Fuchs said, when we met in his office at Leipzig University hospital, echoing concerns I heard time and again. “The balance is shifting. We have more men’s voices and fewer boys’ voices.” The obvious solution — starting boys in the choir at 8 instead of 9 — does not work. The choir tried, and the 8-year-olds couldn’t handle life in the alumnat, learning all the pieces and attending all the rehearsals. So the plan now is to squeeze every day out of the soprano voices. “We try to let the boys sing as long as possible without risking overloading the boys and damaging the voice,” Fuchs said. Many of the Thomaners hold Fuchs in mystical esteem, claiming he can predict to the day when their voices will break. “Of course not the day,” Fuchs demurred, “but maybe two, three weeks.”
In the years before the boys hit puberty, Fuchs saw them every three months to record growth, hormone levels and voice. He played for me recordings of one boy speaking and singing the same passage of a choral piece every year from age 11 to 14. Even to my untrained ear, the differences over time sounded stark, the boy’s voice becoming richer and fuller until the day it shattered. Mining data from the recordings, Fuchs constructs scatter plots showing changes over time in jitter (variation in pitch), shimmer (variation in loudness), noise component (breathiness) and range. All this data provides context so that he can distinguish what is causing flaws in a boy’s voice. “Is it a cold? A problem of singing technique? Voice break can sound like laryngitis.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/magazine/where-have-all-the-sopranos-gone.html?ref=magazine
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