By this stage in our history, it has become clear that the question of whether someone sang with a modal or a falsetto voice is often a spurious one: with countless singers from Ziryab to Amorevoli, the answer is not one voice or the other, but probably both. Related to this, there is another insidious false dichotomy which we should now bring out into the open, and that is the question of whether certain singers were boys or men. Sometimes the answer is clear – Coryat's ‘middle-aged man’, for instance, or perhaps Bach's fourteen-year-old Neucke – but often the distinction is less obvious. From medieval Cambrai to our own day, we find numerous singers who seem to wander across an ill-defined border region between these two states.

For us, there are two obvious reasons why we instinctively find the idea of accomplished adolescent male singers difficult to accept. The first is that modern society tends to insist on an artificially clear demarcation between children and adults. The second is that received wisdom suggests that when a boy's voice begins to change, he should sing no more until his adult voice has stabilised.