INTRODUCTION

THIS essay examines the role of choirboys in vernacular religious drama in England around 1400–1600. Setting aside the choirboy companies of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the boys employed in the adult professional theatres, the residual repertory is that of the civic and parish dramas. The evidence is scanty and difficult to interpret, especially in the still-emerging area of parish drama; but the financial accounts concerning drama in the larger towns and cities provide some information from which a broad picture can be developed.

The plays concerned are the anonymous biblical, saint, and morality plays, which used or may have used choirboys in two main ways. First, because community and commercial drama in England used only male actors (unlike France, for instance, where females are well documented), female roles were played by males. The great majority of these roles, which presented young females, were taken by young male actors with treble voices: only such roles as the prophetess Anna (in the Presentation plays) and the Blessed Virgin at the end of her life (plays of the death of Mary) are known to have been taken by older actors. The young male actors might be apprentices or journeymen of the trade guilds concerned or choirboys from a local church, although some may have belonged to neither of these categories.

Second, many plays required solo singers or small groups of singers to perform items of plainsong or, more rarely, polyphony. While some items were obviously intended to be sung by members of the cast who were not professional singers, most demanded professionals. This is clear from both the repertory (liturgical chant normally performed by trained singers, or polyphony, which demanded a high level of specialist training) and the quality of performance demanded by the dramatic situation (such as the music of angels). Often it is impossible to tell who the professional singers were, but sometimes they can be identified as local church singing-men, and sometimes as choirboys. To some extent this second use of boys overlaps with the first, as a professional singer was sometimes needed to play a female role (such as that of the Virgin Mary) that demanded high-quality singing. Liturgical items were sometimes sung by other characters, including angels, which also might demand a professional singer.

Introduction

Why does one try to ‘read a score’, and what does it mean to do so? Conductors have two main reasons for undertaking this activity. The first is that the written or printed score is the key to understanding what happens in the music. As a conductor's principal task is to rehearse the music for performance, knowledge of the forces involved, the style, structure, and main features of the piece are vital in planning the various practical tasks that make up the rehearsal.

The second is to find out in detail what the piece sounds like, creating an aural image – ‘hearing the music in one's head’ – so that the conductor knows in advance what sounds the orchestra should make and, more specifically, the required details of balance, articulation, rhythm, tempo, and so on that distinguish a performance from a mere play-through of the notes. Some conductors go through this process of auralising the score entirely from the musical notation, while others use the piano to create the actual sound of the melodic and harmonic content of the piece.

Composers undertake this second process in reverse, trying to put on paper instructions for recreating the sounds that they have imagined. Some composers, too, use the piano in this process, generating ideas and fixing the main outlines of harmonic and rhythmic content in their minds. For the great majority, whose main active interest is in listening to orchestral music rather than creating or recreating it, the reasons for learning to read a score are less ambitious but more varied.