Benjamin Yves Liberatore

BENJAMIN LIBERATORE, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, was awarded funding in October 2021 to aid research on “‘Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang’: Child Choristers, ‘White’ Voices, and the Embodiment of English National Nostalgia,” supervised by Dr. Lesley A. Sharp. How do cathedral choristers — choirboys and, though only recently, choirgirls — emerge as sites of investment in aesthetic, affective, and ideological constructions of ‘English culture’ today? Celebrated for uniquely “pure” voices, choristers have been foremost instruments in the sacred-civic rituals of England’s national church for centuries. Yet, children’s voices “break” at puberty, and the anxieties surrounding this certain loss reflect in miniature a pair of interconnected apprehensions: for the diminishing reach of the Church of England and its celebrated “English Choral Tradition;” and for character, history, and customs are threatened by an increasingly “multicultural” Britain. In this context, choristers serve as the national church’s “professional children” in a double sense. They are responsible for delivering technically accomplished choral performances alongside adult professionals, but also for “doing child:” embodying, displaying, and delimiting what, in England, a “child” is. What gendered, racialized, and classed imaginaries are embedded in and reproduced by invocations of choristers’ voices as “pure?” Why are they considered the “instruments” suited to a “quintessentially English” sound? How do choristers understand, internalize, or resist the representational burdens placed upon them? And what might we learn, attending to children tasked with is “doing child,” about children both as cultural “figurations” and as the persons who “must live inside” those figurations?