Cambiata - the changing voice

Responding to the needs of the dedicated young boys in the Cathedral Youth Choir, a new group for boys with changing voices started in September 2018. Like Vivace, the new Cambiata group meet on Fridays at 5pm, an hour before the Youth Choir rehearsal. 

During these sessions, the boys work on specially arranged music with the Cathedral’s Director of Music, Alex Patterson, singing one or two per part. As with the nature of the teenage boys’ voice, which is constantly developing, it has been an interesting journey exploring the boys’ emerging voices, which one week could be a raw baritone quality, the next week a deep bass range, and the following week something completely different!

To deal with the need to have flexible music that can be performed at a different pitch quite quickly, we turned to plainsong. The boys were introduced to neume notation and picked up a few plainsong Mass settings. We then moved on to the Advent ‘O’ Antiphons, which we recorded in the Cathedral Crypt alongside some of our Choral Scholars. The videos were then uploaded to our YouTube Channel and shared via social media and mailing list on the appropriate days in the run up to Christmas. 

The challenge of having constantly developing voices hasn’t stopped the group being able to perform at a range of events throughout the year. They gave their debut performance as part of the Autumn Cabaret Evening, singing Oliver Tarney’s arrangement of Shenandoah. For Carols by Candlelight, they performed the lively arrangement of Gaudete by Ian Crawford. Their recent performance at Lincoln Cathedral saw them perform a beautiful arrangement of Steal away by Russell Pascoe and Take That’s Rule the world arranged by Ian Crawford. 

The boys performed Rule the world again at the Youth Choir’s 1pm Recital on Mothering Sunday in Cathedral Hall. They then joined with the Vivace girls to perform William Byrd’s Ave verum corpus. We are looking forward to hearing more from the combined forces of these two groups in the coming months.