2026 Theses Doctoral

“Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang”: Child Choristers, Embodied Voices, and Contested Values in the 21st Century English Choral Tradition

Liberatore, Benjamin Y.

This dissertation explores the work performed by and the experiences of English child choristers: the school-aged boys and, increasingly—but unevenly, and controversially—girls who sing in the elite choirs of the country’s 42 Anglican cathedrals, collegiate chapels, and royal churches. My research examines how these children, whose “unbroken” voices, especially those of boys, are celebrated in terms such as pure, angelic, sexless, and white, emerge as powerful figures in the aesthetics, iconography, and rituals of a particular understanding of “Englishness” today.

This ethnographic project observes how children participate—both as cultural “figurations’ (Castañeda 2002) and as the flesh-and-blood children who “must live inside” (Stockton 2009) those figurations—in the maintenance and transmission of common ideas of collective belonging. Through the collection and analysis of media artifacts, interviews with 165 children and adults, and both long-term and comparative participant-observation in cathedral choirs across England, I examine how child choristers emerge as sites of ideological and affective investment in national self-fashioning.

In the context of a “post”-Brexit, “post”-COVID Britain where reactionary political formations mobilize around nostalgia for an allegedly purer, more authentic, and threatened national past, this project traces anxieties about vulnerability, change, and loss as they scale across multiple domains, drawn together by the aesthetic, political, and religious peculiarity of England’s national church. At the level of the child’s body, the apprehensive attachment to a powerful but fragile voice that cannot last parallels anxieties that animate the national body politic more broadly: the fear that cultural forms like the English Choral Tradition, exemplary of an “ancient” or “native” English faith, art, and culture, will not survive in a modern world hostile to them; and the alarm, exemplified by the rising tide of ethnonationalist sentiment, that “Englishness” itself is thus in need of defense.

I examine cathedral music and its “quintessentially English” instance of children’s cultural production in order to consider the importance of children and childhood—but some more than others—to broader narratives of cultural value, coherence, and erosion. I explore how the children conscripted into these narratives make sense of their interpellation as “traditional” or “heritage” figures and how their own interpretations may conform with or resist those adults intend. I argue that by attending to choristers’ own accounts of their childhood performances, we stand to gain valuable and often overlooked insight into the work of both “actual” children and the figure of the child in projects of collective and collective-making memory.