of adolescence the voice maintains approximately the same
range, and that this is the time to train it as a _child voice_.

The question now arises, why not use the girl's voice in choirs as
well as the boy's?--and the answer is threefold. In the first place,
certain churches have always clung to the idea of the _male_ choir,
women being refused any participation in what originally was strictly
a priestly office; in the second place, the girl arrives at the age of
puberty somewhat earlier than the boy, and since her voice begins to
change proportionately sooner, it is not serviceable for so long a
period, and is therefore scarcely worth training as a child voice
because of the short time during which it can be used in this
capacity; and in the third place, the boy's voice is noticeably more
brilliant between the ages of seven or eight and thirteen or fourteen,
and is therefore actually more useful from the standpoint of both
power and timbre. If it were not for such considerations as these, the
choir of girls would doubtless be more common than the choir of boys,
for girls are much more likely to be tractable at this age, and are in
many ways far easier to deal with than boys.

At the age of six, the voices of boys and girls are essentially alike
in timbre; but as the boy indulges in more vigorous play and work, and
his muscles grow firmer and his whole body sturdier, the
voice-producing mechanism too takes on these characteristics, and a
group of thirty boys ten or twelve years old will actually produce
tones that are considerably more brilliant than those made by a group
of thirty girls of similar age.

[Sidenote: THE COMPASS OF THE CHILD VOICE]

To the novice in the handling children's voices, the statement that
the typical voice of boys and girls about ten years of age easily
reaches a'' and frequently b'' or c''' [music notation] will at first
seem unbelievable. This is nevertheless the case, and the first thing
to be learned by the trainer of a boy choir is therefore to keep the
boys singing high, beginning with the higher tones [music notation]
and vocalizing downward, instead of _vice versa_. The main reason for
the necessity of this downward vocalization is what is known as the
_movable break_. In an adult voice, the change from a low register to
a higher one always takes place at approximately the same place in the
scale; but the child's voice is immature, his vocal organs have not
formed definitely establ