Boys from Steubenville

From smoky, factory-ridden Steubenville, Ohio, 28 brightly scrubbed boys arrived in Manhattan last week, saw Rockefeller Center, the Aquarium, the Statue of Liberty, got lost in the subway, occasionally trotted around their hotel block for exercise and spent the rest of their time singing. The letters on their badges stood for Singing Boys of America. They regarded this week's Manhattan concert as their formal debut, the springboard from which they hoped to jump to national importance, really earn their name.

Their director was Robert Lippert, a big, tense, jowly man who was once a boy soprano in the German Lutheran Church in Olean, N. Y. Robert Lippert well remembers when he was 13 and his father, the choirmaster, gave him a gold watch and said: "Son, you can't sing with us any longer." Though Son Lippert's voice changed, his interest in choral singing persisted. As he grew up, he organized choirs of his own, concentrated on the relationship of the voice to a boy's physical development. His conclusion was that voices do not necessarily "break," that they can be made to develop naturally. Result: none of the Steubenville boys is allowed to sing high soprano after he is 10. As he develops physically, he graduates down through the eight sections in the choir, until he becomes deep alto.

Director Lippert chose Steubenville for his field because of the mixed racial background, which he maintains makes for the richest tone color. The boys who went to sing with him soon learned that they must submit to a strict routine which precluded all roughhousing, all carefree yelling, kept them at practice as much as seven hours a day. When they were ready for concerts Director Lippert bought them bright snappy costumes: for sacred songs, red silk cassocks, white silk cottas, ruching for their necks; for secular songs, long blue serge trousers, white satin blouses, red pleated sashes. They arrived in Manhattan last week with a spiritual adviser, two tutors, a wardrobe mistress and two trained nurses who see that they change their underwear each day, feed them cod-liver oil, spray their throats, take all their temperatures at night and submit the charts to Director Lippert.

Two of the Steubenville sopranos can sing C above high C. One is Son Robert

Lippert Jr., 9, who sometimes directs the choir. The other is William Stevenson Jr., 8. But Director Lippert will let no one in his troupe be regarded as a prima donna. Even the finances are run on a completely co-operative basis. As the choir makes money, 60% of the profits will be allotted equally among the boys who must set it aside to be used toward a college education or toward entering some business which must be approved by Director Lippert and his board of trustees.

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