Choirs

Boys. When a special bus bumped into Ripon, Wis. one afternoon last week, 20 world-famous little boys got out of it. Though they had traveled 300 wet, slippery miles from South Bend, Ind., the Wiener Saengerknaben (Singing Boys of Vienna) were erect and lively as they marched into their hotel. There they stripped to the waist, scrubbed their faces, brushed their teeth, composed themselves for a short nap. That night they made the little college town gasp at their sweet voices and expert phrasing. Students, teachers and farmers from 100 miles around listened reverently to da Vittoria's 16th-Century hymn to the King of Heaven. The Singing Boys made it as simple and severe as the black robes they wore while singing it.

The Singing Boys date back to 1498 when Emperor Maximilian I founded a choir to supply music for his chapel. After his death other Habsburgs subsidized the choir. It became one of the foremost groups in Europe. Haydn and Schubert were saengerknaben until their voices changed. The Habsburgs would not have their boy sopranos castrated, though this practice was common enough in 17th and 18th-Century Europe.

When the House of Habsburg fell in 1918, the Vienna choir had to disband. Six years later Father Josef Schnitt, a priest at the Former Imperial Chapel, reorganized it, for two years fed, clothed and educated the boys out of his own pocket. By 1926 Father Schnitt's savings were gone and the Wiener Saengerknaben went on tour.

Though they had sung nothing but ecclesiastical music for more than four centuries, their programs took a more secular turn. In Ripon the boys prefaced their church songs with the Star Spangled Banner, sung with the same scrupulous care they would put into a mass. They clowned superbly in a special number based on Strauss's Blue Danube, neatly and beautifully acted a closing scene from Hansel & Gretel.

On their fifth U. S. tour the Wiener Saengerknaben still eat heartily, still complain that they are not allowed chewing gum. They range from 8 to 13. After the Ripon concert they were to go to New Castle, Pa. thence to Hamilton, N. Y.

Girls. In Manhattan once a year 60 Catholic girls put on white academic gowns, pin red roses to their shoulders, and file out upon the stage of Town Hall to sing publicly the music they have been singing all year in church. When this happens, Town Hall is invariably packed to the doors. Students, critics, laymen and churchmen well know that no other organization in the U. S. can sing plain song so perfectly as the Pius X School Choir. Last week Manhattanites were marveling again that any choir could get such feeling out of archaic melodies and Latin texts.

The girl choir sang these strange, loose lines of melody with dignity and devotion. Listeners found them equally able when they undertook the complicated part-writing of Orlandus de Lassus and Tallis. They thrilled when the girls implored God's mercy in a hymn which flagellants are said to" have howled along German roads in the plague year 1349.

If the Wiener Saengerknaben are one of the oldest Christian choirs still singing, the choir of the Pius X School of Liturgical Music is one of the newest. The school was founded by a stylish little woman named Mrs. Justine Bayard Ward, 57-year-old sister of the late Senator Bronson Cutting. In London, at 25, she became a Roman Catholic. Profoundly interested in Catholic liturgy, she studied at the Benedictine school in Solesmes which Pius X, then Pope, considered the best school of plain song extant. In 1918 she gave $100,000 to build a liturgical school in Manhattan connected with the College of the Sacred Heart.

Mrs. Ward broke her connection with the school six years ago but it still thrives with a faculty of ten, enrollment of 125. Graduates have already gone as far as Japan and Australia to teach the proper way to sing plain song. Mother Georgia Stevens, the school's director, is also a convert. She is widely known for her music textbooks for children, hopes some day to make the boys in her school sing as well as the girls.

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