Singing Boys

It was just an average busy week for the 64 students of the Columbus Boychoir School at Princeton, NJ. Their mornings and afternoons were full of the traditional chores of schoolboys 9 to 14: geography and long division, plus Latin for the older ones. But twice each day the,boys broke off for subject No. 1, singing practice. And at week's end, 57 of them climbed into a bus and rolled off to Philadelphia for a children's concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

In white surplices, Eton collars and flowing bow ties, they sang some clean-voiced Schubert lieder (Hark, Hark the Lark, Ave Maria, Ungeduld) and a fluty 0 Filii et Filiae by the little-known 17th century composer, Volkmar Leisring. Reported the critic of the Philadelphia Bulletin: their voices sometimes reached an "almost celestial purity."

Next month the pace gets brisker. A concert team of 26 will pack into a bus and begin a 6,000-mile tour that will take them to some 30 cities and towns in seven weeks. School will carry on in the bus. It is outfitted with folding desks, a piano and a public-address system.

The founder and director of the Boychoir is a onetime Columbus, Ohio choirmaster named Herbert Huffman. He started his school with a group of Columbus youngsters in 1939, moved it 18 months ago to the onetime Princeton estate of Industrialist (Listerine) Gerard B. Lambert. He runs the school with the help of an academic faculty of seven and a musical faculty of four, screens applicants (only one out of 200 makes the grade), and trains the boys for their performances. This year's students come from 18 states. The school bunks and boards them in the 32-room "Big House" and in an adjoining cottage.

By now, the Boychoir has some campus traditions of its own. Birthdays are celebrated with paddlings, while the paddlers solemnly intone the Song of the Volga Boatmen. New soloists get their heads dunked in the nearest basin "to reduce swelling." So far, the best-known soloist has been twelve-year-old Chet Allen of Columbus, who starred in Gian-Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors (TIME, Dec. 31).

But the fun and fame are generally fleeting. After the choir's cross-country tour, which will take them to such towns as Xenia, Ohio, Muskogee, Okla., Great Bend, Kans., Blue Earth, Minn, and Springfield, Mass., some of the older boys will have begun to take on the first edges of manly rasp. Director Huffman swings in with hearty congratulations at this point: "It means you're growing up."

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