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I saw a local production of Guys and Dolls, Jr. last week that was performed by children who all appeared to be between the ages of perhaps 8 and 12. It was cute! The costumes were oversized and they swayed back and forth sometimes as they recited their lines. Near the end of the show, I was quite impressed when one of the actors failed to appear on stage and the other kids started “winging it” to keep the show going – wow! That’s good stuff.

One thing I felt badly about though was the singing ranges for the boys. You see, even though Guys and Dolls, Jr. is just that – Junior (After all, we don’t want the 10-year old singing “Take Back Your Mink”…eeeek!) the singing voice parts still assume that the boys’ voices have changed. Unfortunately this was not the case for the boys performing last week.

Because they were trying to sing notes that were far outside of their physiological capacity, I noted that the boys were straining their voices for most of the show. As they struggled to adjust to become more comfortable and have more easy resonance in their voices, they would go off pitch – because they simply didn’t have those notes.

I felt badly for them because I’m certain they experienced some level of frustration with the situation. After all, we all can tell if we’re not feeling quite right in the throat and most would have been able to tell that they were no longer on pitch.

What’s important to take away from this is that prior to the pubertal voice change, boys’ and girls’ singing ranges are about the same. So, while the girl playing the “trousers” role was able to sing in the correct octave for her, the boys should have been allowed to do the same.

If they had been allowed to sing their material one octave up, their voices would have been more resonant, they would have projected better and they would have gone a step in building a sense memory for singing being something that’s easy and fun. Instead, I’m certain many of them took away the thought that “singing is hard”.

Given that sense memory, many of them will develop the notion that they can’t sing. So, I think that’s sad. Others will persist in that way and show up one day in my lesson studio pressing the you-know-what out of their voices and it will take months if not years to adjust.

Moral of the story: Boys and girls singing ranges are pretty much the same through puberty. Singing an octave up, where the girls sing, will often solve problems of strain and frustration for boys who have not yet begun their voice change.