quare id faciam?

The Maryland State Boychoir

On Wednesday this week The Baltimore Sun ran in its entertainment/fashion/about-town section an article of good length whose subject I found especially appealing. The piece, by Sun music critic Tim Smith, profiles (very engagingly, I should say) an organization I was entirely ignorant of, the Maryland State Boychoir. The occasion is the Boychoir's receipt of a large donation that allows it to purchase the building of the declining church who've given it a home for the last five years. But a good deal of the piece looks at the program's history and the quality of the experience it gives the kids, ranging from 7 to 20 in age and currently numbering about 140, who participate in it.

"The mission in 1987 was to reach out to boys who love to sing, and provide them with a safe environment where they can feel it's OK to sing," Cimino says. "These are not geeks. They play football, they're in the Scouts, they appear in school plays."
  Some boys, of course, look warily at the idea of singing in a choir. "They would not expect boys to like this, because it's not masculine or something," Johnson says. "But I know some kids in my school who want to audition now, which is cool."
  With rehearsals, concerts all over town and the possibility of traveling around this country or abroad, as well as three-day winter and weeklong summer camps, membership in the Maryland State Boychoir asks a heavy commitment.
  "You get attached to it," [Miguel] Boluda says. "It's a part of your life."

What's particularly noteworthy, to my mind, about the article & its subject isn't just exposure of a thriving institution that's drawing boys & young men into an area of the arts they're no longer in any kind of numbers supposed to find interesting, let alone worth a lot of time & energy; although this alone definitely is worth noting. Beyond this, what I'm excited to find here is something that looks like a vibrant, locally established model of formation of young minds in a definite, durable discipline – a discipline both intellectual & practical, realized in community & carried through into enough of the young participants' ordinary experience that you'd expect some, at least, might indeed be said to be coming to inhabit it. I think there's a great depth of good to be discovered under such a model.

This would be a great point to launch into further discussion! But for now I'll just say that this idea of coming to inhabit a discipline is one of the themes I want to try, with time, to draw out for exploration as this blog develops.

Photo by Elizabeth Malby, copyright Baltimore Sun.

posted by paul bowman @ 12:01 AM