Welsh male voice choirs: a vocal minority

By Jude Rogers

A school canteen after-hours, the shutters closed and the chairs
stacked, makes for a peculiar music venue. But this is home to the
oldest amateur male-voice choir in Wales, which I’m watching
rehearse on a quiet Monday evening in the village of Dunvant, near
Swansea. The room is a sea of white hair and pink scalps, and
bellies booming out tenor and bass notes.

The sound made by the Dunvant Male Choir is a cornerstone of
Welsh musical culture; it’s the soundtrack to everything from the
chapel to the rugby field to the rowdy pub singalong. It’s also
something I particularly cherish, both as a local girl who has long
flown the nest – and as the elder sister of the choir’s 28-year-old
conductor, Jonathan Rogers, who is one of the young men taking this
centuries-old musical tradition into the future.

In 2011, the Welsh male-voice choir is entering a new,
challenging age. On the one hand, choral singing – and all-male
choral singing, in particular – has never been more high-profile.
Its most prominent flag-wavers are Only Men Aloud, the
Cardiff-based winners of the 2008 BBC choral talent show Last Choir
Standing. They bagged a multimillion-pound deal with Universal
Records, recently sold out the 7,500-capacity Cardiff International
Arena, and performed on Strictly Come Dancing on Christmas Day.

But membership of the more traditional Welsh male-voice choirs
is falling. Last year, Welsh philanthropic organisation the Hywel
Williams Foundation commissioned a study to look at why this might
be; among the factors under scrunity are the increasing ages of
choristers, and the scarcity of available funding.

It’s an issue that Only Men Aloud have also been addressing.
Last April, their founder, Tim Rhys-Evans, set up 10 youth choirs
in the Welsh valleys, encouraging young boys to follow the
traditions of their fathers and grandfathers. A few months later,
all 220 members of these new choirs – who all operate, naturally,
under the name Only Boys Aloud – performed at Wales’s national arts
festival, the National Eisteddfod. Their set, which followed
traditional pit songs and hymns with a showstopping a capella
Welsh-language version of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, brought
the house down.