Mr. J. C. E. Taylor, choirmaster of St. Mary's, Penzance, and head-master of the National School, says:—
"I have had one or two pure alto voices, and these are the best, but very rare. Good voices of trebles unable to take (D) have often become fair alto voices, and my present solo alto boy is one of these. The trios in the anthems are taken by boy alto, tenor, and bass. These alto boys are practised from lower G to C—
[[Listen]] up and down, minding their p's and f's. My trebles, as a rule, last until fifteen years of age, and altos until sixteen, and even seventeen."
Mr. A. Isaac, choirmaster of a church in Liverpool, says:—
"For the last twenty years I have been continuously engaged with male voice choirs in connection with churches too poor to pay for adult help, and, as you may readily guess, I have never yet had the good fortune to secure, for any length, the services of gentlemen who could sing falsetto effectively. I have had, therefore, to rely solely upon my boys for the alto part. At the present time my choir, which is allowed to be up to the mark amongst local Liverpool churches, is made up of 22 boys (18 treble and 4 alto) paid, and 14 adults (5 tenors and 9 basses) voluntary. There is, I find, no royal road to the alto part. My course is as follows. I obtain my boys as soon as they are eleven, by which age they have been made fairly familiar at my school with the old notation on the movable do plan. Theoretical instruction is continued side by side with special voice-training exercises. Occasionally I meet with a boy who has a true mezzo-soprano voice, and he is a treasure, but in the main my selections are boys with treble voices. As soon as a treble shows signs of voice breaking, I let him down into the alto part. The transition is not very difficult, for by this time the boy has become a fairly good Sol-faist and reader. I have but to adapt the voice-training exercises to him in company with his fellows, and I have no reason to regret the issue. I take my boys always together, with two-part exercises."
Mr. Stocks Hammond, organist and choirmaster of St. Barnabas, Bradford, in a published paper on "Boys' Voices," says:—
"During many years of choir training, I have experienced very great difficulty in supplying the alto parts with good men's falsetto voices (especially in voluntary choirs), and I have therefore been compelled to have that part sung by boys, and experience leads me to prefer the boys' voices to men's, unless, indeed, they are real alto voices, which are seldom to be met with. I have never yet had any great difficulty in finding boys' voices capable of sustaining that part, and can always fill up any gaps that occur by the following means. Whenever I find a treble begins to experience a difficulty in singing the upper notes, and that in order to sing them he must strain his voice, immediately he is put to sing alto, which he is in most cases able to do for one or two years, and during that time he is thus retained as a useful member of the choir; for otherwise he would very soon have been lost to it entirely, for nothing hastens so much the breaking of the voice as the habit of unduly straining it."
Mr. T. H. Collinson, Mus.B., organist of St. Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, writes to me:—