Sunday, January 10, 2010

A Good Idea

I would like to think that the success of Libera shows that the public’s interest in boy choir music is growing. All of the concerts I have been to have been standing room only and that includes some pretty big spaces so it seems that there must be a lot of fans out there. I hope it all means that we will have boy choirs to mesmerize us for years to come.

If you scroll down on this page you’ll notice that since I installed the stat counter last year we have had over 10,000 visits and that’s not bad for a small, amateur blog. I take it as another encouraging sign of hope for the future.

Did you know that BCSD, the Boy Choir and Soloist Directory, lists 817 boy choirs from around the world? And that’s not all of them. I wish I could hear each and every one of those choirs and have Cds in my collection from them all, but it’s hopeless. I suppose one could begin alphabetically and attempt to gather them up. It would take a long time and a lot of money. There are 44 choirs that begin with “A” and I only have three of them, The Abbey School at Tewkesbury, the American Boychoir and the Atlanta Boy Choir.

Following that path I might never get to Zwettler Sangerknaben and Zwols Jongenskoor.
So far, I’ve taken a shotgun approach to my collecting, usually not aiming at a particular target and just picking up whatever comes near. Unless it’s a choir like Libera or the American Boychoir and then I search for specific albums.

Although Amazon has been my main source for music, they usually make me wade through the same pages every time I want to see what’s available and that can take a lot of time.
I’ve considered buying from each choir’s shop but so many of them don’t have English translations of their web pages and my foreign language skills are poor so that cuts out a lot of choirs. Also a lot of them don’t seem to have shops at all.

What we really need is a central clearing house that specializes in boy choir and boy soloist music. We need a catalogue, especially of the new releases from choirs everywhere. So I’m asking for volunteers, people who know about business and the internet and who are multi-lingual and who enjoy this sort of music. A person like that shouldn’t be too hard to find so step up and let’s get something going. Who's with me?

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