Demise of Columbus-founded American Boychoir School 'a huge loss'

Central Ohio choir leaders and others say the closing of the American Boychoir School in Princeton, New Jersey — which originated 80 years ago in Columbus — marks the passing of "a cultural icon."

Last week, officials at the school — devoted to training the pure, clear voices of boys — announced that it would shut down, citing financial problems and dwindling attendance. It represented the last boy-choir residential school in the United States not affiliated with a church.

“We’ve just been weeping since we heard the news,” said Sandra Mathias, founder and former director of the Columbus Children’s Choir, who often recommended Columbus boys to audition for the school.

The school was rooted in the Columbus Boychoir, founded in 1937 at Broad Street Presbyterian Church Downtown.

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Three years later, Herbert Huffman, director of the Columbus Boychoir and the church’s director of music, launched the school, enrolling 48 students ages 11 to 15 — “many of them from needy families,” according to a 1940 story in The Dispatch. For such boys, the $150 tuition “was paid for by music lovers or civic-minded individuals.”

“The American Boychoir School has been a cultural icon,” said Kevin Jones, minister of music at First Congregational Church. "It's a huge loss.

"It’s a loss to the next generation of singers, not to mention voice teachers, composers, conductors and who knows who else," he said.

“When Herbert Huffman started the school," said Mathias’ husband, Joel, who from 1975 to 2012 was the director of music at Broad Street Presbyterian, "a lot of his mission was to give boys in the south end of the city something special."

In 1946, the school moved from the church’s parish house to property acquired at 812 E. Broad St. By that time, the choir was performing frequently throughout the area and beyond

"The Columbus Boychoir was known around the world,” Sandra Mathias said.

In 1950, according to the Dispatch article, the Boychoir School accepted an offer from Westminster Choir College to relocate to Princeton. Huffman, who would continue as director, and others thought that an East Coast location would offer greater national and international opportunities.

In Princeton, the renamed American Boychoir School flourished. The choir recorded dozens of records and compact discs; performed with the likes of Beyonce, Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis and the New York Philharmonic, and inspired a movie starring Dustin Hoffman.

In 2002, The New York Times reported that sexual abuse had taken place decades earlier at the school, a cloud that continued to hang over it. Financial troubles and shrinking enrollment proved too much, and the school on Aug. 16 announced that it did not “have the cash it needs to open the school and cannot reasonably anticipate revenues that would allow it to finish the school year if it did open.”

Those who loved and admired the school, including former students, have expressed dismay.

Kelvin Boateng, 19, of Westerville, attended and graduated from the school. He has sung with Opera Columbus and recently performed at both campuses of First Community Church in central Ohio.

"It breaks my heart because it’s such a special place," said Boateng, who on Wednesday began his sophomore year as a music-performance major at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "I wouldn’t be where I am now without it.

“Herbert Huffman founded that school as the American version of the Vienna Choir Boys," he continued. "We performed Gershwin, American songs of faith and music from all over the world.”

The choir performed frequently in Columbus, in recent years at Broad Street Presbyterian and All Saints Lutheran Church in Worthington. It was scheduled to perform April 13, 2018, at First Congregational Church, a concert that Jones said he assumes "is not going to happen.”

“I was really excited about this concert," he said, "because the American Boychoir School is simply unparalleled."

Jones, the Mathiases and Boateng all commented on the ephemeral nature of such a choir’s voices. By the time a boy turns 15, his voice most likely has changed, turning him into an entirely different singer.

“It’s fleeting,” Jones said. “But there’s a purity of the boy’s voice that people are really drawn to.”

“The appeal of the sound,” Sandra Mathias said, “is the clear, shimmering tone. It’s very special. You think of English cathedrals and it’s just beautiful.”

Boateng expressed hope that, somehow, the school would one day be resurrected.

“I know that even now alumni are coming together and trying to think of ways to make the American Boychoir School reborn,” he said. “I’m praying that it comes back.”

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