when audiences listen to the american boy quiet they are thrilled and amazed that a small group of young boys can create such vocal beauty this is the boy's story started out as the columbus boys choir in columbus ohio and how that happened it was in one nine hundred thirty seven the director whom i knew when i was a student  the director music of the broad street presbyterian church in columbus he had several choirs have a very good children's choir he went to a performance one of the early performances by the vienna and it was a project of a quantised club in the mid one nine hundred thirty s during the depression and it was to try to involve mainly underprivileged children from the center of the city in columbus ohio in an activity after school he was a genius at training boys to sing and then no time they were singing well then they started a day school which was based at the church and so to move ahead a bit then of course the second world war came vienna could no longer travel here for obvious reasons so the columbus boy car began more and more to fill in them so they did quite a bit of touring for a while they had a weekly national broadcast on what was the mutual broadcasting corporation they had a fifteen minute live broadcast once a week so they became incredibly well known and they were invited to come to new york to sing and they did a concert at town hall in new york which is white on forty third or forty fourth str and it was review beautifully delighted to accept the position he was also pleased that the boy choir school was now situated in princeton new jersey close to his home james lipton maintained his affiliation with st bartholomew's church and began a ten year odyssey of conducting teaching and traveling with the american boy choir we sang in every state man's fates except for  over us and so at that that was an amazing experience i mean i was so i love during the touring at first i thought i'm a church musician i don't think this is for me early on i realize what these kids were doing for the audience it was very obvious that many people never heard such a car and they were amazed at what these kids did and so i could see that was making  tremendous impression on the people in the audience so i loved getting on the bus going on tour we toured absolutely everywhere but when i first came i came to work with james lipton  the greatest names in youth choir music so i took the opportunity to just come in with very big ice and very big ears and an open mind and try to absorb as much as possible out of the way to host the choir is basically an excuse for the choir to exist but the fact is that the choir is only a means to an end the end is to educate the boys to be in their character is one of many to us it's a very powerful tour because you're going about a professional to inquire that has professional to enquire expectations and everything that goes with it but the goal of the american boy i try to be it makes me think a lot more about my manners and how i'm interacting with people it also makes me think about like is this honest is this right is this i just feel it makes me question the sort of things and try to be the best person i can be the dramatic difference for our students is they also get to learn life skills they learned how to pack a suitcase they learned how to organize their things they learned how to be independent at a fairly young age and of course they're learning these things in a very safe environment there are many adults who are around to help them to teach them and to make sure that if they struggle there is assistance available but these become very independent self assured people it's all about the boys it's all about them it's about their growth it's about watching them develop as young men into young men and watching them develop musically and to see that transformation when they come in some of them pretty young and it's just they have a love for singing that might be pretty simple but it grows into something more and then even beyond abs you know seeing the alarms and where they go from here and when they come back the joy that they have to know that they had such a special time here and how important it was for them i really enjoy singing along as well so it really is a whole process of you know from young to kind of seeing them become adults it's the requirement that the bar is certainly no or than most people think most people think you have to type to be part of american boy choir and the fact is that the individuals experience to join us for that boy to come and one of these is a gift these boys given me a gift fortunately we found out that we knew a couple men who had graduated from the school and they invited us to a concert at the seminary here in princeton and i took my older son cody who was in kindergarten at the time and i didn't know if he'd want to sit through the whole concert if he'd be interested because it was a pretty long concert but he did and at the end  mr malvo are asked if there are any young boys in the audience who wanted to come up and audition and we thought he was too young because he was six but there was a woman sitting next to us turned out who was his fiance mr say now his wife melissa who said oh i'm sure he'll be happy to hear you know he's my fiance so we went down and koji audition for mr mouth are and i was trying not to listen because i didn't want to make him nervous but he was very interested in the music and at that time and he liked the speaking chorus where they're on the train at the beginning and i think mr melville i was tickled that there was this young boy who was so interested in you know this music so mr malabar said well he's great but you know it's going to have to wait until fourth grade but we have some camps and some after school programs he can try out until then and that's exactly what he did so that was was interested in music from the time he was very very little  three boys he was more easily with music even from the time he was very little by the time he was one and he was playing little bits of piano by the time he was four and a half he was griping at us for not singing the now he was able to harmonize by the time he was four or five so it's been something that's been pretty clear when we found this school it seemed like an answer to prayer a lot of ways this would not really sure where he would fit in public school  he wasn't having a lot of issues there but private school didn't seem like the best fit for him either what i liked so much about this cool is that their goal here is not to create great musicians they do create great musicians but that's not the ultimate goal the ultimate goal is for them to create boys who are responsible who are hardworking who are independent and they just use the music to get to that point but i pulled up to  came for the after school program after that my son was so excited about the program and we started on the ride home talking about the school and i was explaining that it was a boarding school and that i was really glad he was interested me after school program but i thought it was hard for me to imagine sending him away to a boarding school and i remember he turned to me and he said well mom there's always skype and i think at that moment i realized that something about the school and my son really clicked the next step is for the boy and his parents to visit the school and during this visit the boy will be a member of the american boy choir school for two days doing everything that the other boys are doing attending the classes coming to rehearsal spending the night so that the boy can see for himself do i like this is this for me because you know d i said the parents are interviewing as well you're also interviewing the parents we are currently studying immigration in the lower school we took a class trip to ellis island and the entire school went on this outing it was the first time for many of the boys they visited this national landmark we came back and the boys research their own roots their immigration of their own families to this country and coupled with that we're reading the book of the orphan of alice island and it's historical fiction piece and it centered on fifth grade a fifth grade boy and so my boys the fourth grade four or five boys are intrigued in their they're and channeling in that into presentations based upon their strengths and how they wish to present it formally to an audience the boys that come here they want to be here they have a passion to be here and so that is driven by of course music so their love and appreciation for music really defines what type of student they're going to be in the classroom the work that they put forth the music whether it's singing musical theory really takes a lot of focus really takes a lot of effort and so this is really what i see from my students translate in the classroom a real passion for learning whether it's music history music math it really becomes interconnected program we have here at a b s is very very very good for touring we use i pads we use a program called ten marks and it so it's a curriculum that's on line based it's not on my own platform and all the boys have individual assignments that they need to complete because every boy is at a different place in math because they come from different places they come from different schools some of them are in algebra one some of them are act grade level some of them are above grade level so my job is to figure out where they are and continue that on their math journey on the bus is very interesting there is sometimes eating lunch on the bus academics in cramped spaces and sometimes boys get sick so they have to be moved to the back of the bus i began with the american boy choir after completing my voice degree from westminster choir college just down the road in july of two thousand and thirteen this is year two for me  one was quite spectacular i started with an international tour to south korea which was quite remarkable we also performed with the boston symphony orchestra benjamin britten's war requiem it was quite the anniversary year for that particular piece we then did our christmas concerts up and down the east coast like we do every year in december our late winter tour always goes down to florida i just came back from that and we did a spring tour last year to the midwest we ended our season with a tour to france so to international tourism one year which was quite spectacular for my first year at the boys choir school we're going to sing with the same old require i've been on two tour so far this year and i was on four tours last year we went to france to represent the country and we sa for the it was the anniversary of d day and it was we learned a lot about d day and about normandy my name is mark miller i've been on two tours this year and i've been on four last year including the korea tour in the friends to whom i think the south korean culture was really interesting especially at restaurants how you don't really sit in chairs or sit on the floor  little tricky because of the language barrier but we got to know each other and show you some signs like that german like where to go to the bathroom and like where it was we're going to princeton university chapel to sing with the same  i believe that the mission of the school rings true especially when you tour we teach these boys about themselves we build their character they learn to be responsible human beings they are educated while on the road and through singing in a choir and the fact that these boys for example each carry a particular job responsibility while they're on tour the fact that they stay with host families while they're touring and gaining social skills that way and learning firsthand about the cultures of the places that they go to educating themselves rather than from a textbook from various museums and battlefields experiencing these particular moments in our history first hand rather than reading it from a desk it's an education that  is just waste half way some waste of grapes from the boys to be fair and then to go from the graves to the veterans that were attending this memorial service and as i said to have the opportunity to talk to them when i was pulled from the resident training choir to go into the consequent my fifth grade year to sing st matthew's passion at lincoln center and it was very overwhelming as a fifth grader to be singing such a giant piece of in such a giant concert hall with a giant orchestra i remember going to europe i believe it was in the summer of one nine hundred seventy six and we went to st peter's square and we saw of the pope and  just we sang for the pope it just opened up my whole life to a whole new meaning of what it was like to to provide service and to provide music and gifts to other people it just liberated us in many ways i went on a six week tour that started as the first time actually left the eastern time zone and we went down to kentucky  the deep south texas came up kansas nebraska michigan and through one of the provinces account i guess and probably ontario and then to new york and then we had a snowstorm there one concert that sticks in my mind the and there was something about that performance that just every time i hear that piece of music it's like magic when fred meets and fernando mouths are determined that a boy is ready to leave the training required he joins the concert league the national talent search basically is looking in specific states and finding our contacts in those states and  making a concerted effort we love ohio and ohio loves us and we never have a hard time finding boys from ohio that's a great relationship our choir actually started in ohio so it's very easy for us to find out but maybe there are other states that we haven't had boys from in quite a while so the idea is targeting those states and looking in our records and seeing how long has it been since we have a boy from tennessee for example and then who do we know in tennessee who are our contacts maybe they can then in turn give us information about local music teachers who we could contact so it's really creating this whole web of contacts who do we know who they know and then continuing to call until we can find a boy who will represent each state gracious god we invoke your special blessing on these talented young men who are bidding farewell to abs and are looking forward to what lies ahead for each of them they came as boys who love to sing they leave as young men who have learned to sing they came as sopranos and altos some are of them are leaving as tenors and bases with others soon to make the change they came to sing in one of the world's best choirs they have upheld that reputation they came as amateurs but they leave  professionals they came as home boys they leave as world travelers so may they live in the years ahead at their future schools and colleges and in their life's work despite the miles that may individuals and from which they leave as brothers in salt