Chorus (I) in Oxford Music Online

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Chorus (i)
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Chorus (i) [choir]

(from Gk. choros; Fr. choeur; Ger. Chor; It., Sp.coro).
A group of singers who perform together either in unison or, much more usually, in parts; also, by
extension, a work, or movement in a work, written for performance by such an ensemble (e.g. the
‘Hallelujah’ chorus in Handel's Messiah). In the performance of part-music a distinction is generally
observed between a group of soloists (one singer to each part) and a chorus or choir (more than
one singer, usually several or many, for each part); this distinction is not, however, without its
exceptions (e.g. the solopetit choeur of the 17th-century French grand motet). The designations
‘chorus’ and ‘choir’ are often used in conjunction with qualifying terms indicative of constitution or
function (e.g. mixed choir, male voice choir, festival chorus, opera chorus). Moreover at various
times and places certain types of chorus and choir have been generically designated by terms
lacking the words ‘chorus’ and ‘choir’ (e.g. schola cantorum, glee club, singing society, chorale). In
English, but in no other language, a distinction is often made between ‘choir’ and ‘chorus’: an
ecclesiastical body of singers is invariably called a choir, as, normally, is a small, highly trained or
professional group; ‘chorus’ is generally preferred for large groups of secular provenance. This
article deals with the chorus as it developed in Western art music; group singing in the art and
traditional music of other cultures is discussed in articles on individual countries.
1. Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Organized choruses are known to have existed in several cultures of the ancient world. Two
pre-Christian cultures, those of Greece and Palestine, fostered choral singing that was destined to
have an influence on later developments in Western music.
In ancient Greece the chorus was a dancing as well as a singing ensemble. It consisted of one of
four groupings – men, women, men and women together, or men and boys – and performed only
monophonic music. It played a particularly important role in the drama of the Periclean Age – indeed,
Greek drama evolved from religious and ceremonial performances of a chorus of masked dancers.
Of the many types of choral dances performed by such choruses, the paean, first mentioned in the
Iliad (c850 BCE), was an invocation to Apollo in his capacity as god of healing; the partheneia,
introduced about 650 BCE, was for a women’s chorus composed of Spartan virgins; and the
dithyramb, raised to the level of choral art music about 600 BCE, was a choreographic description of
the adventures of the fertility god Dionysus. It was the dithyrambic chorus that led directly to the
tragedies and comedies of the 5th and 4th centuries. In these dramas, the chorus, whose leader
(coryphaeus) sometimes spoke as its representative, functioned as a corporate commentator.
Delivering its commentary from a traditional, conservative perspective that bespoke its earlier
existence as a religious and ceremonial body, the chorus acted as an articulate spokesman for
conventional society, thereby heightening the spectators’ perception of the tension existing between
the protagonists and their environment. Pre-dramatic Greek choruses are reported to have been
sometimes quite large, numbering 600 on at least one occasion; the dithyrambic chorus was
conventionally composed of 50 boys and men arranged in a circle about an aulos player. Authorities
disagree about the size of the chorus in Greek drama. It is generally said to have numbered 12 in the
dramas of Aeschylus and 15 in those of Sophocles, and the latter figure subsequently became
standard for tragedies; it has been variously asserted that the chorus in comedies consisted of 24,
50 or perhaps as many as 60 singers.
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The Old Testament provides ample evidence of the existence of well-organized choral singing in Copyright © Oxford University
Press 2007 — 2011.
ancient Israel. David, when he made preparations for bringing the Ark of the Covenant into
Jerusalem, ‘spake to the chief of the Levites to appoint their brethren to be the singers with
instruments of musick, psalteries and harps and cymbals, sounding, by lifting up the voice with joy’
(1 Chronicles xv.16). Of the leaders appointed at that time, three were assigned the honour of
signalling with cymbals, and 14 (eight with psalteries and six with harps) were designated to play the
string instruments which constituted, then and later, the typical accompaniment for Jewish choral
music. Chenaniah, appointed to supervise the singing, ‘instructed about the song, because he was
skilful’ (1 Chronicles xv.22). He proved to be an able teacher; when the first Temple establishment
was formally organized shortly afterwards, David found it possible to appoint 288 skilful Levite
musicians – 24 groups of 12, each group with its designated leader. For ordinary occasions these
small groups may have served in rotation, but at more important ceremonies the entire body of
Levite musicians performed. At the splendid ceremonies conducted at the dedication of Solomon’s
Temple, this already large choir was further augmented by the addition of ‘an hundred and twenty
priests sounding with trumpets D the trumpeters and singers D as one, to make one sound to be
heard in praising and thanking the Lord’ (2 Chronicles v.12–13).
Several times, during periods of apostasy or adversity, the Temple choir was disbanded, only to be
restored subsequently to its original splendour. A choir school was maintained in which Chenaniah’s
successors trained generation after generation of cantors and choristers. The levitical choir was
officially composed of only adult males, but Levite boys were allowed, probably in the role of
apprentices, to add the sweetness of their voices to the singing. There is insufficient evidence to
support the view held by some authorities that women were allowed to perform with the levitical
singers, but, notwithstanding their probable exclusion from the official choir, women no doubt
participated in the congregational acclamations and responses introduced into the singing of psalms.
The choirs of many synagogues, though more modest in size and usually lacking accompanying
instruments, were modelled on that of the Temple in Jerusalem. In the Temple and synagogues,
Jewish choral music, which was monophonic, was often performed responsorially or antiphonally.
Certain psalms bear superscriptions which have been held to refer to performance by a soloist with
responding chorus, and antiphonal singing is described in several biblical passages (e.g.Nehemiah
xii.31–9). That the ancient practice of antiphonal singing was still in existence among Jews of the 1st
century is shown by Philo of Alexandria’s description of congregational antiphony as practised by a
Jewish sect known as the Therapeutae (De vita contemplativa, §29):
“They rise up together and D form themselves into two choirs, one of men and
one of women, the leader chosen from each being the most honoured and most
musical among them. They sing hymns to God composed of many measures and
set to many melodies, sometimes chanting together, sometimes antiphonally D It
is thus that the choir of the Therapeutae of either sex – note in response to note
and voice to voice, the deep-toned voices of the men blending with the shrill
voices of the women – create a truly musical symphony.”
The leaders of the early Christian Church, guided by Old Testament precedent and New Testament
admonition (e.g. Colossians iii.16 and James v.13), gave their general approval to the use of music
in the services of the church; but although Christianity was a Jewish sect at its inception and
therefore heir to the musical materials and practices of Judaism, it possessed during its earliest
period neither the financial resources nor, since it was forced by persecution to conceal its activities,
the physical facilities necessary for the development of a tradition of choir singing like that of the
Jews. As a result of these circumstances the singing that flourished among the early Christians was
largely congregational. Specific practices varied from place to place, but the activity of singing praise
was common to Christians everywhere. ‘The Greeks use Greek’, reported Origen (c185–c254), ‘the
Romans Latin D and everyone prays and sings praises to God as best he can in his mother tongue’.
The singing of Old Testament psalms was practised, initially at least, by Christians of both sexes
and of all ages, but some of the later church Fathers, heeding the interdiction of St Paul (1
Corinthiansxiv.34), opposed the participation of women in congregational singing.
Not only were the psalms themselves borrowed by the Christians from their Jewish predecessors but
Jewish methods of performance were also incorporated into Christian worship. References to
antiphonal and responsorial singing occur in the works of several patristic writers. Eusebius (c260–
c340), Bishop of Caesarea, in whose Historia ecclesiastica Philo’s account of antiphony among the
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Therapeutae is quoted, remarked that in his own time the manner of singing described by Philo was
still practised among the Christians. Responsorial psalmody was mentioned, probably with reference
to Rome, by Tertullian (c155–c222). Antiphonal and responsorial singing may have appeared first
among those Christians in closest geographical proximity to the Judaic roots of Christianity, but by
the end of the 4th century at the latest these methods of performance were common to Eastern and
Western churches alike. Moreover, antiphonal and responsorial singing were not used exclusively in
connection with psalm texts but were applied to other types of texts as well, and exercised an
influence on the development of the early Christian liturgy. Patristic opinion was divided concerning
the propriety of using instruments to accompany singing. Because of their association with pagan
festivities, instruments were censured by many of the church Fathers, among them Clement of
Alexandria (c150–c220), who forbade their use in church. Even as late a writer as Didymus of
Alexandria (c313–38), however, defined a psalm as ‘a hymn which is sung to the instrument called
either psaltery or cithara’.
Constantine the Great’s Edict of Milan of 313 elevated Christianity to the status of an officially
recognized religion, thereby eliminating all previously existing impediments to the development of
choirs. The work of educating experts in the art of singing seems to have begun almost immediately,
for according to tradition St Sylvester, pope from 314 to 336, was the founder of the first schola
cantorum. The Roman schola cantorum, which served simultaneously as the papal choir and as an
institution for training apprentice choir singers, was further developed during the 5th-century
pontificates of Celestine I and Hilarius; two other 5th-century popes, Sixtus II and Leo I, are reported
to have established monasteries devoted to the daily practice of psalmody; moreover, music also
held an important place in the activities of the monastic order established in the early 6th century by
St Benedict. Thus, when Gregory I, pope from 590 to 604, set about reforming the liturgy and music
of the church he found that some of the tools necessary for his task were already at hand.
Recognizing its importance to his programme of reform, he reorganized the schola cantorum, in the
process making use of the musical skills of a Roman community of Benedictine monks. The alliance
thus formed between monastery and schola cantorum was to have far-reaching effects on the
development of choral music; during the next five centuries monasteries, and the cathedral schools
that succeeded them, functioned as the principal centres of choral music education, imparting
Roman musical methods to many generations of singers, who became the cantors and choristers of
churches throughout the Christian world.
The existence of expert singers – soloists and choristers – was reflected in the development of
stylistically differentiated liturgical chants. In contrast to the simple, syllabic chants entrusted to the
priests and congregation, more elaborate ones were assigned to the choir; the most difficult and
elaborately melismatic chants were sung by the virtuosos who functioned as cantors. Methods of
performance were also affected by the existence of virtuoso soloists within the choir; responsorial
performance, in which the soloists were given an opportunity to display their skills, was eventually
employed not only for those liturgical chants that had traditionally been performed in this manner but
also for chants that had earlier been performed antiphonally. The resulting prevalence of
responsorial singing in the performance of monophonic chant is of basic importance to an
understanding of the respective roles of soloists and choir in early polyphony. In the organa of about
1200 and in clausulas throughout the 13th century, only those portions of the responsorial chants
originally assigned to soloists were provided with polyphonic settings; those portions originally
chanted by the choir remained monophonic. This distinction is almost universally accepted as
showing that polyphony in its earliest stages was assigned exclusively to soloists. Indeed, there is a
great deal of evidence suggesting that only unison choirs and solo ensembles were known in the
medieval church and that it was not until about 1430, a date coinciding with the beginning of the
musical Renaissance, that polyphony was assigned to the choir.
In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages choirs were composed of men or of men and
boys; only in convents were women afforded an opportunity to sing sacred choral music. Extant
documents from the last few decades before the Renaissance show that cathedral choirs usually
consisted of four to six boys and ten to 13 men; the eight boys and 18 men employed in 1397–8 at
Notre Dame, Paris, constituted what was, for that period, an exceptionally large choir. Instruments, if
they had ever been entirely eliminated from church services in accordance with the directives of
some of the early church Fathers, were readmitted to play in churches by the later Middle Ages.
Many churches had organs; string and wind instruments were regularly employed in religious
processions outside the church and are known to have been played on occasion inside the church
as well; it is probable that in some 14th- and 15th-century performances of sacred vocal polyphony
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these instruments were combined with the voices, the former doubling, or substituting for, some of
the latter.
European secular music during the Middle Ages was almost entirely the province of soloists. In the
period of monophony, choral singing of secular music was restricted to the performance of choral
refrains in works of the litany and rondel types. Choruses also sang the refrains of some secular and
para-liturgical polyphonic compositions, for example carols. In general, however, secular polyphonic
works were performed entirely by ensembles of soloists in which there was equal participation
between singers and instrumentalists.
James G. Smith
2. The Renaissance.
With only a few exceptions, secular music continued throughout the Renaissance to be sung by
soloists. At the courts and in the homes of aristocrats and prosperous merchants, madrigals,
chansons and all other types of Renaissance secular music were performed for pleasure by
amateurs, sometimes with the assistance, or perhaps under the leadership, of court or household
professional musicians. Men and women were on an equal footing in performing these convivial
pieces, and instruments were freely combined and interchanged with the voices; the social nature of
the musical activity made it essential for all those present on any given occasion to contribute
whatever vocal or instrumental talents they possessed. Although secular music of this period was
generally sung and played by solo performers, there were some important occasions, such as
festivities associated with court weddings, at which it was publicly performed by choruses consisting
for the most part of professional musicians. In 1475, at festivities in celebration of the wedding of
Costanzo Sforza and Camilla of Aragon, two 16-voice antiphonal choruses performed along with
‘organi, pifferi, trombetti ed infiniti tamburini’; and in a masque described in Balthasar de
Beaujoyeux’s Balet comique de la Royne, a chorus of about 12 singers sang both with and without
instruments at a wedding celebration held at the court of Henri III of France in 1581, the instruments
on this occasion comprising violins, viols, flutes, oboes, cornetts, trombones, trumpets, harps, lutes
and percussion. Choruses also participated in the Italian intermedi. For example, Cristofano
Malvezzi’s 1591 compilation of Intermedii et concerti, performed at the wedding in 1589 of the
Medici Grand Duke Ferdinando I, includes a six-voice madrigal described as having been sung by a
chorus of 24 singers and a concerted finale said to have been performed by a company of 60
musicians composed of about equal numbers of singers and instrumentalists. Though such festive
choral performances of secular music were rare, the fact that they occurred at all suggests that the
prevalence of solo ensemble singing in Renaissance secular music resulted from the convivial
function generally served by the music rather than from any fixed objection to the use of larger
numbers of singers.
About 1430 sacred polyphony ceased to be sung exclusively by solo ensembles and began to be
sung by choirs as well. As composers of sacred music explored the capabilities of the choir, rapid
progress was made in its development as a vehicle for the performance of polyphonic music, and its
general constitution was established along lines that were to remain constant throughout the later
history of choral singing. Ranges of outer parts were gradually extended until, by the beginning of
the 16th century, the range of the choir as a whole spanned three to three and a half octaves. It was
recognized that this aggregate range allowed for the existence of four basic voice parts. By the end
of the 16th century the Latin forms of the names by which these parts were to be known had
emerged. The lowest part was called the bassus, a shortened form of ‘contratenor bassus’, which
had earlier designated the lower part written against the tenor; the next lowest part, the tenor,
retained the name originally used for the part assigned the function of carrying (literally ‘holding’) the
pre-existing material of cantus firmus compositions; the part above the tenor was called the altus, a
shortened form of ‘contratenor altus’, which had earlier designated the higher part written against the
tenor; and the highest part was often called the superius (later Italianized as ‘soprano’). The
emergence of this SATB distribution of parts did not deter Renaissance composers from writing for
other combinations and for larger numbers of parts. Choirs of the Renaissance, like those of later
periods, were often called on to sing in five, six or eight parts; occasionally the number of parts was
even greater, as for example in Tallis’s 40-part motet, Spem in alium. Four parts, however, became
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the standard minimum and SATB their basic distribution. In works in more than four parts, one or
more of the basic parts was subdivided, or if the number of parts was unusually large they were
distributed among two or more choirs; for example, Tallis’s 40-voice work is for eight choirs, each in
five parts resulting from subdivision of the lowest part into what would today be called baritone and
bass parts.
The choirs of Renaissance churches and chapels, like their predecessors of the Middle Ages, were
composed entirely of male singers. Bass and tenor parts were sung by men. Alto parts were sung by
men with exceptionally high natural voices, by falsettists, by boys or by boys and men combined.
Soprano parts were normally assigned to boys, who occasionally were assisted or replaced by
falsettists capable of singing these high parts. In the second half of the 16th century, castratos were
introduced into the choirs of the Roman Catholic Church. They were first listed as members of the
Cappella Sistina in 1599, but this listing may constitute a belated acknowledgment of an already
well-established practice; one singer listed in the Vatican rolls for 1562 as a falsettist is elsewhere
referred to as a castrato, and castratos are known to have been employed in Portugal and
elsewhere as early as about 1570. Although the use of castratos in church choirs seems to have
been most prevalent in Italy, particularly at Rome, the practice spread to all other Roman Catholic
countries. At first only soprano parts were assigned to castratos, but after 1687 castratos in the
Cappella Sistina sang alto parts as well. Although the Church took a strong stand against castration,
it continued to employ castratos in its choirs. In 1780 more than 200 of them were employed in
churches at Rome, and they continued to sing in the Cappella Sistina throughout the 19th century,
the last of them retiring as late as 1913.
Renaissance sacred polyphony was probably not infrequently performed by instruments and voices
combined. However, all-vocal performances seem to have been the ideal; the Cappella Sistina, for
example, was particularly noted for its singing without instruments. When melody instruments were
used, they served to replace absent parts, or doubled the singers to enrich the texture on festive
occassions; they were rarely required. The players of melody instruments sometimes listed on the
membership rosters of church and chapel organizations were usually used as a separate,
contrasting ensemble rather than as an accompaniment added to the voices. Although many other
melody instruments were employed by such organizations, sackbuts, shawms, dulcians and cornetts
were those most frequently associated with performances in ecclesiastical surroundings. Organs
were sometimes used to accompany the voices in the last few decades of the Renaissance.
Organists often played from bass partbooks, sometimes from organ scores, which consist for the
most part of reductions of the vocal parts.
Roman Catholic choirs of the Renaissance, maintained in the chapels of princely patrons as well as
in churches, were in general larger than their medieval predecessors. In 1467, for example, the
Burgundian chapel of Philip the Good consisted of about 30 men and boys, and in England 16 boys
and 16 men made up the choirs of the collegiate churches of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1448
and Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1484. Choirs tended to increase in size as the period progressed.
Employing only nine singers in 1436, the papal choir, descended from the Roman schola cantorum
and called the Cappella Sistina from about 1480, grew to 18 in 1450, 24 in 1533 and 28 in 1594; in
1625 its strength was permanently established at 32. Most choirs of the period were probably no
larger than the Cappella Sistina, but there were some important exceptions; for example, about 1570
the Bavarian Hofkapelle at Munich, directed by Lassus, consisted of a total of 92 performers: 16
boys, 6 castratos, 13 alto falsettists, 15 tenors, 12 basses and 30 instrumentalists. This and other
exceptionally large establishments no doubt functioned on a day-to-day basis as umbrella
organizations from which smaller performing units were extracted as needed for ordinary events
(even the Cappella Sistina rarely, if ever, performed at full strength); for festive religious and
ceremonial occasions their full complements were available to give aural representation to the
magnificence of their ecclesiastical or secular patrons.
Although the Reformation signalled the end of Roman Catholic hegemony in the development of
church choirs, the 16th century witnessed only modest steps towards the establishment of
independent traditions of Protestant choral singing. Both Luther and Calvin, emphasizing the
priesthood of all believers, recognized the need for revitalization of the ancient, but generally
neglected, practice of Christian congregational singing. Calvin’s austere views concerning the
function of music in the service of religion led him to sanction only unison congregational singing of
psalms, thereby forestalling for at least two centuries the development of choirs in Calvinist
churches. Luther, however, encouraged the use of choirs, acknowledging that they served both
aesthetic and didactic functions in worship. Early Lutheran choirs were modelled on their Roman
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Catholic predecessors. The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers did not result in the
participation of women singers; men and boys were trained in the cantorial tradition at schools which
were under the protection of clerical or municipal authorities. Lutheran choirs may sometimes have
been larger and less professional than Catholic choirs of the period. Johann Walter (i), Luther’s
principal musical adviser and from 1526 to 1548 Kantor at Torgau, was the leader of a Kantorei
made up of students from the Torgau Lateinschule, clergy, teachers and other interested citizens.
Walter’s choir, like many other Lutheran choirs, performed on civic and scholastic as well as
ecclesiastical occasions.
Inasmuch as the Reformation in England was motivated more by political considerations than by
religious discontent or theological differences with Rome, the early Anglican Church tended to
conserve many customs and traditions of the past. English choirs were not therefore greatly altered
in constitution or in function as a result of the Reformation. The dissolution of the monasteries
between 1536 and 1540 and the similar fate that befell the choir schools of cathedrals and collegiate
churches as a result of the Chantries Acts of 1545 and 1547 would have been fatal to English choral
singing traditions had not Henry VIII and his successors provided for the survival or establishment of
more than 30 regularly constituted and endowed cathedral and collegiate choral foundations. The
Chapel Royal, which had existed since the late 13th century, was also retained, and it continued to
attract to its service the finest of England’s singers and composers (see LONDON, §II, 1). From the
mid-16th century until the Civil War a century later it regularly employed 32 men and 12 boys. The
choirs of cathedrals and collegiate churches varied in size from place to place; the cathedral choirs
of 16 men and eight boys established in 1541 at Oxford, Ely and Peterborough were average in size,
but smaller choirs of 12 men and six to eight boys were established between 1540 and 1542 at the
cathedrals of Bristol, Carlisle, Chester, Gloucester and Rochester, while during the same years
larger choirs of 20–24 men and ten boys were established at Westminster Abbey and at the
cathedrals of Canterbury, Durham, Winchester and Worcester. Unusually large choral bodies were
sometimes created when, in connection with particularly important occasions of state, the Chapel
Royal joined with the musical forces of one of the cathedrals, thus producing choirs of more than 70
voices. Although recorders and viols were sometimes used in English churches, cornetts and
sackbuts were the instruments most frequently combined with choirs; indeed, the use of a quartet of
two cornetts and two sackbuts was more or less standard practice in some churches. As on the
Continent, the organ, although probably used with voices in earlier times as well, began to be
recognized as a constituent part of English choral establishments only during the last few decades of
the 16th century; at the Chapel Royal the first appointment of an organist specifically so designated
is not recorded until 1601. Following medieval custom, English choirs of the Renaissance were
divided into two equally balanced halves; the two groups were seated facing one another on
opposite sides of the chancel, decani on the dean’s side and cantoris on the precentor’s side. This
encouraged an antiphonal mode of performance that was often exploited in the works of English
Renaissance composers. The principle of responsorial singing was employed in the English verse
anthem. In contradistinction to the entirely choral full anthem, the verse anthem consisted of
contrasting sections for soloist or soloists (verse) and chorus. In Renaissance verse anthems,
soloists were supported by a consort of viols or an organ; the instruments doubled the voices of the
choir during the full choral sections. It has been suggested that the use of the term ‘verse’ to
designate the solo sections of these anthems was derived from its association with responsorial
chants (e.g. graduals, alleluias, introits) consisting of verse and respond sections sung respectively
by soloists and choir; according to an alternative explanation, the term was derived from secular or
paraliturgical compositions (e.g. rondels, carols) possessing a structure of verse (solo) and refrain
(chorus). In either case the fact that this term, with its antecedents in earlier responsorial singing,
was adopted by English composers of verse anthems may be seen as a specific reflection of the
general continuity that characterized the development of the chorus throughout the Middle Ages and
up to the end of the Renaissance.
The general statement that women did not sing in church and chapel choirs during the Renaissance
and Baroque eras is subject to two important exceptions. In convents, unison chanting was used in
daily religious observances from the Middle Ages onwards. During the late Renaissance period and
the Baroque, some female monastic houses emerged as centres of musical development. In these
centres, polyphony was performed and sometimes composed by nuns specially trained as musical
leaders. Late 20th-century research into this subject has tended to show that with some exceptions
the polyphony performed in the chapels of convents was more conservative than that sung
coterminously in non-monastic musical establishments. This was not the case, however, with the
second exception. At four ospedali in Venice, renowned composers such as Caldara, Cimarosa,
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Hasse, Jommelli, Lotti and Porpora were engaged to direct and teach and to compose works in the
most up-to-date styles for talented and rigorously trained women singers and instrumentalists who
began as students and progressed to become teachers and leaders; these institutions were the
forerunner of later conservatories of music. Among the women who emerged as leaders within these
conservatories were several composers whose works, some of which compare favourably with those
of their famous teachers, have begun to receive the attention of musical scholars. Founded to
provide charitable relief for the indigent, the chronically ill and orphans (hence the derivation of the
word ‘conservatory’), the ospedali began in the mid-16th century to offer musical training to the
female orphans in their care. By the mid-17th century, this training and the opportunities it opened
for its recipients became so desirable that the daughters of Venice’s patrician and noble families,
who were neither orphans nor indigent, sought admission. Talented young women of lower
socioeconomic status who were not orphans were recruited and accepted as what would today be
called scholarship students. Eachospedale had a large church building attached to it in which
services and concerts featured the singing and playing of the student ensembles. Although the
orchestras sometimes included male teachers playing alongside their female students, the choruses
were made up entirely of women. These choruses were not large – perhaps no more than 20
singers as a rule – but on at least one important occasion, a concert in 1782 in honour of Emperor
Joseph II, the four ospedali combined to create a force of over 100 singers and instrumentalists. The
music historian Charles Burney spent several days in 1771 investigating the ospedali. In his Present
State of Music in France and Italy (1771), he gave a decidedly favourable description of what he
saw and heard, commenting as follows on technical aspects of the choral ensembles:
“As the choruses are wholly made up of female voices; they are never in more
than three parts, often only in two D. Many of the girls sing in the counter-tenor
[range] as low as A and G, which enables them always to keep below the soprano
and mezzo soprano, to which they sing the bass.”
James G. Smith
3. The Baroque.
The general enlargement of church and chapel choirs that had taken place during the Renaissance
was not carried forward to any great extent during the period from 1600 to 1750. As in the previous
period, unusually large choirs occasionally flourished as a result of favourable patronage: the
French royal chapel in the second half of the 17th century, for example, consisted of about 60
singers, Louis XIV having doubled its former size in order to make it a sufficiently splendid
representative of his opulent court. For the celebration of particularly important occasions,
untypically large choral bodies were sometimes created either by combining two or more choirs or by
enlarging a single choir through the temporary employment of additional singers. The choirs of the
Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey were customarily combined at English coronations, and on at
least one occasion, the funeral of Handel in 1759, they performed in conjunction with the choir of St
Paul’s Cathedral as well. Extra singers were often employed at, for example, S Petronio, Bologna, in
connection with the feast on 4 October of the church’s patron saint; in 1687, a typical year, the basic
16-voice choir was augmented by 49 additional singers. On the other hand, Baroque choirs were
often smaller than their Renaissance predecessors. Periods of adversity were sometimes the result
of external circumstances: for instance, German choirs suffered a drastic shortage of adult male
singers during the Thirty Years War (1618–48), and English choirs, already adversely affected
during the Civil War (1642–9), ceased to exist altogether during the Commonwealth and
Protectorate (1649–60). Towards the end of the Baroque era, indifference on the part of patrons had
a deleterious effect on choirs. English choirs, although they had been re-established at
pre-Commonwealth strength immediately following the Restoration in 1660, were allowed to
degenerate in both size and quality by Charles II’s successors. Lack of affirmative patronage is also
reflected in the memorandum that Bach submitted in 1730 to the Leipzig town council. In his ‘Short
but most necessary draft for a well-appointed church music, with certain modest reflections on the
decline of the same’, he complained of the inferior quality of some of the singers assigned to him and
enumerated the minimum number of singers required to serve the three Leipzig churches in which
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concerted music and motets were performed; this minimum number, according to him, was 36 –
three choristers, one of whom also functioned as a soloist, for each of the four parts of three
12-voice choirs. However, notwithstanding the existence from time to time and place to place of
larger and smaller choirs, the choir of 30–40 voices which had become common during the
Renaissance continued to be regarded as a satisfactory norm throughout the Baroque era. S Marco,
Venice, had a choir of 36 in the late 17th century; as has been stated above, the Cappella Sistina
numbered 32 from 1625; the restored Chapel Royal of England consisted of 44 singers from 1660 to
1689, 34 from 1689 to 1715 and 38 thereafter; Buxtehude employed a choir of about 30 in his
Abendmusik concerts at Lübeck during the last three decades of the 17th century; and even Bach,
when major undertakings warranted the use of all his singers in a single performance, possessed a
choir of 36.
Thus choirs did not generally grow in size during the Baroque period, primarily because they were
expensive. For this reason, solutions less costly and more effective than the mere multiplication of
voices were devised to satisfy the Baroque concern for increased sonority. Contrast was the
essential factor in these solutions, one of which involved polychoral performance and spatial
distribution of the voices, others the use of solo–tutti contrasts and of independent choral and
instrumental bodies in a concertato style.
Music for two or more choirs was not a new development of the Baroque period. Mention has
already been made of a performance by antiphonal choirs at a 1475 wedding celebration, of decani–
cantoris antiphony in English Renaissance music and of a motet for eight choirs by Tallis. Polychoral
works were produced by many other Renaissance composers, among them Palestrina at Rome and
Willaert at Venice. Performance by CORI SPEZZATI – literally ‘broken’ choirs, that is, choirs spatially
separated from one another – was indicated for several psalm compositions by Willaert which were
published in 1550 under the designation ‘salmi spezzati’. It was, however, during the early 17th
century that performance by two or more choirs in a concertato manner was fully exploited. Choirs of
like timbre (e.g. SATB/SATB) as well as those of unlike timbre (e.g. SSAT/SATB/TTTB) were pitted
against one another; spatial distribution of the choirs created an illusion of increased sonority. S
Marco in Venice became famous for its use of antiphonal cori spezzati, and Venetian techniques
spread to other countries as well, especially to Germany, where they were employed by Lutheran
musicians such as Michael Praetorius and Schütz. At Rome, although the Palestrinian contrapuntal
style was perpetuated in conservative stile antico writing, polychoral performance flourished and
was expanded to unprecedented dimensions. The term ‘colossal’ has been aptly applied to Roman
polychoral performances, some of which involved as many as 12 choirs. André Maugars described
one such spectacular performance which he attended in 1639 at S Maria sopra Minerva:
“Two large organs are elevated on the two sides of the main altar, where two
choirs of music were placed. Along the nave were eight more choirs, four on one
side and four on the other, raised on platforms eight or nine feet high, separated
from one another by the same distance and facing one another. With each choir
there was a small organ.”
The grand style of Roman polychoral performance was exported to other countries, notably to
Austria. Indeed, the colossal Baroque style can be said to have reached a climax in the later 17th
century with the 53-part polychoral mass formerly attributed to Orazio Benevoli but now thought to
be by Biber or Andreas Hofer. Polychoral distribution of the voices, although never again so
extensively employed as in the 17th century, remained a device occasionally used by composers of
all later periods.
Contrasts between large and small choirs or between soloist(s) and choir(s) were sometimes
employed in both Venetian and Roman polychoral performances, but such quantitative contrasts,
probably because they contributed to a lesser degree to the illusion of increased sonority, were not
an indispensable feature of the splendid performances of Italian music that occurred during the 17th
century. In the last half of the century, however, solo–tutti contrast constituted an essential feature of
choral performances in both England and France. The French grand motet depended for its identity
on a juxtaposition of grand choeur and petit choeur, the latter consisting of solo voices, and the
Restoration verse anthem, like its Renaissance forerunner, was similarly identified by contrast
between soloists (verse) and chorus.
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Since there was no general increase in the number of participants, solo–tutti contrast and polychoral
disposition of the singers made a contribution more illusory than real to increased sonority. Initially at
least, similar circumstances prevailed in connection with concertato deployment of instrumental
ensembles. The same instruments that had previously functioned as an integral part of the choir,
reinforcing or replacing ad libitum the individual vocal parts, were organized in the late 16th and
early 17th centuries into independent ensembles which, functioning now as one or more of the
separate choirs of polychoral works, were pitted against the voices. At first, as in a 1587 collection of
polychoral compositions by the Venetian composers Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli which appeared
under the title Concerti ' continenti musica di chiesa, composers began to express a generalized
desire for vocal–instrumental contrast, but without designating either the specific parts to be
assigned to instruments or the specific instruments to be used. As time passed, specific instrumental
designations began to appear and the contrast between voices and instruments was heightened by
concomitant developments in the differentiation of vocal and instrumental idioms. Not only was there
a shift from a colla parteto a concertato use of melody instruments in the early Baroque period but
the organ also began to function in a new role, underpinning the vocal and instrumental choirs with a
virtually indispensable continuo part. Shortly after 1600, as the instruments of concertato ensembles
began to be specifically designated, a real increase in sonority resulted from enlargement of the
instrumental groups. The aforementioned 53-part mass, for example, was written for two eight-part
vocal choirs; two six-part choirs of string instruments; a six-part choir of flutes and oboes; a
seven-part choir of trumpets, cornetts and trombones; two four-part choirs of trumpets, one with
timpani; and three organs, two of them functioning as continuo instruments with the vocal choirs and
the third playing a master basso seguente part. The instrumental ensembles participating in early
Baroque performances of choral music were not standardized, but as the period progressed, choirs
performed more frequently with homogeneous groups of instruments, most often strings, and with
regularly constituted orchestras. In Louis XIV’s royal chapel, for example, the famed ‘24 Violons du
Roi’ played a prominent role in performances of concerted motets, and a similar band of string
instruments, organized by Charles II in imitation of it, participated in Chapel Royal performances of
many English verse anthems. Similar string groups and orchestras also existed in many churches
and cathedrals. Buxtehude’s choir of 30 or so voices performed with a string ensemble of about 15
players, and Bach, in his 1730 memorandum to the Leipzig town council, specified the need for an
orchestra of about 18 players. At S Petronio, Bologna, in the previously cited typical year of 1687,
the normal 16-voice choir sang regularly with an orchestra of 13 players, and the 49 singers added
to the choir to celebrate the feast of the church’s patron saint were balanced by an additional 28
instrumentalists. By the end of the Baroque period, continuo underpinning was virtually an
ever-present element in choral music and fully developed orchestral accompaniments were a normal
part of most choral performances.
The foundations of opera were laid by the musicians, poets and scholars of the Florentine
Camerata, who had as their goal the renewal of musical practices associated with ancient Greek
drama. Although concerned chiefly with the creation of a monodic style of declamation suitable for
the individual expression of passionate utterances, they recognized that the restoration of Greek
practices required the use of the chorus not merely as a decorative element, as had been the case
in intermedi (which were among the immediate theatrical predecessors of the opera), but in the roles
of interlocutor and commentator as well. Moreover, early composers of operas, especially
Monteverdi, discovered that the chorus served a useful purpose from a purely musical point of view
by providing contrast and structural delineation amid the unvarying style that prevailed in solo song
before the development of stylistic contrast between recitative and aria. The chorus therefore played
a structurally important role, dramatically and musically, in early opera, especially in the works of
Monteverdi and in those of Roman composers. At about the time that Venice emerged as a leading
centre of operatic activity, a variety of circumstances – theoretical, musical, and practical – combined
to reduce the importance of the chorus in Italian opera: a waning of speculative interest in the
restoration of Greek drama undercut the theoretical basis on which the dramatic importance of the
chorus had initially been predicated; developing stylistic differentiation between recitative and aria
eliminated the previous need for choral delineation of musical structure; and most important,
increasing reliance on public support, rather than, as previously, on the support of munificent
patrons, demanded the elimination of the extravagance of choristers’ salaries. After about 1640 the
chorus virtually disappeared from Italian opera; only in festival operas produced at the italianate
courts of such Austrian and German centres as Vienna and Munich, where opera continued to be
supported by wealthy patrons rather than by the public, did the chorus retain something of its former
importance. In the late 17th century and in the 18th, the chorus flourished briefly in French operas by
Lully, Rameau and their contemporaries, as it did also in English theatrical music of the Restoration,
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especially in the works of Purcell (e.g. Dido and Aeneas in which the chorus, with Belinda as its
leader, functions very much in the manner of its Greek ancestor).
At about the time of its disappearance from Italian opera, the chorus began to be used in the
oratorios which were just then becoming popular in Rome. Supported by church societies, the
Roman oratorio was not subject to the budgetary difficulties that adversely affected the chorus in
publicly supported opera. The oratorio initially possessed a dramatic libretto in which a sacred story
was recounted; non-sacred subjects of a moralizing nature were also used at a later time. These
dramatic texts were usually presented, however, without benefit of scenery, costumes or stage
action. Under these circumstances the chorus was found to be useful not only in its ancient role of
commentator and in its operatic role of collective persona but also for the purposes of narrating the
action and compensating for the lack of visual representation. The chorus flourished particularly in
the oratorios of Carissimi and, outside Italy, in those of Charpentier and Schütz. During the last
decades of the 17th century a few Italian composers of oratorios (e.g. Stradella and Legrenzi) made
extensive use of the chorus, but by the end of the century Italian oratorio, like the opera for which it
served by that time as a Lenten substitute, featured the singing of virtuoso soloists to the virtual
exclusion of the chorus. In the first half of the 18th century, Italian oratorios in which the chorus
played a prominent part were produced in Vienna. It was, however, in the English oratorios of
Handel that the chorus, enjoying a reversal of its earlier exclusion from opera due to economic
considerations, became an element of central importance. Handel, whose entrepreneurial ventures
in opera had ended in failure, discovered as a result of several fortuitous circumstances the
profitability of a kind of public entertainment that, although presented in the same theatres that had
formerly housed his operatic works, dispensed with expensive scenic trappings and highly paid
Italian virtuosos and substituted for them an expanded use of the relatively inexpensive chorus.
Handel gave the chorus an importance, invariably structural and sometimes quantitative, that
outweighed that of the solo singers. He often, as in Israel in Egypt, assigned the chorus the role of
idealized protagonist, writing brilliant and varied movements on a grand scale and sometimes
combining two or more consecutively to form multi-movement choral structures on an exceptionally
large scale. Through his emphasis on the chorus he developed the oratorio far beyond its original
scope and produced works that were destined to serve as models for many later generations of
oratorio composers, especially in England.
Little documentary evidence is available concerning the size and other physical characteristics of
Baroque opera and oratorio choruses. A rare insight into the size of the chorus in the earliest operas
is provided by Marco da Gagliano’s specification, in the preface to his Dafne (1608), that the chorus
should be composed of ‘no more than 16 or 18 singers’; it is also known that at Vicenza in 1585 a
group of 15 singers, a number determined by the supposed size of the ancient Sophoclean chorus,
performed the music composed by Andrea Gabrieli for the choruses of the drama Edippo Tiranno.
Probably the choruses employed in early Italian operas were generally no larger than these. Indeed,
evidence shows that the designation ‘coro’ was sometimes used in these early operas to refer to an
ensemble which, although it functioned dramatically as a chorus, was composed of only one singer
for each part. Except at the German and Austrian courts, where operas were produced on a grander
scale, this latter practice became the norm for all Italian operas after about 1640. In Handel’s operas,
for example, the final ensembles, although designated ‘coro’, were performed by the principals. The
chorus in French opera was at first no larger than its Italian predecessor. Cambert’sPomone,
produced in 1671, employed a chorus of 15 singers and an orchestra of 13. Larger groups were
organized by Lully and his successors. From at least 1713 the orchestra of the Académie Royale de
Musique consisted of 46 players, and it was presumably balanced by a chorus not too dissimilar in
size: in 1754, when the orchestra still numbered just under 50, there was a chorus of 38. It is
impossible to determine the extent to which women participated in Baroque opera choruses. They
appeared from the outset in solo roles. Moreover, in 1681 female dancers were admitted to the
French operaticcorps de ballet, and it may be reasonable to suppose that at this time female singers
– if they had ever been excluded – were also licensed to appear in operatic choruses. They had
definitely been admitted by 1754; of the 38 choristers employed in that year, 17 were women. It has
been generally assumed that the structurally and dramatically important choruses of early Italian
oratorios were sung by choral groups no smaller, perhaps even considerably larger, than the
average church choirs of the period, but there is at present no direct evidence for this assumption.
Maugars, whose account of music performed at a Roman church service (see above) included
ample description of the use of choirs, provided an analogous account of a 1639 Roman oratorio
performance in which he mentioned the singing of an introductory motet but omitted any reference to
a chorus. He was apparently unimpressed by the singing of the oratorio chorus – or perhaps there
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was no chorus, the introductory motet having been sung by an ensemble composed of the soloists
who later portrayed the various characters in the oratorio. The instrumentation of two violins and
continuo typically used by Carissimi and his contemporaries suggests that the chorus was only of
modest size, but later Italian oratorios, particularly those produced at Vienna during the 18th century,
used larger orchestras and may therefore have required appropriately larger choruses. The English
oratorios of Handel, however, were often more fully orchestrated still and virtually always more
emphatically choral than any previous oratorios; yet their choruses were generally performed by
groups of about 25 singers, sometimes even fewer, this number including the soloists who are
known to have participated at times in the singing of the choral movements. For the 1758 Foundling
Hospital performance of Messiah, for example, Handel’s forces consisted of 13 adult male
choristers, six boy choristers, three male and three female soloists and an orchestra of 33. Regularly
employed as members of the choirs of the Chapel Royal, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s
Cathedral, Handel’s choristers found in the oratorio a welcome opportunity for part-time employment.
They were probably typical in this respect of most of the choral singers in Baroque performances of
non-ecclesiastical music, for although opera and oratorio provided additional vocational
opportunities for professional choristers, the church remained, throughout the Baroque period, the
principal educator and employer of choral singers.
James G. Smith
4. From the mid-18th century to the later 19th.

During the last years of his life Handel’s oratorios were increasingly performed in the English
provinces, generally in conformity with practices familiar in London. His death turned what had
already become a cult almost into a religion. In 1759 there were many commemorative Handel
performances, not only in London but also in Oxford, Cambridge and other large towns and in the
small village of Church Langton, near Leicester, where there was a two-day festival. In the same
year, at the Three Choirs Festival at Hereford, Messiah, which like the other oratorios had been
previously performed only in secular buildings, was for the first time sung in a cathedral. Almost from
the beginning of Handel’s career as an oratorio composer, the profits on performances of his works
had helped sustain charities, and as the need for investment in hospitals became more urgent, so
the cult of Handel, assisted by the editions of Randall and Arnold, grew even stronger during the
remainder of the 18th century.
The centenary of Handel’s birth was celebrated in 1784 (a year prematurely) with a festival of his
works in Westminster Abbey; 300 singers and 250 instrumentalists participated. The singers came
from various parts of England, and, as a result of the impressions they carried home with them to
their local choral organizations, large-scale performances became the rule rather than the exception.
As far as interpretation was concerned, the 1784 commemoration was a watershed, for from then
until modern times the main emphasis was on large numbers and broad effects, with the orchestra
reduced to a supporting role. The success of the 1784 commemoration was followed by other
Handel festivals in Westminster Abbey: in 1785 there were 616 participants, in 1786 749, in 1787
806, and in 1791 (when Haydn was present) the number had increased to more than 1000. In the
same year the festival in York Minster comprised a force of 100 singers and players, but at the more
important festival of 1823 there were 465 (‘vocal band’ 285, ‘instrumental band’ 180), including 49
female and 13 boy trebles and 55 altos, all men. It was not always the case at this time, however,
that women were included in festival choruses. In the Norwich Festival chorus of 1830 there were 70
trebles, 38 countertenors, 61 tenors and 65 basses; in a memorandum giving these numbers
Edward Bunnett noted ‘no ladies at this period’.
The stimulus given by Handel’s works to choral singing in Britain (already noted in F.W. Marpurg:
Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik, 1758) was to some extent paralleled on the
Continent. At Hamburg, Michael Arne directed performances of German versions of Alexander’s
Feast and Messiah in the early summer of 1772, and these works and aTe Deum by Handel were
included in the concert series given in the 1775–6 season in the Handlungsakademie. German
performances of Messiah were stimulated by translations of the text by Herder, J.A. Hiller and
Klopstock. One of the most important of these performances was directed by Hiller on 19 March
1786 in Berlin Cathedral; there were 305 singers and players. Hiller also arranged two performances
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of Messiah later in the year in the university church at Leipzig, where he used 90 singers and rather
more orchestral players. During the years 1788–90, Mozart, on commission from the Prefect of the
Imperial Court Library, Gottfried van Swieten, reorchestrated four of Handel’s works: Acis and
Galatea, Messiah, Alexander’s Feastand the Ode for St Cecilia’s Day. Mozart’s expanded use of
woodwinds in Messiah became closely associated with 19th-century performances of that work and
his version remained in use well into the 20th century.
As in England, where the cult of Handel provided an impetus for the use of grandiose performing
forces, the numbers in continental choruses grew, particularly in response to special needs and
occasions. At Naples in 1774, 300 performed the music at Jommelli’s funeral. In Vienna, oratorios
were given in 1773 by 400 performers, in 1811 by more than 700 while in 1812 1000 took part in
Handel’s ode Alexander’s Feast. Annual oratorio performances involving such forces took place in
Vienna until 1847.
As choruses grew larger, participation of amateur singers supplanted the reliance on professionals
which had been characteristic of oratorio and church music performances in earlier times, and the
distinction between church and civic venues began to blur. To some extent, this emancipation of
‘sacred’ music from its former confinement in the ecclesiastical arena was brought about by a new
concept of social obligation, symbolized by the sorts of charity set up during the Enlightenment. As
regards the development of the chorus, one of the most important of these charitable enterprises
was the Tonkünstler-Societät of Vienna, for which a constitution was drawn up in 1771; it was
modelled on the Society of Musicians in London and catered for the needs of indigent members of
the musical profession and their dependants. On 29 March 1772 Gassmann’sBetulia liberata was
performed under its auspices and was so well received that further performances were given on 1
and 5 April. Haydn was greatly interested in the society and composed for it his Il ritorno di Tobia
(1774–5). Later, one of the most popular works in its repertory was his Creation, which was greatly
influenced by Handel and almost immediately after its composition joined Handel’s works in the
international repertory.
In Britain, new societies for the purpose of singing madrigals and madrigal-type music came into
being during the 18th century, either to conserve old music, as with the Madrigal Society (founded in
1741) and the aristocratic Anacreontic Society (1766), or to encourage the production of new music,
preferably of a convivial nature, as with the Noblemen’s and Gentlemen’s Catch Club (1761) and the
Glee Club (1783). Although they were male preserves (except for ‘ladies’ nights’), such bodies
served a useful function in developing musical literacy, especially among the middle classes, and
increasing the regard for choral music per se. The term ‘glee club’ was in due course adopted in
North America, but its meaning was extended beyond English usage to denote a choral group in
general – usually one in a high school or college and, in the late 20th century at least, all-male or
all-female – rather than a club devoted to singing catches and glees.
In the 19th century, Romanticism led to the advancement of music associated with words, and choral
music enjoyed the benefits of this. The age of the lied and the Wagnerian music drama, was also the
age of the Chorgesang and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. That choral music could prove influential
in developing political as well as religious philosophies had been shown long before, but it was to
become more evident during the epoch to which the storming of the Bastille in 1789 was the prelude.
In 1790 a popular festival to celebrate the French Revolution took place in Paris. The music for it, a
Te Deum, was composed by Gossec, who subsequently wrote a number of other choral works
reflecting his political thinking. In 1794 the National Festival – a popular yearly event – was
remarkable for the use of a chorus of 2400 voices. From this initial enthusiasm there developed in
France a male-voice choir movement, its participants largely working-class men, which from 1833
was generically known under the name ORPHÉON.
In Germany by the end of the 18th century much patriotic music for male voices was being published
in such periodicals as the Berlinische musikalische Zeitung. In 1793, with an initial membership of
30, C.F.C. Fasch established the Berlin Sing-Akademie (which was also a teaching institution) for
the purpose of protecting standards in German choral music. Encouraging developments soon
occurred throughout the German states. In 1801 an Akademischer Chor was founded in Würzburg,
in 1802 a Singakademie at Leipzig and in 1804 a Singverein at Münster; in 1806 choral societies
came into being at, among other places, Dresden, Erlangen and Kassel. Meanwhile Zelter, Fasch’s
successor at the Berliner Sing-akademie, founded the firstLIEDERTAFEL, a male-voice choir organized
as much for convivial as for musical purposes, and many similar bodies so designated (or sometimes
called Liederkranz to denote a group rather more popular in character) were later established
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throughout Germany and ultimately in North American cities with large German communities. By
1839 the male-voice choirs of the German-speaking countries (often, like Orphéon choirs, composed
of working-class men) were brought together into an association known as Vereinigte Liedertafeln.
Regional festivals, usually including a competitive event, were organized for which festival
compositions were sometimes commissioned. For example, for one such festival, an 1843 gathering
of Saxon male choruses, Wagner supplied a large-scale work entitled Das Liebesmahl der Apostel.
Nowhere was the urge to nationalism stronger than in the German male-voice choral movement,
which received a great impetus in the first place from the liberation of Germany through the so-called
Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in October 1813. Typically nationalist works include Spohr’s Das
befreite Deutschland (1814) and Weber’s Kampf und Sieg(1815), while anthologies such as
Auswahl deutscher Lieder: Vaterlands- und Bundeslieder, Kriegs- und Heldenlieder nebst
Festgesänge für Siegestage (Leipzig, 1830) appeared in profusion. The importance of the
Liedertafel movement is illustrated by the fact that in 1847 Schumann undertook to conduct the one
in Dresden in succession to Ferdinand Hiller, whom he also succeeded, in 1850, as director of the
Düsseldorf Gesangverein, a mixed-voice choral society. Schumann produced several lovely but
relatively easy Liedertafel partsongs, as did a multitude of other composers. A composition that
provides some insight into the convivial nature of the Liedertafel is Brahms’s ‘Tafellied’ (1884), a
scintillating portrait of ‘ladies’ night’ at a Liedertafel gathering.
Side by side with the French and German development of choral music an important movement grew
up in Switzerland. The initial inspiration came from H.G. Nägeli, who postulated that music involving
the participation of many people in joint performance was of its very nature democratic. He founded
a Singinstitut and a Sängerverein at Zürich, and from time to time he provided them with
compositions of his own. The political character of the male-voice choir – for which much music to
politically inspired texts was provided by German composers – met with disapproval in Austria,
where the formation of such choirs was for a time forbidden. German partsongs were also written for
female ensembles by many 19th-century composers. Some, like those composed by Schubert to be
performed by the voice students of Anna Fröhlich, were intended for informal soirées and concerts
by ad hoc ensembles. Others, like those supplied by Brahms for the women’s chorus he conducted
in Hamburg from 1859 to 1861, were written for formally constituted ensembles which enjoyed an
existence similar to that of their male-voice counterparts. These women’s ensembles, however, were
far less numerous than men’s ensembles, and they were not organized, as the male groups were,
into a strong national organization that existed for the purpose of promoting their development.
In the first half of the 19th century, new choral societies (SATB) sprang up in virtually every British
town. Just as the 1784 Westminster Abbey commemoration had proved an inspiration to the country
at large so too did the festival held in the Abbey in 1834 by command of King William IV. Once again
performers came from all parts of the country; they were directed by Sir George Smart. The
conservative nature of the festival was reflected by a programme note which read: ‘To avoid giving
offence to any living Authors, it was determined, that the selection should be made, solely, from
compositions of those who had been gathered to their fathers’. Smart, who in the course of a long
life conducted some 1500 concerts, popularized the grand manner of Handel performances through
the festivals (many of them dating from the previous century) in Bath, Birmingham, Bury St
Edmunds, Cambridge, Colchester, Derby, Dublin, Edinburgh, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester and
Norwich. A remarkable growth in secular choral societies was in no small measure due to the vocal
scores that were being made increasingly available: just as in Germany Breitkopf & Härtel had seen
the commercial possibilities of the situation, so in England Alfred Novello, himself much in demand
as a bass soloist in oratorios, put himself in the van of progress by issuing material for amateur
singers at low cost. In London the Sacred Harmonic Society (1832–82) did much to widen
opportunities and also to broaden the repertory. The chorus had women to sing the treble and alto
parts (though they were invited to assist at the performances rather than being admitted to full
membership of the society). The Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace in 1859 was prompted by a
suggestion from R.K. Bowley, sometime secretary and librarian of the society. When the society’s
regular meetings came to an end through lack of proper rehearsal facilities the final report presented
to the members on 24 November 1879 stated:
“It cannot be forgotten D that to the efforts of the Sacred Harmonic Society of
forty years ago, and to the consistent course pursued by its Managers throughout
its entire history, is due the great advance which has taken place in public musical
taste, and that cultivation of oratorio music which in times gone by was only the
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luxury of a few wealthy amateurs. The style of the Society’s Concerts has
furnished the type and standard of oratorio performances throughout the country.
”
It was also noted that towards the end of its existence the society had found it difficult to meet
ever-increasing costs which all but exhausted its funds. Performances patterned after the
large-scale English festivals were presented in other countries as well, most importantly in Germany,
Austria and the USA. The manner in which these festivals developed, and the principles that
inspired them, affected both architecture and composition. The centuries before the 19th had
brought to maturity a style that had evolved within great ecclesiastical buildings and for the purposes
of the ceremonies held within those buildings. The major works of the 19th century were mostly
designed for secular buildings, which were themselves not infrequently planned with the
requirements of oratorio-type music in mind. At the same time, choral festivals encouraged the
creation of new large-scale choral works; many festivals regularly commissioned composers to write
what were called ‘novelties’, and the oratorio-type works thus created were for a new category of
singers, largely amateurs and members of the emerging middle class, and a new kind of public. The
oratorio enjoyed enormous popularity, but the religious element was of relatively little significance,
except that it denoted ‘serious’ music for middle-class audiences who liked to take their pleasures
gravely. For example, works by Ferdinand Hiller, Loewe and Spohr detailing the destruction of
Jerusalem or Babylon, dramatic themes formerly treated by Handel, had their day. On the other
hand, Mendelssohn – ‘Bach’s spiritual son’, in Hanslick’s phrase – ensured himself a place beside
Handel and Haydn in the pantheon of oratorio composers with St Paul, composed for the
Cäcilienverein of Frankfurt in 1836, and Elijah, the ‘novelty’ that received its première at the
Birmingham Festival of 1846. Many of the oratorios of the Romantic era were blatantly nationalistic
in their aspirations and therefore appealed only within national frontiers. Apart from the religious and
nationalistic subjects that inspired composers, mention should also be made of the Faust theme,
which aroused so much speculation and introspection: Goethe’s masterpiece inspired works by
Berlioz and Schumann among others.
The availability of choral-orchestral forces of symphonic proportions and the acoustical possibilities
of new concert halls brought a wave of choral symphonies (or works so described) in the wake of
Beethoven, of which perhaps the most remarkable are Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (the ‘Symphony of
a Thousand’) and the ‘Gothic’ Symphony by Havergal Brian. In Romantic opera the chorus played
an increasingly important role, and certain operatic choral numbers have taken their place in popular
esteem by the side of favourite vocal and instrumental excerpts. By the end of the 19th century there
was no adequately appointed opera house without a resident chorus, just as today there are few
major orchestras which do not possess an affiliated symphonic chorus. In more recent times, at least
one opera company has developed from a choral tradition of special significance – the Welsh
National Opera (founded 1946), which grew out of the eisteddfod tradition.
In the second half of the 18th century, the choirs of Roman Catholic court chapels continued to be
made up of professional musicians. Many of these organizations were quite modest in size. In 1754
the chapels at Gotha and Breslau possessed only one-on-a-part vocal ensembles. Even the famous
chapel and chamber music establishment at Mannheim had modest vocal resources: in 1756 its
orchestra of 30 string players and ten wind players was balanced by only ‘three female and three
male sopranos [the former presumably for chamber music only], two male altos, three tenors, two
basses’ (Marpurg: Historisch-kritische Beyträge). On the other hand, the archbishop’s Kapelle at
Salzburg in 1757 – the year after the birth of Mozart – had a smaller orchestra, less than 20 string
players about ten wind players, and a much more grand vocal complement of 10 solo singers (5
male sopranos, 3 tenors and 2 basses), 15 boy choristers and 29 adult male choristers (4 altos, 12
tenors and 13 basses). From 1772 to 1867, the Hofmusikkapelle of the imperial court at Vienna, with
an orchestra of about 30, had a choral contingent which hovered at around 20 members, of whom
half were boys evenly divided between soprano and alto (no women and no adult male sopranos or
altos). Since the Esterházy establishment in which Joseph Haydn was employed had an orchestra
slightly smaller than that of the imperial Hofkapelle, we may suppose that its vocal resources were
no larger. It was for forces such as these that the masses and other liturgical music of Haydn, Mozart
and their contemporaries were written. Towards the end of the 18th century, a series of reforms
promulgated by Joseph II attempted to curb what the emperor viewed as excessively ostentatious
displays of ecclesiastical opulence. As a result of these reforms, certain limitations were placed on
composers. A well-known instance of this involves the restrictions imposed by Archbishop Colloredo
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on Mozart as to the maximum amount of time which could be taken up by the musical setting of the
mass ordinary. But counterbalancing these attempts to discipline and limit composers was a
prevailing tendency, in the wake of the French Revolution, to recognize the need to allow composers
freedom of expression. The ultimate in this respect was Beethoven’s Mass in D, composed for an
archbishop’s enthronement but destined to take its place among the small group of works that
forever test anew the resourcefulness of secular choruses. Ecclesiastical theories concerning the
nature of sacred music were put under great strain by this work and also by later self-assertive
masterpieces on liturgical texts by Berlioz, Verdi and, in most of his masses, Bruckner. These works
were a far cry from the ideal of Palestrina and the a cappellastyle. The Requiem by Berlioz, with its
huge instrumental component which was balanced by a chorus of 200 at its first performance in
1837, is one of the foremost examples of gigantism in the 19th century. Verdi’s Requiem took the
theatre into the church, the first performance in 1874 being given in S Marco, Milan, by a selected
choir of 120 trained singers and an orchestra of 110.
The 19th-century Roman Catholic Church, along with some

non-Catholic musical conservationists, espoused the view that a
special virtue was attached to 16th-century polyphony. Among those
who set out to revive interest in it was A.F.J. Thibaut, Schumann’s law
professor at Heidelberg, who brought together in his home a group of
singers to perform Renaissance music (fig.1). In London the Motet
Group of singers performing Society, with Edward Rimbault as secretary and editor, came into
Renaissance music at the
Heidelberg homeD being in 1841 as a consequence of the emphasis on liturgical
propriety by the ritualistic Oxford Movement. Giuseppe Baini’s
pioneering study of the style of Palestrina’s music (Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere
di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina) appeared in 1828 and was published in German (Über das
Leben und die Werke des G. Pierluigi da Palestrina) in 1834; it provided the Catholic reform
movement with an icon whose name was associated with all that was good and proper about
Renaissance polyphony. It was at this time, too, that the terma cappella began to be accepted as
synonymous with ‘unaccompanied’. About 1600 a distinction began to be made between the old
style of the Renaissance, for which Palestrina’s music served as a model (PRIMA PRATICA), and the
new style of the Baroque (seconda pratica). By the middle of the 17th century the terma cappella
had become associated with the old style, notably in Christoph Bernhard’s widely circulated
manuscript treatise Tractatus compositionis augmentatus. But 19th-century musicians, noting that
no instrumental parts were included in the sources in which 16th-century polyphonic works were
found, believed the term to have been used to designate the type of ensemble required – i.e. voices
only, no instruments – rather than style. The question of forces had not been an issue in the
preceding centuries. Although unaccompanied voices were always heard in the papal chapel in the
16th century, elsewhere instruments were sometimes used to replace absent voices or to enrich the
sound on special occasions. In the 18th century, stile anticocompositions had almost invariably
included a basso continuo to be played on the organ. In the 19th century, however, many people
(following Baini, who stressed the unaccompanied style of the papal chapel) wished, as the cult of
Palestrina progressed, to return to the ideal of unaccompanied singing, designated by the term a
cappella. In 1868, in order to promote the ideals associated with the Palestrina style, the Catholic
church choirs of the German-speaking countries were brought together into the Allgemeiner
Cäcilienverein, a powerful reform organization named in honour of the patron saint of music. The
principles of Cecilianism, as this reform movement has been called, were formally endorsed in the
1903 Motu proprio of Pius X. One direction found in this encyclical is particularly pertinent to the
subject of choral development: ‘wherever it is desired to employ the acute voices of sopranos and
contraltos, these parts must be taken by boys, according to the most ancient usage of the church’.
Protestant church music in Germany was also influenced by a reverence for its musical past.
Moreover for historical reasons German Protestantism had been closely allied with nationalism, and
in the 19th century the urge of the latter stimulated concern for the musical heritage of the former.
State schools of church music were established at Breslau (in 1810), Königsberg (1812) and Berlin
(1822), the last being the creation of Zelter, who was its first director. A great deal of music and
literature was published to provide new material for general use. Key works were Über den Gesang
in den Kirchen der Protestanten (1817), Thibaut’s Über Reinheit der Tonkunst(1825), the Berliner
Gesangbuch (1829), C.F. Becker’s Kirchengesänge von J.S. Bach (1843), the Eisenacher
Gesangbuch (1854) and the various works of C.J.V. von Winterfeld published between 1832 and
1850. The so-called Bach revival – incorrectly supposed to have begun with Mendelssohn’s
performance of the St Matthew Passion with the Berlin Sing-Akademie in 1829 – is to be seen in the
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context of a general revival of Lutheran church music.
A revival of interest in Britain in the classics of the Anglican tradition coincided with a feeling on the
part of many church musicians that the authorities of the Church of England were negligent in their
maintenance of the choral foundations. In 1841 a large number of organists sent a petition to the
deans and chapters of the cathedrals requesting them not to implement their proposals to economize
in this area. None worked harder than S.S. Wesley to restore the standard of church music. In 1849,
when he was organist of the new parish church at Leeds, where daily sung services were
maintained, he published the first of two pamphlets relating to the improvement of music ‘in Divine
Worship’. In 1856 Sir F.A.G. Ouseley devoted much of his private fortune to the foundation of St
Michael’s College, Tenbury Wells, the main purposes of which were to provide a standard for church
music and to train choristers. A popular tradition of choralism derived from the Methodist and
collateral evangelical movements and gathered new strength through the wish of many among the
working classes to perform not only hymns and gospel songs but also oratorios and cantatas. There
was a consequent broadening of musical literacy. Many volumes of favourite hymns contained
guides to theory, and instruction became available in mechanics’ institutes and Sunday schools. The
influence of Joseph Mainzer, author of Singing for the Millions and other works, and of John
Curwen, promoter of the tonic sol-fa system, was of inestimable benefit. Earlier, in the last half of the
18th century, musical literacy in Anglican parish churches (both urban and rural) and in
nonconformist chapels had been the object of the educational efforts and publications of a large
number of composers, often self-taught, whose principal advantage was their intimate knowledge of
the singers for whom they wrote. These men were frequently itinerant teachers whose singing
schools involved the formation of choruses, which often became, after the singing masters had
departed, the embryos from which the choirs of small churches developed.
English parish and village choirs created in this manner provided what may have been the earliest
opportunities for women to participate along with men in church choirs. Nicholas Temperley (The
Music of the English Parish Church) has called attention to the following passage from a satirical
work of 1727 by Alexander Pope in which a fictional parish clerk recounts having tutored both ‘the
young men and maidens to tune their voices as it were a psaltery; and the church on the Sunday
was filled with these new hallelujahs’. On the Continent, women were still a rarity in church choirs in
1772 when Charles Burney noted in his Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and
the United Provinces (1773) that at the Stephansdom in Vienna ‘there was a girl who sung a solo
verse in the Credo extremely well’. At the cathedral of St Bartholomäus in Frankfurt, Burney found
that the choir ‘was not furnished with singers of great talent, but yet there were a number of girls,
who, though the service was that of the Roman catholics, were many of them Lutherans or
Calvinists, that chanted with the priests and canons’; and in connection with a service he heard at
the church of Ste Gudule in Brussels, Burney opined that he:
“was glad to find among the [band of voices] two or three women, who, though
they did not sing well, yet their being employed, proved that female voices might
have admission to the church, without giving offence or scandal to piety, or even
bigotry. If the practice were to become general of admitting women to sing the
soprano part in the cathedrals, it would, in Italy, be a service to mankind, and in
the rest of Europe render church-music infinitely more pleasing and perfect.”
Veneration of the ideal past, a characteristic of the Romantic ethos in all the arts, manifested itself
not only in church music, as described above, but also in concert music and in the establishment of
choral societies named after and devoted to performing the works of individual great composers of
earlier times. The Beethoven Festival of 1845, when the statue of the composer was unveiled at
Bonn, brought musicians from all over Europe to hear choral works not only by Beethoven but also
by Liszt and other, lesser composers; it also necessitated the building of a new concert hall. The
centenary of Bach’s death caught the force of a tide already favourable to his genius. Bach
Societies were formed, and Bach Choirs followed. The Bach Choir was founded in London in 1875
and stimulated similarly named bodies in many parts of the country. The Handel centenary in 1859
brought into being the Great Handel Festival Chorus in England, with various supporting ‘Amateur
Divisions’ in different parts of the country, and the consequent long tradition of the Crystal Palace
Handel Festival. Held triennially until 1926, this festival exemplified good intentions married to
doubtful taste, but it gave great satisfaction to performers and audiences alike.
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Many of the groups of settlers who established themselves in North America during the 17th and
18th centuries were religious communities. Music was important to some of these groups, most
notably the Moravian Brethren (or Unitas Fratrum) who established communities in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, and Salem (now Winston-Salem), North Carolina. The Moravians produced some
outstanding composers and maintained choirs and orchestras on a par with those of Europe, but
they remained, as a matter of religious principle, isolated within their insular settlements, and
therefore had virtually no influence on contemporaneous American music. Of much more importance
during the 18th century were the so-called Yankee tunesmiths, self-taught composers and teachers
who travelled from place to place – sometimes in urban centres such as Boston but more often in
small rural communities – offering singing schools at which they taught the rudiments of music, sold
tunebooks of their own creation and formed choruses. It was formerly believed that these itinerant
singing masters emerged without precedent, arising more or less spontaneously on the American
scene, but Temperley has shown that there were English antecedents for these men and their
methods. William Billings has long been deservedly recognized as the leading figure among Yankee
tunesmiths and, notwithstanding the debt he owed to his English predecessors, he was a man of
great imagination and originality. He issued six collections of sacred music for popular use. In his
Continental Harmony (1794) formal instruction in music theory was presented in the form of an
entertaining dialogue (in the manner of Thomas Morley’s Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall
Musicke of 1597) between master and pupil. Billings and his co-workers made a great contribution
to musical literacy in 18th-century America, and their enthusiasm for music, especially choral music,
was infectious. In many small communities the singing school choruses they organized were
transformed after their departure into church choirs. In keeping with the egalitarian principles of the
new country in which they came into being, the singing school choruses and the church choirs which
were their successors were open to male and female participants of all ages.
During the 19th century, later generations of singing masters – whose music became associated
with a newly invented notational system in which variously shaped notes were associated with
solmization syllables (seeSHAPE-NOTE HYMNODY ) – carried the traditions of the Yankee tunesmiths to
rural and frontier communities of the American South and West, but in the cultural centres of the
eastern USA, choral development was patterned after European practices. Men who prized orthodox
musical learning – Lowell Mason, Thomas Hastings, W.B. Bradbury and others – railed against what
they considered to be the immature crudity of the music of Billings and his colleagues and advocated
imitation of the more refined and sophisticated music of Europe. It is by no means certain that this
imitation of Europe made an immediately positive contribution to the development of musical
composition by American composers, but there can be no doubt that it contributed greatly to the
proliferation and development of choral groups. Among the earliest were the Handel and Haydn
Society of Boston (founded 1815) and the Sacred Music Society of New York (1823). Towards
mid-century, German emigrés formed singing societies modelled after those already in existence in
Germany. In New York, the Deutsche Liederkranz was organized in 1847, and a rival organization,
the Männergesangverein Arion, was set up in 1854. Similar Germanic convivial music societies were
established in the Mid-western cities of Milwaukee, Chicago, Cincinnati and in other centres with
large German communities. Glee clubs were organized on English models. Among the most notable
were the Mendelssohn Glee Club (New York, 1866), the Apollo Club (Boston, 1871), the Apollo Club
(Chicago, 1872) and the Mendelssohn Club (Philadelphia, 1874). Glee clubs and Germanic singing
societies began almost invariably as all-male convivial organizations, but often evolved into large
choral societies of mixed voices. Many societies were formed specifically to perform large-scale
choral works with orchestra. The Oratorio Society of New York (1873) was the best-known civic
chorus, but oratorio societies were also established in most major cities. Other large choruses
followed the example of the Handel and Haydn Society in naming themselves after famous
European composers: a Mendelssohn Society (1858) and a Beethoven Society (1873) were
founded in Chicago, and the Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) Bach Choir, tracing its ancestry back to
18th-century Moravian roots, was founded in 1898 and sponsored the first of its annual Bach
Festivals in 1900. Choral festivals were organized along British and German lines. The Cincinnati
May Festival, which began as an all-male Sängerfest in 1849, converted to a festival for a chorus of
mixed voices in 1873, in which year there was a chorus of 800 and an orchestra of over 100, and in
1880 a permanent May Festival Chorus of 600 singers was established. In 1856 the Handel and
Haydn Society of Boston sponsored the first American event initiated as a festival for a chorus of
mixed voices: in that year 600 singers and an orchestra of 78 participated. The largest festivals held
in the USA during the 19th century were the Peace Jubilees which took place in Boston in 1869 and
1872. These were gargantuan affairs: in 1869 there were more than 10,000 choristers and 1000
instrumentalists, and in 1872 these numbers doubled.
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Black Americans developed a choral idiom of great vitality in which African and European elements
were combined (see UNITED STATES OF AM ERICA, §II, 2 and SPIRITUAL, §II). In 1878 George Grove was
present at a service in a black Methodist church in Philadelphia and was greatly impressed by the
vigour of the singing and the wide contrasts in mood and dynamics. Grove’s experience was shared
by many as the spirituals of the recently emancipated black slaves became known. One group in
particular, the JUBILEE SINGERS, a small touring ensemble of ex-slaves from Fisk University in
Nashville, Tennessee, eloquently presented the tradition of the black spiritual to audiences
throughout America and in Britain and Germany.
In the 19th century the principle that music was universally educative was an ideal that coincided
with the provision of general education. In countries with a strong choral tradition, class-singing was
cultivated, but not always under the direction of adequately trained teachers. In America, Lowell
Mason introduced systematic music teaching in the public schools of Boston and New York, and
organized and conducted teacher-training institutes. In Britain the lead was given by John Hullah,
inspector for music in elementary schools, and John Stainer, his successor. During the 19th century,
patriotic songs (giving way in the early 20th century to folksongs) were the basis of elementary
school music. Children’s choirs were provided by obliging teachers in most Western countries for
church, civic and even national occasions; the greater the occasion the larger the choir. Thus the
number of choristers assembled for such events as the 1863 festival of the Metropolitan Schools
Choral Society in the Crystal Palace was hardly smaller than that of adults who took part in the
Handel festivals.
Percy M. Young/James G. Smith
5. The 20th century.

Two major trends – sometimes mutually contradictory, but nonetheless co-existent as the century
drew to a close – marked the progess of choral development in the 20th century. On the one hand,
there was the pursuit of a monolithic ideal in terms of choral organization and sonority. This
tendency, which predominated during the first 60 or so years of the century, was challenged, mildly
at first and more strongly from the 1960s, by a growing tendency towards differentiation:
organizational, structural, functional, timbral and stylistic.
From very early in the century, the SATB chorus of mixed voices became the favoured medium.
Female sopranos and altos were firmly entrenched in choruses large and small, sacred and secular.
Choirs of men and boys continued to exist only in a few tradition-laden ecclesiastical and academic
insitutions, primarily those of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches. These all-male church
choirs, as the century progressed, became exceptional even within the Anglican and Roman
churches, and they were no longer in the forefront of choral development. Secular choruses, like
those founded during the 19th century for oratorio singing, became increasingly important. Under the
leadership of choral specialists such as the Englishman Henry Coward, these organizations pursued
the ideal of ‘artistic choralism’, as it was called in Coward’sC. T. I. [i.e. Choral Technique and
Interpretation]: the Secret (1938). In the USA, choruses associated with colleges and universities
assumed a leading role. These ensembles were often involved in what has been called the ‘a
cappella choir movement’. F. Melius Christiansen, founder of the St Olaf Choir of St Olaf College in
Northfield, Minnesota, and J.F. Williamson, founder of the Westminster Choir of Westminster Choir
College (from 1930 in Princeton, NJ) were leaders in pursuit of the a cappella ideal. Their methods
and goals were communicated to large contingents of choral conducting disciples, who made the
unaccompanied chorus pervasive in colleges, high schools and churches throughout the USA. Fred
Waring, Robert Shaw and Roger Wagner, although not involved exclusively in the a cappella choir
movement, were also influential in shaping the ideals of American choral music. Although these and
other leading American choral conductors differed from one another with regard to certain technical
questions (Waring, for example, made the control of diction and blend through what he called ‘tone
syllables’ the centre of his methodology, while Christiansen became known for his emphasis on
straight tone production), they are seen in retrospect to have been united in their pursuit of an ideal
of discipline, blend, balance and tonal unity.
In addition SATB mixed-voice choruses, male-voice ensembles of tenors and basses and all-female
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ensembles of sopranos and altos proliferated in American educational institutions and elsewhere.
The all-male choruses traced their ancestry in a direct line to ensembles of the 19th century and
earlier, but the all-female groups, although they had isolated antecedents in the past, gained a firm
footing as coequal with their male counterparts for the first time in the early 20th century. This was at
least partially a result of the existence enjoyed by female-voice ensembles in women’s educational
institutions, but as colleges and universities became coeducational, men’s and women’s glee clubs
continued alongside mixed choruses as standard components of a well-rounded choral music
programme. These single-gender groups tended to perform a somewhat lighter repertory than the
mixed-voice ensembles, but as they grew and developed during the 20th century, they were no less
focussed than their SATB counterparts on the achievement of ‘artistic choralism’.
As the century progressed, however, the concept of a monolithic, universally applicable choral ideal
was called into question. Nationalism, for example, and, later, multiculturalism promoted an
awareness that concepts of choral beauty differ from culture to culture, and improved
communication, especially through recordings and international touring, made this awareness
pervasive in the choral community. In the early and middle years of the century, the tendency was to
make an eclectic use of these differences by borrowing attractive features from nationally and
ethnically diverse sources, while incorporating these features within the universally admired
performance style of western Europe and the USA. Towards the end of the century, under growing
influence of multiculturalism, attempts were made to capture performance techniques associated
with diverse repertories, even if this sometimes meant sacrificing traditional views concerning choral
unity and beauty of tone.
In part, the quest to master multicultural styles is one aspect of the broader topic of authenticity in
choral performance. Similar, and of more consequence, is the concern for historical accuracy which
has arisen among choral conductors as a result of musicological elucidation of performing-practice
issues. At the end of the century it was generally recognized that the style of performance
appropriate to the music of one historical period might not be equally appropriate to the music of
another. This attention to performing-practice issues affected not only performing styles, but also the
choice of forces. Although pre-Baroque, Baroque and Classical works continued sometimes to be
performed by large choruses like those preferred during the 19th century, there was a tendency to
restore pre-1800 works to the dimensions originally envisioned by their composers. Thus, Handel’s
oratorios, for example, were often performed by choruses and orchestras only a fraction of the size
of those employed in pre-1950 performances. The initial fervour to achieve historical accuracy in
early music restored to favour the choirboy (in secular terminology described as a boy chorister or
boy soprano, the latter replacing the time-honoured ‘treble’), but by the end of the century
early-music ensembles tended to employ women sopranos, often seeking from them a boy-like
quality. Many large choruses that specialized in singing oratorio-type literature began to mix adult
male falsettists with female altos in order to achieve a more penetrating alto part (but it is not clear
whether this was being done as a restoration of practices of the 18th century and the early 19th, or
simply as a useful technique for enhancing modern performances). Perhaps the most provocative
controversy surrounding appropriate performance forces concerned whether or not Bach intended
some of his vocal works – the controversy centres on the Mass in B minor – to be performed not by
a chorus, but by an ensemble of one-on-a-part soloists: Joshua Rifkin asserts the affirmative, Robert
L. Marshall the negative.
The quest for cultural and historical accuracy demanded a new versatility, perhaps even a new
virtuosity, from choral singers. No longer were they permitted to sing all works in a single style, but
they had to master the different techniques appropriate to various styles. Recognizing that this
burden weighs heavily upon singers, especially the amateurs who continued to populate most
choruses, conductors sought an alternative solution by forming specialist choruses of various sizes
and make-ups. Madrigal groups of 12 to 16 singers were popular from mid-century. Towards the end
of the century, many groups of moderate size (generally 24–36 singers) were formed to perform
early music and the vocal chamber music of later periods. These groups, although they are often
given imaginative names (e.g. Camerata Chorus, Amor Artis Chorale, Gloriana Singers), are
generally called chamber choirs. Another type of specialist chorus that came into existence at least
partly as a result of the widening repertory horizon was the show or swing choir. These choirs
specialized in popular music and often combined singing and visual elements (dance, costumes,
etc.). Yet another type of ensemble that became a standard component of multifaceted university
choral programmes in the USA was the black chorus (usually with membership not racially
restricted). Some black choruses sang only black spirituals, gospels and so forth; others performed
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a wider variety of works that included selections from the standard repertory of classical choral
music.
Some specialist ensembles looked to the future rather than the past, performing avant-garde
literature that required the use of what have been called ‘extended vocal techniques’. This term
refers to sound production through non-traditional use of the vocal mechanism: grunting, hissing,
shrieking, inhaling audibly and so forth. Ensembles specializing in extended vocal techniques have
been in existence since the 1960s. By 1971 the vocabulary of non-traditional techniques was
sufficiently well developed to generate a compendium of new notational devices associated with it
(Pooler and Pierce), and during the last decades of the 20th century many techniques developed by
groups specializing in avant-garde performance made their way into music for mainstream choruses.
In the late 20th century, choruses sometimes owed their existence to some non-musical affinity
shared by participants – e.g. age, occupation, sexual orientation. These affinity choruses often
achieved a very high level of artistic performance. Especially important musically are the superb
children’s choirs that emerged as part of municipal programmes of cultural and educational
enrichment. Many adult groups found that choral music offered a highly satisfactory method of
expressing solidarity for a cause. Perhaps the fastest growing and artistically most significant
example of this tendency has been the gay choral movement, organized internationally as GALA
Choruses (the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses). There are currently more than 150 gay
choruses in the USA, 70 in Europe, 10 in Australia and about 15 others world wide.
Another factor that contributed significantly to the development of choral music in the 20th century
was the establishment of advanced programmes of study in choral conducting. In the 1950s the
DMA degree was established in American universities as a performance-oriented analogue to the
PhD. At the end of the century the DMA degree in choral music was offered by several universities,
and hundreds of choral conductors, firmly grounded in choral literature, conducting techniques and
performing practices, had graduated from these programmes.
The 20th century witnessed the formation of several organizations dedicated to the advancement of
the choral art. The largest national organization of choral leaders, the American Choral Directors
Association (ACDA), founded in 1958, had a membership of over 16,000 in 1997. In 1981 ACDA was
one of seven national and pan-national organizations that joined together to form the International
Federation for Choral Music (IFCM); the other founding organizations were A Coeur Joie
International (France and other French-speaking countries), Arbeitsgemeinschaft Europäische
Chorverbände (Germany), Asociación Interamericana de Directors de Coros (Latin America), Europa
Cantat (a European federation of youth choruses based in Passau, Germany), the Japan Choral
Federation and the Nordiska Körkommittèn SAMNAM. Both individually and collectively as IFCM
these organizations provided opportunities for collegial interchange among conductors, held
conventions and symposia, sponsored important performances and published journals and bulletins.
Leading members of these organizations spearheaded efforts to harness for the benefit of the
worldwide choral community the most recent technological advances in rapid communication. As of
1997, ChoralNet (with branches named ChoraList, ChoralTalk and ChoralAcademe) provided
internet and e-mail services for choral professionals throughout the world. Begun by Walter Collins
of the University of Colorado at Boulder and developed by James Feiszli of the South Dakota School
of Mines and Technology, ChoralNet is now operated under the auspices of IFCM. Another internet
service provided by IFCM is MUSICA, an on-line database, developed by Jean Sturm of the
University of Strasbourg, which currently includes more than 60,000 choral compositions.
In the early centuries of the choral tradition the singers were professional, employed by royal and
noble patrons, churches and abbeys. In the 18th and 19th centuries a great expansion of interest
and opportunity placed the emphasis on amateur singers. In the second half of the 20th century the
growth of the recording industry, the needs of radio and television programmes and the film industry,
and the more exact requirements of concert and festival promoters and of contemporary composers
created a rebirth of choral professionalism. At the end of the century there were professional
choruses, either entrepreneurial or state supported, in virtually all countries in which the music of
Western civilization is performed. In the USA, an umbrella organization, Chorus America (formerly
the Association of Professional Vocal Ensembles), was formed to promote the welfare of
professional choral singing. Founded in 1977 by Michael Korn of Philadelphia, this organization had
in 1997 a membership of 550 choruses, about half of them professional, which together provide
performance opportunities for more than 25,000 singers. While professionalization proceeded, the
standards of amateur choral music, no doubt to some extent due to the professional models
20 de 22 22/03/2011 09:19
available were in general significantly raised. Perhaps the most encouraging guide to this and to the
cultural opportunities inherent in the medium was the development of the A Coeur Joie movement,
founded in Lyons by César Geoffray in 1945, which spread interest in choral music among young
people throughout French-speaking countries and also into Spain, and Europa Cantat, which was
founded at Passau in 1961 to bring together young choralists from many lands and which has
continued on a triennial basis.
Percy M. Young/James G. Smith
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1930, 55–66
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M.F. Bukofzer: ‘The Beginnings of Choral Polyphony’, Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Music (New
York, 1950), 176–86
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D. Arnold: ‘Instruments in Church: some Facts and Figures’,MMR, lxxxv (1955), 32–7
G. Reaney: ‘Voices and Instruments in the Music of Guillaume de Machaut’,RBM, x (1956), 3–17, 93–104
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(Regensburg, 1961)
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Present Day (London, 1962)
R.S. Hines, ed.: The Composer’s Point of View: Essays on Twentieth-Century Choral Music by those who
Wrote it (Norman, OK, 1963/R)
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the Present (New York, 1966/R)
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Social History (diss., U. of Birmingham, 1968)
W. Mason: ‘The Architecture of St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Venetian Polychoral Style: a Clarification’,
Studies in Musicology: Essays ' in Memory of Glen Haydon (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969), 163–78
A. Schnoebelen: ‘Performance Practices at San Petronio in the Baroque’, AcM, xli (1969), 37–55
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1970)
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H. Swan: ‘The Development of a Choral Instrument’, Choral Conducting: a Symposium, ed. H. Decker and
J. Herford (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973), 4–55
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Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1978)
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47–56
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International Choral Bulletin (1982–)
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Missouri, 1991)
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22 de 22 22/03/2011 09:19

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Chorus (i) in Oxford Music Online http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/05...

Oxford Music Online

Grove Music Online

Chorus (i) [choir]

1. Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

4. From the mid-18th century to the later 19th.

The 19th-century Roman Catholic Church, along with some

context of a general revival of Lutheran church music.

Percy M. Young/James G. Smith

5. The 20th century.

Percy M. Young/James G. Smith

Sacred Harmonic Society: Annual Reports (London, 1832–80)

E. Hanslick: Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien (Vienna, 1869–70/R)

R. Walters: The Bethlehem Bach Choir (Boston, 1918/R)

H. Coward: ‘C.T.I.’: the Secret (London, 1938)

G. Reese: Music in the Middle Ages (New York, 1940)

P.M. Young: Handbook of Choral Technique (London, 1953)

G. Reese: Music in the Renaissance (New York, 1954, 2/1959)

W. Apel: Gregorian Chant (Bloomington, IN, 1958, 3/1966)

W. Dean: Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London, 1959/R)

H. Engel: Musik und Gesellschaft: Bausteine zu einer Musiksoziologie (Berlin, 1959)

The Choral Journal (1959–)

E. Wienandt: Choral Music of the Church (New York, 1965/R)

P. le Huray: Music and the Reformation in England, 1549–1660 (London,1967, 2/1978)

A. Sendrey: Music in Ancient Israel (New York, 1969)

F. Pooler and B. Pierce: New Choral Notation (New York, 1971)

J. Mussulman: Dear People ' Robert Shaw: a Biography (Bloomington, IN,1979)

N. Temperley: The Music of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 1979/R)

International Choral Bulletin (1982–)

V. Morosan: Choral Performance in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (Ann Arbor, 1986/R)

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