What Is A Chorus?

What's a chorus? What is choral music? Not many people reading this article probably worry much about that, but it is sometimes an issue for those of us who think about music as it was performed in the past. What we call choral music has been around for as long as any music we know of (think of Gregorian chant), so there is maybe a greater variety of kinds of choral music, and of styles of choral music, than of any other kind of music.

Or maybe not. Essentially, it would be possible to define choral music as music sung by a chorus. Just as we could define sacred music as music used for a religious purpose. And by those definitions, any music could qualify, provided only that it meet the one condition.

A Beethoven string quartet, if it were sung by a chorus, would be—at least for that moment—choral music. And if it were sung in church, it would be sacred music at the same time. In the one case it's the performance medium, and in the other case it's the intention, but neither case tells us much of anything about the style, the technical or esthetic quality, of the music. The music, in a sense, resides in some other qualities.

Those of us interested in how music was performed when it was new are not particularly fond of preaching.  If a very large chorus wants to perform a Monteverdi madrigal, and does it well and gets pleasure from it, where's the harm?

So is choral music a pretty worthless category? Not at all; it's what is sung by choruses. And that includes a lot of beautiful music, most of which is music that was intended by its composers to be sung by choruses, and that is sung by choruses, and that is pretty obviously choral music.

But not everything is so clear. What about Gregorian chant? A lot of it, in the Middle Ages, in the cathedrals and monasteries where it was regularly practiced, was sung by the chorus (that is, by everybody present—the ideal form of choral music, with no audience except perhaps for God). But a lot of it was sung by a single person, and this latter part is therefore not choral music.

A lot of choruses perform Handel oratorios; when they're not performing Messiah, they often prefer the oratorios that have a high proportion of choruses—Israel in Egypt or Solomon or Alexander's Feast. But even in those cases, a lot of the music is not choral—it's recitatives and arias, overtures, and sinfonias. So is a Handel oratorio a kind of choral music? What about the Saint Matthew Passion? Maybe we should redefine choral music as music sung in concerts given by choral associations.

Then there's the question of music that may or may not ever have been intended to be sung by a chorus. Here I define a chorus as a group of singers including more than one singer on each voice part. That's how I distinguish a string quartet from an orchestra, and the same distinction, it seems to me, should be made between one-on-a-part madrigal performers and solo vocal ensembles on the one hand and choruses on the other.

But what about the cantatas and passions of Bach, which Joshua Rifkin, Andrew Parrott, and others have argued were written for, and performed by, one singer on a part in the choruses and chorales: Is that choral music? What about the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610? Doesn't it seem likely, because of the amazing virtuosity of the vocal lines, that they are intended for solo singers?

There seems to be evidence, too, that many of the great masses and motets of the Renaissance were often performed with one singer to a part; even where a chapel or cathedral choir consisted of many singers, smaller groups were often drawn from it for individual performances. And most of the madrigals and chansons of the Renaissance are music for solo vocal ensemble.

So a great deal of the music claimed by modern choruses, and often beautifully sung by them, is not at its origin choral music. It becomes choral music when we sing it. We have the 19th century to thank for a lot of what we sing. Before that, choruses were almost exclusively professional, found in church, in princely chapels, and in opera houses.

The popularity of Handel's oratorios contributed a great deal to the choral movement in England and in Germany, and the rise of choral societies allowed amateur singers a chance to participate actively in the making of music. That choral movement is what allows so many of us to be musicians and to get the satisfaction that only comes from being a part of the music.

The singing schools of 18th-century New England made their contribution, too. They taught everybody to sing the Lord's praise, as loudly as possible, and they also allowed for social interaction that was not otherwise permitted in puritanical societies, encouraging the idea that singing, and not just listening, was the right way to make music in church and at home.

Those of us interested in how music was performed when it was new—a field of study sometimes called performance practice—are not particularly fond of preaching. Nobody wants to tell you how you should or should not perform music or what music is or is not appropriate for what ensemble. If a very large chorus wants to perform a Monteverdi madrigal, and does it well and gets pleasure from it, where's the harm?

We are a culture interested in the past, and we sing music from many times and places.  It allows us to take musical time-trips, and it gives us a wonderful breadth of knowledge and experience. 

But maybe it's good that somebody is interested in finding out what the music was like when it was new, when it was a piece of cutting-edge contemporary music, when the Sistine Chapel Choir saw a mass for the first time, when the Chapel Royal set to sight-reading Purcell, when the women's choir at Hamburg first sang those beautiful Brahms songs.

Sometimes we learn something about why the music is made the way it is, sometimes we get ideas about performance, but always we are reminded that music is for people, and that each performance is an event never to be repeated.

We are a culture interested in the past, and we sing music from many times and places. It allows us to take musical time-trips, and it gives us a wonderful breadth of knowledge and experience. What we lack, perhaps, is a complete familiarity with the music of our own time.

Listeners to Bach's cantatas, people who heard a cantata every Sunday, knew pretty well how to listen to one, how to get the theological implications, how to hear the counterpoint, how to appreciate the poetry, how to compare it with hundreds of other cantatas. We may have to work a lot harder to get that same information; but unlike them, we have access to music from all times and all places. Our experience is shallower, but it is broader.

I'm not sure I'd trade the chance to hear whatever I want for a chance to live in Bach's Leipzig. But I'm pretty sure that I would rather give up my recordings than give up the possibility of making music with other people.

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This article is adapted from The Voice, Spring 2005.