(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 solo petit 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.
4. From the mid-18th century to the later 19th.
JAMES G. SMITH (1–3), PERCY M. YOUNG/JAMES G. SMITH (4–5)
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 bc), was an invocation to Apollo in his capacity as god of healing; the partheneia, introduced about 650 bc, was for a women’s chorus composed of Spartan virgins; and the dithyramb, raised to the level of choral art music about 600 bc, 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 (see fig.1). 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.
The Old Testament provides ample evidence of the existence of well-organized choral singing in 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 … the trumpeters and singers … 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 … 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 … 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 … 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 Corinthians xiv.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 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 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.
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 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 (fig.2). 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 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, 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. Each ospedale 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 …. 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.
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 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.
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 parte to 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, 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’s Pomone, 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 operatic corps 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 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.
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 a Te 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 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 Feast and 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’s Betulia 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 first Liedertafel, 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 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 … 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 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 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 cappella style. 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.9). In London the Motet Society, with Edward Rimbault as secretary and editor, came into 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 term a 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 term a 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 antico compositions 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 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.
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 (see Shape-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.
Black Americans developed a choral idiom of great vitality in which African and European elements were combined (see United states of america, 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.
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’s C. 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 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 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 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.
MGG2 (‘A cappella’, B. Janz)
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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)
E. Wienandt: Choral Music of the Church (New York, 1965/R)
R. Stevenson: Protestant Church Music in America: a Short Survey of Men and Movements from 1564 to the Present (New York, 1966/R)
P. le Huray: Music and the Reformation in England, 1549–1660 (London,1967, 2/1978)
B. Pritchard: The Music Festival and the Choral Society in England in the 18th and 19th Centuries: a 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
A. Sendrey: Music in Ancient Israel (New York, 1969)
C. Dearnley: English Church Music 1650–1750, in Royal Chapel, Cathedral and Parish Church (London, 1970)
F. Pooler and B.Pierce: New Choral Notation (New York, 1971)
H. Swan: ‘The Development of a Choral Instrument’, Choral Conducting: a Symposium, ed. H. Decker and J. Herford (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1973), 4–55
B. Kunneke: Der Deutsche Sängerbund: Entstehung, Entwicklung und Stellung in der heutigen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1978)
J. Fulcher: ‘The Orphéon Societies: Music for the Workers in Second-Empire France’, IRASM, x (1979), 47–56
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–)
R. Marshall: ‘Bach’s “Choruses” Reconstituted’,High Fidelity/Musical America, xxxii/10 (1982), 64–6, 94
C. Neuls-Bates, ed.: Women in Music: an Anthology of Source Readings from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York, 1982)
J. Rifkin: ‘Bach’s “Choruses”: Less than they Seem?’, High Fidelity/Musical America, xxxii/9 (1982), 42–4
R. Marshall: ‘Bach’s Choruses: a Preliminary Reply to Joshua Rifkin’, MT, cxxiv (1983), 19–22
J. Rifkin: ‘Bach’s Chorus: a Response to Robert Marshall’, MT, cxxiv (1983) 161–2
V. Morosan: Choral Performance in Pre-Revolutionary Russia (Ann Arbor, 1986/R)
L. Sawkins: ‘For and against the Order of Nature: Who Sang the Soprano?’, EMc, xv (1987), 315–24
R. Sherr: ‘Performance Practice in the Papal Chapel during the 16th Century’, EMc, xv (1987), 453–62
W.R. Bucker: A History of Chorus America: Association of Professional Vocal Ensembles (diss., U. of Missouri, 1991)
J.L. Baldauf-Berdes: Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations 1525–1855 (Oxford, 1993)
R. Boursy: ‘The Mystique of the Sistine Chapel Choir in the Romantic Era’, JM, xi (1993), 277–329
D.P. DeVenney, ed.: Source Readings in American Choral Music, Monographs & Bibliographies in American Music, xv (Missoula, 1995)