CHORAL MUSIC

music sung by a choir with two or more voices assigned to each part. Choral music is necessarily polyphonal-i.e., consisting of two or more autonomous vocal lines. It has a long history in European church music. Choral music ranks as one of several musical genres subject to misunderstanding because of false historical perspectives or misinterpretation caused by the confusion engendered by unsolved semantic problems. Choral, chorale, choir, and chorus stand in obvious relationship to one another and are in some respects used interchangeably when a body of singers, for example, is referred to as a choir, a chorus (Latin noun derived from the Greek word choros), or a chorale, which properly is a Lutheran hymn tune. The adjective choral may therefore be applied in a general way (choral music, choral technique) or in a specific way (such as Beethoven's Choral Symphony and Choral Fantasia). The nouns chorale, choir, and chorus are frequently used as adjectives in such expressions as chorale prelude ("choral prelude" is incorrect), choir organ, or chorus part. The definition of choral music has by circumstance and usage been forced to comprise a far wider area than a comparable definition of an instrumental genre. It is unusual, to say the least, to perform a symphony with only a single instrument to each part, even though the opposite has occasionally happened when a string quartet movement is played by the massed strings of an orchestra. Much music now performed by choirs, however, was originally intended for soloists; and, while the lack of historical authenticity may here be deplored, it is evident that a choral performance of a madrigal (equivalent to an orchestral performance of a string quartet movement) permits many amateur musicians to enjoy, as members of a team, music that might otherwise escape their knowledge. If a choral performance of genres for several solo voices, such as the madrigal, ballett, villanella, and part-song, results in a more neutral sound and a less personal intensity of expression, it is nevertheless true that the reverse sometimes offers unsuspected advantages, as when a work written for choir alone is performed by a group of soloists. In certain cases the work may take on a new and enhanced aspect because each strand of melody within the texture carries a personal rather than a group expression. In defining choral music, some attention should also be paid to the enormous variation in the size of choirs. A chamber choir need contain only a dozen voices, certainly not more than 20; whereas a choir assembled for the Handel Festivals in the 19th century or for the Berlioz concerts monstres in Paris during the same epoch, might have numbered thousands. Modern traces of such massive choral effects may be found in the Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major (sometimes called Symphony of a Thousand) of the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. This work calls for a large double choir and a separate boys' choir, in addition to a large orchestra and eight soloists. On the other hand, numerous modern choral works, because of their difficulty and complexity, seem to have been composed with a chamber choir in mind, as in the case of Cinq rechants (1949) by the French composer Olivier Messiaen. If there is more than one voice to each part-i.e., to each line of polyphony (music of several voice parts) or strand of melody-the performance is choral, even though the actual sonority may not seem choral in the accepted sense until there are more than five or six voices to a part. Both types of singing may also coexist, since a choir may contain several capable soloists who may at certain points sing as a group without the choir or with the choir as a background. This feature is the choral equivalent of the orchestral concerto grosso, in which a small group of solo instruments alternate or combine with the main body of players. Examples of this may be found in choral music of all types and ages. The medieval rondeau was usually performed by a soloist who sang the verses, with a small choir for the refrain. When the mass became a vehicle for choral performance in the 15th century, the Christe Eleison, certain parts of the Gloria and the Credo, the Benedictus, and the Agnus Dei were frequently assigned to a group of soloists within the choir. The Eton Choirbook motets demand similar treatment since red and black text is used to differentiate between those sections intended for soloists and those for full choir. Comparable effects may be found in music written for special occasions, oratorios, verse anthems, and settings of the Passion. Although choirs existed throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, their role was restricted to unison singing of plainchant. Polyphony was the exclusive preserve of soloists. This state of affairs was gradually modified for several reasons. Early forms of musical notation were not precise enough to allow choral performance of even the simplest two-part polyphony. As time went on, improved accuracy in notating pitch and time values permitted some degree of experiment in choral performance. Knowledge of the subtleties of mensural (precisely measured) music was at first the prerogative of a small number of initiates. The ordinary member of the plainchant choir, or schola, was not expected to understand the notation or to perform music using it. But the teaching of musical theory spread rapidly in the 14th century, and singers became better equipped and educated than they had been at any previous time. The ever-growing wealth of the church also acted to encourage choral performance, since abbeys, cathedrals, parish and collegiate churches, and court chapels vied with each other in the opulence and perfection of their choral establishments. Laws were passed enabling royal chapels to impress (that is, to seek out and enroll) eligible provincial choirboys for the great central establishments, and in consequence every boy was a soloist in his own right, just as were the countertenors, tenors, and basses. Finally, the rapidity with which composers took advantage of this situation, evolving new techniques and adapting old ones, created a tremendous surge of choral activity and composition, which the new art of music printing was to aid even further in the early years of the 16th century. From that time until the present, there has been no abatement of interest in choral music, which is performed at amateur and professional levels throughout the entire world. music sung by a choir with two or more voices assigned to each part. Choral music is necessarily polyphonal-i.e., consisting of two or more autonomous vocal lines. It has a long history in European church music. Although choirs existed in churches and cathedrals throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, their role was restricted to the unison singing of plainsong, or Gregorian chant. Beginning in the 9th and 10th centuries, the polyphonic development known as organum added a second vocal line to the plainsong, and writing for this solo second voice gradually became more elaborate. These two-part compositions were superseded in the 13th century by three- and four-part organa by Protin, a composer of the Notre-Dame school. Another Frenchman, Guillaume de Machaut, became in the mid-14th century the first composer to write single-handedly a polyphonic setting of the Ordinary of the mass. Masses became the main vehicle for choral composition for centuries thereafter. The early masses of Machaut and others were intended for soloists, though they are often performed by large choirs today. Choral settings of the mass became the focal point of choral music in the 15th and 16th centuries, when Giovanni da Palestrina and many other composers wrote them. Instrumental accompaniments were added by Claudio Monteverdi and others in the 17th century. In the 18th century, the mass was partly supplanted in popularity by the oratorio, which is a large-scale composition on a sacred subject for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, and by the cantata, which is basically a short oratorio that may utilize arias, recitatives, chorales, and purely orchestral passages in its structure. The most important such works are the approximately 200 cantatas composed by Johann Sebastian Bach and the Messiah (1741) and other oratorios written by George Frideric Handel. Franz Joseph Haydn wrote masses and such important oratorios as The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801). The Classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote many masses, including the unfinished Requiem (1791), and Ludwig van Beethoven's Missa Solemnis (1823) is one of the great masterpieces of choral music. Such 19th-century composers as Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms, and Anton Bruckner continued to write masses and oratorios. In the 20th century, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, and Igor Stravinsky were among the foremost composers of choral music, much of it secular in subject matter. Apart from opera, a truly secular tradition of choral writing did not emerge until the 17th century, and even after that, the church and the opera tended to monopolize choral writing. But the spread of choral societies, or amateur choirs, throughout Europe in the 19th century stimulated the production of secular choral works. Amateur choral societies also began adapting secular polyphonic songs, such as the Italian madrigal, German lied, and French chanson, and assigned each solo vocal line to a group of singers. In this way the body of choral music, which was already extensive, has been expanded still further. Additional reading For a general survey of song literature, see Denis Stevens (ed.), A History of Song (1960); and "Song," in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., vol. 7 (1954); for discussions of early chants and songs to 1640, with bibliographies and editions: The New Oxford History of Music, vol. 2-4 (1954-68); for problems in text setting: the introductions to An Elizabethan Song Book, ed. by Noah Greenberg, W.H. Auden, and Chester Kallman (1955); The Ring of Words: An Anthology of Song Texts, ed. by Philip L. Miller (1963); and The Penguin Book of Lieder, ed. by S.S. Prawer (1964); also Archibald T. Davison, Words and Music (1954); Vincent Duckles and Franklin B. Zimmerman, Words to Music (1967); Northrop Frye (ed.), Sound and Poetry (1957), esp. ch. 1, "Words into Music: The Composer's Approach to the Text," by Edward T. Cone; and Jack Stein, "Was Goethe Wrong About the Nineteenth-Century Lied?" PMLA, 77:232-239 (1962). For a discussion of the concert aria, see Paul Hamburger, "The Concert Arias," in The Mozart Companion, ed. by H.C. Robbins Landon and Donald Mitchell (1956). Manfred F. Bukofzer, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (1950) and Music in the Baroque Era (1947), are both well-established classics, the first volume being of particular importance since it discusses the beginnings of choral music. Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal, 3 vol. (1949, reprinted 1971), is a detailed account of the entire history of the Italian madrigal. The third volume contains hitherto unpublished compositions, Edmund H. Fellowes, English Cathedral Music from Edward VI to Edward VII, 2nd ed. rev. (1945), and The English Madrigal Composers, 2nd ed. (1948), are regarded as classics and are well suited to the general reader as well as to the professional musician. Frank L. Harrison, Music in Medieval Britain (1958), is the most thorough account of church music in Britain from the earliest times up to the middle of the 16th century. Peter Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England, 1549-1660 (1967), provides especially good coverage for this period. Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance, rev. ed. (1959), is the finest single-volume study of music from the time of Dufay up to that of Byrd. Denis W. Stevens, Tudor Church Music (1961), is a study of forms and styles in 16th-century church music. See also Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church, 2 vol. (1979); and Stephen Daw, The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the Choral Works (1981).