I.

Introduction

Choral Music, music sung by a group of people, using two or more singers to perform each musical line. The term part-song is used for vocal music having one singer for each part. Choral music is written for choruses, or choirs, consisting either of adults, children, or both.

Although complex genres of choral music developed in Western music, part-singing practices were also established in folk, tribal, and non-Western cultures. Such singing often accompanies manual labor, expresses joy or sorrow, or forms a part of religious ritual. Among the world's many singing traditions are the polyphonic (multipart), polyrhythmic choruses of African music; the relaxed harmonies found in the Alpine and northern Slavic areas of Europe; the tense-voiced women's canons of the Balkans; the unison choral singing that sometimes accompanies an Indonesian gamelan orchestra; and the unison and polyphonic choruses of Oceania.

In ancient Greece, religious feelings were expressed in drama by a chorus. Although the chorus members—like those of modern opera—were dancers and actors as well as singers, the term chorus eventually came to indicate only singers.

II.

Development of Choirs in Western Music

Western choirs effectively began in the 6th century ad, when Pope Gregory I, known as the Great, established song schools in the European centers of Christianity in order to ensure the correct performance of liturgical music (see Music, Western: Early Medieval Period). Many still-famous choirs—of highly trained boys and men singing soprano, contralto, tenor, and bass parts—developed in churches, colleges, and royal chapels. These included the still active choirs of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, Italy; Saint Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, Austria; Saint Thomas's Church in Leipzig, Germany; and King's College at the University of Cambridge and the Chapel Royal in London, England. Notable modern choirs of boys and men include that of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

In the 16th and 17th centuries the range of choral music was extended beyond the liturgy. The Reformation encouraged informal group singing of religious songs—metrical psalms in France, Switzerland, England, and Scotland, and chorales, or hymns, in Germany. The Italian-inspired Renaissance, on the other hand, followed the precedent of 15th-century French chansons (secular part-songs) and stimulated amateur singers to perform madrigals and other part-songs, genres now often performed chorally. In the 18th century the choral works of Johann Sebastian Bach and German-English composer George Frideric Handel produced an enthusiasm that found an outlet in amateur choirs in which women (rather than boys and men, as was the tradition) sang the soprano and contralto parts. These included the Berlin Singakademie (1792), the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music, Vienna, 1812), the Handel and Haydn Society (Boston, Massachusetts, 1815), and the Sacred Harmonic Society (London, 1832).

Choral festivals became frequent in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Welsh eisteddfod, derived from folk music and having more than a thousand years of tradition, combines choral and poetry competitions; the annual National Eisteddfod was established in 1860. The Three Choirs Festival, founded in 1717 and based in three English cathedrals, is the oldest continuing festival of oratorio and church music. In the 20th century, choral groups have tended to specialize in particular styles or composers and are frequently associated with civic, academic, church, or national institutions. Organizations such as the American Choral Directors Association effectively unite many interests.

III.

Musical Genres

From the formation of western choirs until about the 12th century, single-line plainchant (see Chant) dominated the choral repertoire. From the 12th through the 15th century the single-line chant of Gregorian plainsong expanded into polyphony. Genres such as the antiphon, in which choir members alternated singing portions of a psalm or verse; the motet, a multipart setting of a sacred text; and the mass (see Mass, Musical Settings of) were the principal vehicles for the development of Western polyphony during these centuries. Their counterparts in 16th-century post-Reformation England were the anthem and service. The great masters of church music of the 15th and 16th centuries included Guillaume Dufay, from France; Giovanni da Palestrina, from Italy; Tomás Luis de Victoria, from Spain; and William Byrd, from England. In the 16th century the madrigal, the secular equivalent of the motet, was developed. Italian composers Luca Marenzio and Claudio Monteverdi excelled in writing madrigals. During that time much ensemble singing was without instrumental accompaniment (a cappella), a tradition maintained in most modern part-songs.

The outstanding composers of the baroque era (about 1600 to about 1750) were Handel and Bach, masters of their native German style and of advanced Italian, French, and English techniques. Handel settled in England and developed the oratorio, a large-scale setting of a dramatic text for choir and orchestra, which originated in the mid-16th century. Bach based his Passion oratorios and many examples of the church cantata (similar to an oratorio but smaller in scale) on Lutheran chorales. Composers such as Henry Purcell, from England, often used the same compositional techniques in their choral odes for civil and court occasions as they did in their church music.

In the classical era (about 1750 to about 1820) the orchestra almost equaled the choir in importance in the masses of German composer Ludwig van Beethoven and Austrian composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn. Composers of large choral works began to use musical instruments in many ways to reinforce the meaning of the texts, and this trend continued into the 20th century. Notable examples include the Requiem (1874) of Giuseppe Verdi, from Italy; the German Requiem (1868) of Johannes Brahms, from Germany; The Dream of Gerontius (1900) by Sir Edward Elgar, from England; the Psalmus Hungaricus (1923) by Zoltán Kodály, from Hungary; and Carmina Burana (1937) by Carl Orff, from Germany.

During the romantic era (about 1820 to about 1900), composers often turned to the great poets for the texts of their secular choral works. For example, both the First Walpurgis Night (1831, revised 1843) by German composer Felix Mendelssohn and The Damnation of Faust (1846) by French composer Hector Berlioz used texts by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The introduction of voices into a previously purely instrumental genre, the symphony, brought choral symphonies into the repertoire. The first and most famous is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (1824), the last movement of which incorporates a choral setting of the “Ode to Joy,” by German poet Friedrich von Schiller. Among its most important successors were the Second, Third, and Eighth symphonies (1894, 1895, 1907) of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. Advanced 20th-century idioms were reflected in later works such as the Symphony of Psalms (1930) by Russian-born Igor Stravinsky, Canti di prigionia (Songs of Prison, 1941) by Italian Luigi Dallapiccola, and the Passion According to Saint Luke (1966) by Krzysztof Penderecki, from Poland.