Prof Davey #106
A good read - well said!
There in another angle to this too.
For those that are aficionados of classical music and, in particular, classical singing will understand there are different forms. So a good (if somewhat simplistic) distinction being between operatic and traditional choral singing. Now these are actually different in singing style and professional musicians tend to become proficient in one or the other, but rarely both. The whole tone, technique and sound generated is different. And this is linked not just to basic distinctions but the type of space in which the music is 'designed' to be performed. So an opera house has a completely different design to a church, for example - and I'm talking acoustically, not purpose.
So choral music has always been composed for choral voices that perform in a space that uses its natural reverberation and resonance to augment and enhance the sound generated from the singers. And in most cases that kind of acoustic is to be found in the natural reverberations of traditional church designs (which themselves are designed often with that in mind). So take a top choral singing group, such as the sixteen. They are just about the best around - here them in Kings College Chapel and they are spellbinding - their voices are augmented by the acoustic to fill the space with rich reverberant sound. Take them and put them in a different space - e.g. a Barbican concert hall, which has a completely different acoustic that specifically reduces much of the natural reverberation that you'd get in a church (and is designed for orchestra largely) and although they'll still sound good the richness and fullness of the sound is lost.
So music is composed to be performed in particular types of space and musicians abilities are influence by that space.
Most traditional choral music is composed to be sung in a space with significant reverberation - which is usually a church. It isn't designed to be sung in the much 'drier' acoustic of an opera house or a concert hall. And vice versa - Opera is designed to be sung in an Opera house.
And I think this has had an affect, certainly until recently, on the 'subject' of the choral music. So if you are composing music that will be sung in a church, because that's the place where it sounds best, then likely as not you'll ensure the subject matter is suitable. Indeed until pretty recently many churches wouldn't really countenance the performance of secular choral pieces within their spaces, so frankly there wasn't a great deal of point composing them with no-where for them to be performed. However recently (over the past 40-50 years) there has been a softening of that approach, with churches recognising that they can make money from secular concerts and that insisting that the music must have a sacred theme isn't really tenable. Hence the proliferation of secular choral pieces that have a traditional choral flavour but choose non sacred text.
Interestingly there have been some much earlier 'cross-over' pieces, largely sacred music written by composers more associated with the operatic genre and in an operatic rather than traditional choral style. Perhaps the most famous being the Verdi requiem, which (after a brief initial 'test' performance) received its proper premier in La Scala, an Opera house, and was then performed in similar 'concert or opera' venues in Paris and London. The music is Operatic in nature and works best in an Opera house or concert hall rather than a church.
