Chorus and Community

Description

The chorus and its effect on music and the world. Although organized group singing appears world wide, in a great variety of circumstances, from church to worksite, school to civic club, parlor to concert hall, amateur setting to professional, quartets to monster concerts, in groups brought together by race, class, gender, or political, social, national, or ethnic heritage, this collection is the first to give it serious musicological attention. The chorus is a musical instrument and a social organization that crosses cultural, historical, and geographical boundaries. The essays discuss an East African chorus; groups from nineteenth-century England, Germany, and America; Hall Johnson; the Fisk Jubilee Singers; early twentieth-century Russian Mennonites; barbershop; Soviet workers' clubs; a Sardinian brotherhood; women's garment workers in Pennsylvania; choral groups in a small Illinois town (Decatur); semi-professional symphony choruses; and gay and lesbian choruses. Within this wide variety, these choruses do have characteristics in common. All of them have a more or less fixed membership. They all rehearse and perform, distinguishing between preparation and a culminating musical event given for listeners. They all have a chosen repertoire. They all have acknowledged musical leaders. With one exception, their members are not soloists; sounds are produced by an aggregate of voices, either in sections or by the chorus as a whole (the performances of the Sardinian brotherhood in Lortat-Jacob's essay are solo quartets selected from the membership). However, the choruses do not necessarily read from musical scores or sing "classical" music. And none creates income for its members individually. The accompanying CD illustrates virtually all the choruses or traditions presented in the book. [Publisher description].

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Chorus and Community

  • 2006
  • 338 pages
  • Paperback
  • University of Illinois Press

Similar books

• 

  Singing Out: GALA Choruses and Social Change

  By Heather MacLachlan

  Singing Out: GALA Choruses and Social Change tackles the premise underlying such claims, analyzing groups of amateur singers who are explicitly committed to an agenda of social justice.

• 

  A Queerly Joyful Noise: Choral Musicking for Social Justice

  By Julia "Jules" Balén

  Little Red Songbook,” many labor movement songs of this era were composed or altered on the picket lines, in meetings, and during strikes. Building on songs that were familiar to most in genres ranging from the religious to the popular, ...

• 

  Before the Singing: Structuring Children's Choirs for Success

  By Dr. Barbara Tagg

  What happens before the singing begins, is critical to supporting, sustaining, and nurturing choirs to give every child the opportunity to experience the wonder of choral singing.

• 

  Community Music Today

  By David J. Elliott, Kari K. Veblen, Marissa Silverman

  This book is both a response to and a testimony of what music is and can do, music's place in people's lives, and the many ways it unites and marks communities.

• 

  Transforming Choral Singing: An Activist's Guide for Choir Directors

  By Charles W. Beale

  The book closes with a series of calls to action and lays out a potentially transformative activist vision for the whole field, which foregrounds participation and engagement, and conceives of all choral singing as a powerful catalyst for ...

• 

  Focus: Choral Music in Global Perspective

  By André de Quadros

  The song was written by survivors Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Peña to honor the 17 victims of the mass shooting. ... of choral music lies in its power to mobilize a community, to provide a platform for protest, and a unifying voice.

• 

  American Victorian Choral Music

  By Dudley BUCK

  This MUSA volume makes an important contribution to American music studies by presenting a scholarly edition of selected choral works by Dudley Buck (18391909).

• 

  A River Rather Than a Road: The Community Choir as Spiritual Experience

  By Sarah Morgan, June Boyce-Tillman

  This book is an auto-ethnographic account of the development of a charismatic community choir leader.

• 

  The Oxford Handbook of Choral Pedagogy

  By Frank Abrahams, Paul D. Head

  For instance, when I was appointed Artistic Director of the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, I knew that Santa Fe was a city famous for its art, chamber music, and opera. Thousands of people, many of them well-traveled, highly educated, ...

• 

  Choral Singing: Histories and Practices

  By Ursula Geïsler, Karin Johansson

  Basics of Vocal Pedagogy. Boston/New York: McGraw Hill, 17. Vennard, W. (1967). Singing, The Mechanism and the Technic (2nd ed.). New York: Carl Fischer, 44. Sell, K. (2005). The Disciplines of Vocal Pedagogy: Towards an holistic ...