Choral music has both a longer history and a wider global spread than almost any other musical genre. Opera was born in seventeenth-century Florence and until the nineteenth century was mainly written and performed within a thousand-mile radius of its birthplace; orchestral music appeared in eighteenth-century Europe, and the symphony orchestra did not crystallize into its present form until the nineteenth century; pop music and its electronic soundworld were products of twentieth-century technology, rooted in America and its musical and ethnic fusions before being copied and developed elsewhere.
Contrast this with a recital program I recently heard sung by an American college choir in New York’s Carnegie Hall. It opened with a thousand-year-old Gregorian chant, moved on to Renaissance polyphony by Lassus and Victoria, took in some Brahms part-songs and Russian liturgical music on the way to Barber’s Agnus Dei , crossed the Pacific for a group of Japanese folk songs and traveled back again for a finale of American spirituals. The young performers and their conductor were perfectly at ease with all this musical time- and space-travel, and I found myself marveling at the global nature of choral music today.
The appearance of The Cambridge Companion to Choral Music is a timely reflection and reminder of this easily overlooked miracle. People have gathered together to sing since earliest times, and in doing so they have created marvelous sounds which could not be made in any other way. They have adorned religious ritual, celebrated the landmark occasions in the life of their community, inspired and uplifted their listeners, created a unique instrument for composers, and in doing all this have expressed their innermost souls and forged a communal identity. This volume explores all these themes and more, in just the way a good companion should: informatively but not exhaustingly, pointing the way rather than dragging us down every byway; surprising us now and then with a new perspective on a familiar landscape; and offering sound practical advice for those of us starting out on the road that our guides have already traveled.
In editing what is necessarily a compact symposium, André de Quadros has been unafraid to make bold and wide-ranging choices of topic to complement the global history and survey that form the main part of the book. Despite all the differences of approach and topic, it seems to me that three overarching themes emerge at the end of it all: first, that in engaging with choral music, individuals can be at one with themselves – made whole; second, that people can be at one with each other; finally, that peoples can be at one with each other. In choral music, we can discover and express our own selves, we can form social units that are potentially a microcosm of an ideal society, and at the same time we assert that a diverse world can celebrate its diversity and yet be at one. I can think of no more powerful messages for our times.