At 40 distinct melodies, it is certainly the 'grandest' piece in early English church music.
But it definitely suffers from every one of the reasons for obscurity listed in TFA, on steroids.
However, Backstreet Boys or many of the Korean idol groups do music that could be classified as choral that's highly accessible.
The main difference is drums. Music without drums or some rhythmic equivalent is less accessible.
The other main difference is not in accessibility, but economics. Is cheaper and easier to make a band with only one featured vocalist, so most professional bands do this. It's what people hear, and therefore what they identify with and therefore what they go out of their way to listen to.
But yes, solo vocalists have been the primary mode of vocal music in English-speaking culture which presented a challenge in creating post-Vatican II liturgical music which was intended to echo the local culture (something that Dennis Day noted in his book, Why Catholics Can’t Sing). Folk and rock both tend not to work well as a format for congregational music although the former works better in my opinion. Certainly, I don’t buy Day’s argument that the obvious liturgical choice is old-school hymnody (I lean more towards incorporating more of Black gospel instead).
I wouldn’t call the various harmony-based groups like Backstreet Boys or K-Pop as choral music. What makes choral music choral is the fact that there are multiple voices singing each part in the piece.
The Wikipedia article for the Motet has an interesting quote which echoes the sentiment here:
> [the motet is] not to be celebrated in the presence of common people, because they do not notice its subtlety, nor are they delighted in hearing it, but in the presence of the educated and of those who are seeking out subtleties in the arts.
This quote is attributed to Johannes de Grocheio in the 1200s! That means that people have been saying that choral music is hard to appreciate for more than seven hundred years.
I also agree with the article that understanding the blend of voices is best "when you are singing in the midst of the action" rather than on a recording. But also, that means it's hard to gain familiarity with specific songs or genre-specific styles, which is another barrier to entry.
I think a lot of vocal music written around 1500 would benefit from this approach. It has been remarked that this is really a sort of sacred chamber music rather than music requiring a huge choir. The music moves too fast and it's very difficult for a big choir in a very resonant space to do Obrecht, Josquin and friends full justice.
[1] https://hyperion.lnk.to/cda68460 [2] https://www.medieval.org/emfaq/cds/dvg102.htm
We do record in churches because we like the reverb, so it's not quite the dry studio sound you're describing, but we do prioritize a clear sound stage where all of the parts can be clearly heard.
We've found that a Blumlein mic configuration (two figure-8 pattern microphones placed at a 90 degree angle from each other) helps to create this clarity of texture, where all the parts can be heard individually across the stereo image, especially when listening with headphones. I can't take credit for this idea though: we learned it from the sound engineer who records the Tallis Scholars, who told us that they record in this configuration.
Here are a couple examples of tracks recorded using this style:
I do realise that's a monumental undertaking, though :-D
For example, when I learned about convolution reverb, and how it should theoretically be able to simulate the unique reverb pattern of any room, I was initially excited about the possibilities. But after trying it I was underwhelmed.
That said, I'm open to being convinced. If you know of any compelling demos of this kind of spatial placement, I'd be interested to see.
I had not heard of Nonsuch Palace, despite having a passing interest in Henry VIII and certainly a large interest in Tallis! Is it thought that Spem was performed there?
(Say what you want about "spatial audio" on earphones - if you're lucky enough to have a good home cinema separates system it's awesome, and this would be the ultimate application for it IMO.)
I disagree with the premise. I don't think there's anything inherently "harder to appreciate" about choral music. It's just a personal, and no doubt culturally influenced, preference. I struggle to enjoy opera and hip-hop, but that's on me. I don't go around writing articles about how hard they are to appreciate.
It feels like Enya falls squarely into the 'choral' sound despite them being 'solo'. (lots of overdubs I imagine)
And then there's African choir. Popular example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AGtd2-jv0U
There's nothing "harder to appreciate" about a group of voices vs any other way of making music.
As an addendum, for anyone interested in choral music I highly recommend listening to Caroline Shaw. She is among the most interesting new voices in the genre. Her piece Partita for 8 Voices [1] won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back. For a somewhat more accessible piece I also really like Its Motion Keeps [2].
so notes that are dissonant on piano are not necessarily dissonant with human voices.
a big reason for that is apparently overtone matching (and i guess that because of formants/resonant cavities of the human vocal tract, there must be a lot of matching overtones in more cases, maybe? i wonder if there is a youtube vid about that, there must be...)
big chances it does not make dissonance "smoother", but that the sound is less dissonant in the first place.
For example, if you are on the fifth in the chord, you adjust the tone slightly up. If you are on the major third, slightly down. Minor third, slightly up. These rules are consciously applied by choral singers, and are even genre-defining for things like barbershop.
"Choral music is harder to appreciate than say either symphonies or chamber music" - unlike orchestras and smaller string ensembles, choirs are champions of new music. The end of the article cites opera's growing popularity (an idea I'm not sure I buy into) but opera companies are famously stuck in rep from 100-300 year old, because that's what the donor class wants to hear.
The perspective painted by this article isn't all that different from the boomer who thinks there hasn't been good rock n' roll since the Beatles and the Stones. It's out there, all around you - you're just not looking in the right places. Choir music has a built-in network effect; when one choir sings a piece that goes over well, often times there are members who are in one or two other choirs, or are even choir directors themselves. There's a very dynamic scene, not even touching on religious choirs. And to people who think it's not that exciting, again I think you might just not be going to the right concerts. I've seen a choir reduce an entire audience to tears, and I've heard choral pieces that send the hair up on the back of my neck. I say this as someone who normally listens to Nine Inch Nails, Fever Ray, Queens of the Stone Age, Autechre, Aphex Twin... Some of my favorite choral works have very catchy rhythms, others border on math rock.
Choral organizations could do with better marketing; it's hard to compete in today's media landscape. One of my favorite groups, the St Louis Chamber Chorus, performs new and old works, and makes it a point to perform in unique spaces all around the St Louis area - part of the attraction to a concert is getting to go into that church you've always wondered about, or an old theater that's been brought back to life by the community. The Mid-Columbia Master Singers have performed in the Hanford B reactor site in the Tri-Cities area of Washington state. Or even seeing The King's Singers perform with Voces8 in an old mainstay like Royal Albert Hall, it's a sensory experience that can't be replicated.
And again, it's a community thing. You meet other people who appreciate this stuff when you go to the concerts and stay for the receptions. If you feel like you could make things better, become a subscriber, a major donor, join the board of one of these things. It's incredibly rewarding.
Back to marketing: outside of a few long-running groups like Chanticleer, Cantus, Voces8, the King's Singers, and so on, it's really challenging to build a brand around choral music. The industry's just not there for it. But seek out local choral concerts, talk to some strangers there, and you'll find a whole ecosystem that operates is more typically consumed live and in person, than it is via recording.
Going back to the title of the article, I suppose that does make it harder to appreciate than something you've heard in movie trailers and can stream from Spotify.
Small group a capella is slightly more viable, but it's very "amateur coded": even very good a capella groups perform a lot of covers, and rarely stick with one genre. They perform whatever they want, which is often also things with commercial appeal, but isn't ideal for long-term musical identity building.
Take Rajaton for instance. Extremely technically brilliant, but their own compositions are a relatively small part of their repertoire (and still more than most a capella groups!). Pop music covers and Christmas music are obviously a big part of what makes them commercially viable, in addition they perform commissioned work from acknowledged choral composers (Mia Marakoff, Michael McGlynn). When they do the occasional album with good stylistic coherence and their own compositions (like 2016 Salaisuus) it doesn't look like a commerical success.
That really depends where you live. In Vienna you definitely get all-professional choirs of that size for instance.
Choral music is boring because the tempos tend to be slow. The instruments used are generally incapable of fast passages in which notes have a sharp, clear attack. Not just fast passages, but interesting passages. Choral melodies tend to be uninteresting, because they have to be singable. If there are too many awkward leaps, only some rare genius with a perfect ear and vocal control can pull it off; yet the same melody would be nothing to a violinist, pianist, or flutist, at twice the tempo, who would have all the notes crisply articulated with good intonation and a quick attack.
In a nutshell, some people like their Western Art music when it shreds.
Otherwise, not so much.
Which is not to say that vocals as such are unexciting; far from it. The problem is that choral works often just have too many people singing. Exciting vocals mainly have one vocalist, or at most a very small number, doing something powerful with their voices, not just hitting the notes in a score.
I'd rather listen to a good barbershop quartet than some Baroque chorale---even if it's by Bach! However, if the latter were reduced to an ensemble of just four people, it could work a lot better.
E.g. this actually sound pretty cool: five ladies singing the Toccata and Fugue in Dm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKI9VThPB4w
Much more fun than any random Bach chorale, sorry J. S.
But still, only to a point. Though they are hitting the notes and the harmonies are crisp, there is a lot of portamento (gliding from note to note). The attack of an instrument isn't there.
In terms of vocal power, it's a joke compared to swing, blues, rock.
The textures emerging from the the overlapping voices is just amazing…
rectang•2h ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aQXehmVDLc (trad)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE01DAATf6s (remix)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p4qcbzKWeY (deodorant ad)
samplatt•2h ago
Even the softer track "Ecce Gratum" still has regular organ interludes to set the tone.