Musical Form
Choral Music
Music for a group of singers, sacred and secular, across the entire timeline.
Vocal / Choral
Choral music is written for a group of singers - a choir - performing together, with or without instrumental accompaniment. It's the oldest thread on this entire timeline: Medieval Gregorian chant, sung by monks in unison, is choral music in its simplest form, and choral writing has continued evolving in parallel with every other genre ever since.
How a choir is organized
Most choral music is written for four voice parts, abbreviated SATB: sopranos and altos (higher and lower women's or children's voices), and tenors and basses (higher and lower men's voices). Each part usually has several singers, which gives a choir its blended, unified sound. Composers may split parts further - eight-part writing is common, and Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium has forty independent parts.
Music sung without instruments is called a cappella ("in the chapel style"). Choirs come in many sizes, from a chamber choir of a dozen professionals to a symphony chorus of a hundred or more amateurs, and churches, cathedrals, schools, and community choral societies keep the tradition alive everywhere.
The main choral forms
- Mass and requiem - settings of the Catholic liturgy, and of the Mass for the dead.
- Motet and anthem - shorter sacred pieces, in Latin and in English respectively.
- Oratorio and cantata - concert-length works combining choir, soloists, and orchestra, often on religious or narrative themes.
- Madrigal and part-song - secular songs for small vocal groups.
A short history
The Renaissance is where choral music reaches an early peak of technical sophistication, with composers weaving multiple independent vocal lines into dense, carefully balanced polyphony for church use - Palestrina, Tallis, and Byrd are the great names. See the Renaissance era.
The Baroque brought choirs together with orchestras. Bach wrote hundreds of church cantatas and the towering St Matthew Passion; Handel's oratorios, above all Messiah, created a tradition of large-scale public choral singing. The Classical era added Haydn's The Creation and Mozart's Requiem.
In the 19th century, amateur choral societies flourished, especially in Britain and Germany, and composers wrote big works for them: Mendelssohn's Elijah, Brahms's A German Requiem, Verdi's Requiem. Beethoven even brought a chorus into the symphony with his Ninth. Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil shows the rich Russian Orthodox tradition of unaccompanied singing.
The 20th century produced works as different as Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and Britten's War Requiem (1962), and choral music remains one of the most active areas of new composition, from the stillness of Arvo Pärt to Eric Whitacre's "virtual choirs" assembled online from thousands of singers.
Singing, not just listening
Because it doesn't require any instrument at all beyond the human voice, choral music has also remained one of the most widely accessible ways for ordinary people to participate in classical music-making, not just listen to it. Many of the works above were written with amateur singers in mind, and joining a local choir is one of the best ways to get to know classical music from the inside.
Where to start listening: Handel's Messiah (specifically its "Hallelujah" chorus) is the most famous large-scale choral work; for something quieter, Hildegard von Bingen's chant is choral music at its oldest and most stripped-back. For pure spectacle, try "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana.