Choir and vocal ensembles

A single voice sings a melody. Several voices together can sing the same melody, louder and fuller, or sing different melodies at once and make chords. The group of voices that does this is the choir (Lacerda 1966, ch. XLI).

Med defines the choir as a group of singers performing pieces written for vocal ensembles, and points out that choral is the adjective: choral singing, choral music (Med 1996, ch. XXXVII). English also has chorus, used for large choirs and for the choral sections of operas and oratorios.

Four kinds of choir

A choir is female, male, mixed or children's (Lacerda 1966, ch. XLI). The name says who sings: only women, only men, men and women together, or children.

The commonest is the mixed choir, and it usually comes in four parts: soprano, alto, tenor and bass (Lacerda 1966, ch. XLI). This is the layout abbreviated SATB: soprano and alto are the higher and lower voices of women and children, tenor and bass the higher and lower voices of men (Blatter 2007, part 4, art. 1).

Here is a simple cadence for mixed choir, with the four parts on two staves. On the upper staff, soprano and alto; on the lower, tenor and bass:

Hear the passage

Hear the passage

The soprano comes down E, D, C; the alto holds G and drops to E; the tenor goes from C to B and back; the bass leaps from C to G and back. Four lines, and each can be sung on its own.

Where the mezzo-soprano and the baritone go

The classification of voices has six adult types, and the mixed choir has four parts. That is not an oversight. It is customary not to use the middle voices, mezzo-soprano and baritone, as separate parts in the mixed choir, so that the timbres of the four parts are more distinct from one another (Lacerda 1966, ch. XLI).

Singers with those voices stay in the choir; they just do not get a line of their own. A mezzo-soprano sings with the sopranos or with the altos, depending on the piece and the balance of the group; a baritone sings with the tenors or with the basses.

Choir voices are not soloists' voices

Blatter gives the ranges of the four parts assuming untrained singers, and notes that trained singers reach much further, while many amateurs can sing only part of those ranges (Blatter 2007, part 4, art. 1).

That changes how you write. A choir part does not ask for the extreme notes an opera soloist can reach, because it will be sung by a group whose members do not all have the same technique. Whoever writes for choir keeps each part in the comfortable stretch of the voice, the middle register, and saves the extremes for short moments.

How choral music is written

In a choral score each part can have its own staff, from top to bottom in the order of the voices: soprano, alto, tenor, bass. Soprano and alto in the treble clef; bass in the bass clef; and the tenor, usually, in the treble clef, with the notes written an octave above where they sound (Lacerda 1966, ch. XLI).

When space is short, the four parts share two staves, as in the cadence above: the women's voices on the upper staff, the men's on the lower. It is the layout of hymnals and of many harmony books.

A choir can have more than four parts. When a part divides, the singers of that section split into two groups with different lines, and the score marks "soprano I" and "soprano II", for instance. And there are works for double choir, two four-part choirs singing opposite each other.

A cappella

An a cappella choir is one that sings without instrumental accompaniment (Lacerda 1966, ch. XLI). The Italian phrase means "in the manner of the chapel", and it comes from church music, where the choir sang on its own.

Singing a cappella is harder than it looks. With no instrument to give the notes, the choir has to hold its tuning by itself, and a group that sags a little in each phrase can finish the piece in a different key from the one it started in.

Med also records a figurative use of the word choir: instruments of the same family playing together can be called a choir, as in a trumpet choir or a brass choir (Med 1996, ch. XXXVII).

Soloists and groups of soloists

The soloist is the singer who performs individually, alone or accompanied by other voices or by instruments (Lacerda 1966, ch. XLI). Two or more soloists together make a duet, or duo, a trio, a quartet, a quintet, a sextet, and so on (Lacerda 1966, ch. XLI).

A vocal quartet and a four-part choir can sing exactly the same score. The difference is how many people sing each line: in the quartet, one; in the choir, several. With one voice to a part, each singer is heard as an individual, with their own timbre; with several, the voices of a part blend into a single sound.

Where to breathe

A string player can play without stopping. A singer cannot. Breathing at a point with no written rest forces the singer to break the sound for a moment, which makes a small rest. Sometimes the composer marks where to breathe, with a comma or a V above the staff (Lacerda 1966, ch. XLI).

Lacerda's rule is that the time for the breath must always be taken from the note before, never from the note after (Lacerda 1966, ch. XLI). That way the next note comes in exactly on its beat:

Hear the passage

The wrong way is to hold the note to its end and breathe in the time of the next note, which comes in late:

Hear the passage

In a choir this matters even more. If every singer breathes when they like, the start of the next phrase comes out blurred; taking the time from the note before, everyone arrives together on the downbeat.

What comes next

The choir is the ensemble in which voices are organised the way the orchestra is organised by families. For so many singers and players to perform the same work, someone has to see every line at once, and that is what the score is for. And four-part writing, soprano, alto, tenor and bass, is also the workshop where harmony is studied.