Deeply Intense Singing

February 12, 2021 11:06 AM

Why Does Choral Music Sound So Good? "What makes the sound[of a choir], and in particular the sound of a professional group, so appealing? In this essay, I look at the science behind the notes to find out why choral music sounds so good. ...Professional choirs have the ability to take advantage of the astonishing complexity of the vocal machinery and can produce music that is not only perfectly tuned and harmonically rich but is also deeply intense. Singing is something that feels rooted deep in all of us, that taps into feelings of longing anguish and love brought into focus by the mesmerizing sounds produced by choirs across the world.

0:01 The path of Miracle: 4 Santiago by Joby Talbot
1:40 Nunc Dimittis by Arvo Pärt (credits to Sebastian Amadeus Van Brahms, I had no idea!)
3:20 Hymn to St-Cecilia, by Britten (credits to John Swedberg, I also had no idea!)
5:30 Ubi Caritas by Ola Gjeilo
6:19 The Lamb by John Tavener
7:45 Vespers: 6 Bogoroditse Devo by Rachmaninov
8:50 The Path of Miracle again (4th movement) by Joby Talbot

Also: Anatomy of the Voice (pdf)

posted by storybored (18 comments total)

Great timing . My workplace has just allowed the choral students back in (masked, tested, and distanced) to once again rehearse in our acoustical awesome Great Hall. I love hearing the singing seeping through every crack of the building.
posted by PussKillian at 12:34 PM on February 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

I needed this combination of loveliness and nerdery in my life, and so did all of my choir-nerd friends.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 12:50 PM on February 12, 2021

A while back I was at a concert where the choir went out and stood in a circle around the audience to sing a few of their selections. It was just an undergraduate group at a small college, with probably a lot of non-music majors, but the sound was so much better than almost any other choir I'd ever heard I'm kind of shocked this isn't considered the ideal setup for a choir concert.

Obviously a lot of concerts have an audience too large to do this effectively, but having heard it this way once I feel like putting a choir all together on stage is almost as much of a compromise as having to listen to a recording because you couldn't hear it live.
posted by straight at 12:57 PM on February 12, 2021 [4 favorites]

After hearing the demonstration of overtone singing, I was reminded of these examples from a different genre of singing, with varying degrees of polish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx8hrhBZJ98
https://youtu.be/jM8dCGIm6yc
posted by Citizen Cane Juice at 1:23 PM on February 12, 2021

straight,

I'm not in any way a choral professional - just a long-time community choir singer - but my choir does at least one number in the round for most of our concerts. It is an extremely cool experience but, beyond the sheer fact that most venues aren't well set up for it, it's much more difficult to do. The distance across the circle means that there is an appreciable difference between the moment your choir mate sing a note and the moment you hear it. It therefore requires a different kind of listening than one is used to when singing in a more traditional formation, and it makes it much more difficult to keep in time both with the rest of the group and with the director. This problem could be solved by spending more time rehearsing in the round, but see above: re rehearsal venue setups.

It's so good when done well, though, I completely agree.
posted by darchildre at 1:33 PM on February 12, 2021 [3 favorites]

Thanks for filleting the IDs of the background music! For several years in the 00s my teenage daughters draaagged me to attend an annual singing weekend run by Sian Croose (they needed a responsible adult). Sian typically allows people to decide their own pitch and assemble into sections; she then teaches, by ear and repeat, each section its part. That can be a teensy bit draggy sometimes, but eventually everyone knows their bit and Sian starts one section going on their own. After all the rehearsal, it sounds good. Then she brings in another part which, by accentuating and complementing the first, sounds much richer. When she adds a third part, you think “it can’t get better than this – this is really fine”. But there are two more parts to be woven ! There have been times when I’ve had to concentrate really hard on just singing my own small bit because if I listened to The Whole, I knew I wouldn’t be able to continue: I would be, as the Victorians had it, unmanned. I came to believe that singing together is a defining attribute of the human condition and if you fail to do it often enough you are not fulfilling your potential as a person.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:44 PM on February 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is so nice to listen to and think about. I have what I guess one would call "aggressively modern" tastes in music, but I also have a deep love of early music and close vocal harmonies. That overtone singer is just... incredibly impressive with her vocal control. I'd add, too, that the space in which choral performances happen can be an equal contributor to that spine-tingling quality of choral music. Even if it's a train station where announcements keep interrupting the experience, these sounds and how they interact in certain spaces reliably give me chills.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 3:52 PM on February 12, 2021

It is an extremely cool experience but, beyond the sheer fact that most venues aren't well set up for it, it's much more difficult to do.

Concur. I sang with a local community chorus for a few years recently and although singing dispersed through the hall made for a lovely experience for the audience, it was significantly harder to hit my notes at the right time when I wasn't surrounded by the other singers in my section. Similarly when the music director rearranged us so that each section was dispersed through the choir instead of standing together: much harder to do the more complicated pieces.
posted by suelac at 4:44 PM on February 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Arvo Pärt, an Estonian composer, I learned about here; has a specially build concert hall in Tallinn, Estonia. His coral music is amazing, and fresh. I think Da Pacem is my favorite of the choral works, there is a chorus it ends with that reminds me of seabirds flying low out over the ocean and calling into the distance. I don't know why it strikes me this way. I have never been a fan of choral music, until now. The whole concert that has this piece in it, is here.
posted by Oyéah at 6:19 PM on February 12, 2021 [3 favorites]

We all contain multitudes, and one of mine is as a choral singer. I have sung many of these works. Just to hear them imparts a kind of mental frisson in me so dangerous that I have to limit my exposure to them, lest I find them haunting my waking moments for weeks or even months.

Like others have commented, dispersed singing, acoustically challenging places, 2nds and chord structures that I must fight, rhythms .... I hear you! Singing is one of the great moments for me, a moment where my heart and my head are present. Thank you for this post. I miss it so.
posted by grimjeer at 6:33 PM on February 12, 2021 [4 favorites]

Try "A Room Full of Teeth," this choir is like the machinery of music. Somehow.
posted by Oyéah at 6:47 PM on February 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Sung in some choirs and madrigal groups in my youth. It is often hard work, and a lot of practice and commitment, but when it all comes together on the night it is a major buzz. I loved it and heartily recommend everybody gives it a go.

And, yeah, the venue can make a big difference.
posted by Pouteria at 8:51 PM on February 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Too painful to read until I can go back to group singing. I feel like part of my body has been missing for a year.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:10 PM on February 12, 2021 [7 favorites]

For some strange reason, the Choral Scholars of University College Dublin has been popping up in my youtube feeds recently and man does that sort of stuff remind you of the awesome power of communal voices in unison. I'm not a religious/spiritual man by any three stretches but when you sit in a space with choral music, group singing, chants, it's easy to understand that connection that feels above us all.
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:13 PM on February 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

People’s stories of having difficulty singing dispersed in the space got me thinking about some of the more awkward experiences I’ve had with choral singing.

I think the most challenging may have been the time a choir I was in was performing Mendelssohn‘s oratorio Saint Paul. We did it in a few different locations, and rarely got a dress rehearsal in the performance space. The first and biggest performance was at a large urban Baptist church. The size and denomination is significant because, as big a church as it was, the choir stalls were too small for our group. So half of us were seated on old metal folding chairs on the closed lid of the baptismal tank.

It’s traditional in an oratorio for the chorus to rise immediately before singing and then immediately sit back down again during the solos. And our director, a very theatrical person, had painstakingly trained us to rise and sit as one, without using our hands (which had to be artfully prearranged on the backs of our open folders), without leaning excessively forward, etc. - kind of like being coached for a tea party with the Queen.

The overture winds up, and we’re all set to rise like freshly-curtseyed debutantes and sing, “Lord, Thou alone art God.” As soon as we shift our collective weight from our bums to our feet, that tank lid starts wobbling and buckling like the deck of the Titanic. We’re all thinking this is going to look less like the life of St. Paul than the school dance scene from It’s a Wonderful Life. And the motion of the lid caused the ancient church-hall folding chairs to rattle audibly. If there was a little less passion in our description of the heathers furiously raging, it was because we were all standing really, really, really still.

We got used to it by the halfway mark, and we seemed to instinctively develop the trick of steadying our chairs with the back of one knee. Happy and blest were we who endured.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:30 PM on February 13, 2021 [2 favorites]

We keep one of those 'line a day' diaries and are just coming up on my last big concert before COVID - last February we did the Ode to Joy symphony. It feels like a million years ago, but what a lucky one to be your last to go on for awhile.

The most surprising thing I often tell laypeople is how all-encompassing mental and physical work singing is. The stamina of singing and breathing through 90+ minutes of intense music, on a hot stage, paying attention to exactly when to stand, when to turn the page, when to cut off your last consonant so the audience doesn't hear "for unto ussssssssssssss." We love it so much, but we are absolutely putting all of ourselves out there.
posted by nakedmolerats at 2:06 PM on February 13, 2021 [3 favorites]

I just realized Autocorrect changed “heathens” to “heathers” in my story above. Oh, the mental images.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:21 PM on February 13, 2021

The answer to the question was nothing like I'd have imagined. Great post thanks.
posted by hypnogogue at 8:04 PM on February 13, 2021