In Transforming Choral Singing: An Activist's Guide for Choir Directors, author Charles W. Beale draws from his many years of choral directing experience to put forth a new vision for choral singing: to move audiences and change the world. He lays down a non-canonical and inclusive framework, grounded in critical musicology and pedagogy, for mission-driven and activist-oriented engagement with the choral arts and provides practical takeaways for choral practitioners and conductors through a lively mix of practical workshops, tips, and suggestions.

Provides an annotated list of works composed or arranged for the unchanged treble voice. Examines a wide variety of musical styles. Offers tips for teaching and presentation, and presents cross-references by composer, title, voicing, and level of difficulty.

What role does contemporary choral activity play in the construction of social and musical meaning? How can historical knowledge and analysis shed light on contemporary choral problems and possibilities? And how can choral research promote the development and expansion of new music today? Questions like these are addressed in this anthology from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives. The book comprises a selection of papers presented at the International Conference on the Concepts and Practices of Choral Singing in Lund, Sweden, in October 2012. The aim of the conference was to highlight the contemporary dynamic developments in choral research, and to explore interdisciplinary investigations and interaction between practice-based and historical approaches. The conference was also the fourth meeting of the network “Choir in Focus”, which was initiated in 2009 at Southern Choral Centre (Körcentrum Syd), a joint venture between Malmö Academy of Music, the Department of Musicology, Odeum (all at Lund University), Malmö Symphony Orchestra and Music South (Musik i Syd), Sweden. The continuous ambition of the network has been to provide a forum for co-operation across national and disciplinary borders and to encourage debates around the musical and social function of choirs in modern society as mirroring collective and individual needs for meaning, music-making and well-being. In the introductory chapter, the editors describe choral practice as a field of simultaneous (re)presentation, (re)production and (re)creation, and suggest that these three aspects may be seen as umbrella themes for the fifteen chapters of the anthology. The authors come from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Germany, United Kingdom, Portugal and Belgium, and explore choral practice from differing theoretical and methodological starting points. Together, they contribute to a transdisciplinary discussion about the origins, functions and meanings of choral singing.

This is an annotated bibliography to books, recordings, videos, and websites on choral music. This book will serve as an excellent tool for librarians, researchers, and scholars in sorting through the massive amount of new material that has appeared since publication of the previous edition.

Choral music is now undoubtedly the foremost genre of participatory music making, with more people singing in choirs than ever before. Written by a team of leading international practitioners and scholars, this Companion addresses the history of choral music, its emergence and growth worldwide and its professional practice. The volume sets out a historical survey of the genre and follows with a kaleidoscopic bird's eye view of choral music from all over the world. Chapters vividly portray the emergence and growth of choral music from its Quranic antecedents in West and Central Asia to the baroque churches of Latin America, representing its global diversity. Uniquely, the book includes a pedagogical section where several leading choral musicians write about the voice and the inner workings of a choir and give their professional insights into choral practice. This Companion will appeal to choral scholars, directors and performers alike.

Nineteenth-Century Choral Music is an in-depth examination of the rich repertoire of choral music and the cultural phenomenon of choral music making throughout the period. The book is divided into three main sections. The first details the attraction to choral singing and the ways it was linked to different parts of society, and to the role of choral voices in the two principal large-scale genres of the period: the symphony and opera. A second section highlights ten choral-orchestral masterworks that are a central part of the repertoire. The final section presents overview and focus chapters covering composers, repertoire (both small and larger works), and performance life in an historical context from over a dozen regions of the world: Britain and Ireland, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latin America, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Scandinavia and Finland, Spain, and the United States. This diverse collection of essays brings together the work of 25 authors, many of whom have devoted much of their scholarly lives to the composers and music discussed, giving the reader a lively and unique perspective on this significant part of nineteenth-century musical life.

Focus: Choral Music in Global Perspective introduces the little-known traditions and repertoires of the world’s choral diversity, from prison choirs in Thailand and gay and lesbian choruses of the Western world to community choruses in the Middle East and youth choirs in the United States. The book weaves together the stories of diverse individuals and organizations, examining their music and pedagogical practices while presenting the author’s research on how choral cultures around the world interact with societies and transform the lives of their members. Through an engaging series of portraits that pushes beyond the scope of extant texts and studies, the author explores the dynamic realm of world choral activity and repertoire. These personal portraits of musical communities are enriched by sample repertoire lists, performance details, and research findings that reposition a once Western phenomenon as a global concept. Focus: Choral Music in Global Perspective is an accessible, engaging, and provocative study of one of the world’s most ubiquitous and socially significant forms of music-making.

Choral Music: A Research and Information Guide, Third Edition, offers a comprehensive guide to the literature on choral music in the Western tradition. Clearly annotated bibliographic entries guide readers to resources on key topics within choral music, individual choral composers, regional and sacred choral traditions, choral techniques, choral music education, genre studies, and more, providing an essential reference for researchers and practitioners. Covering monographs, bibliographies, selected dissertations, reference works, journals, electronic databases, and websites, this research guide makes it easy to locate relevant sources. Comprehensive indices of authors, titles, and subjects keep the volume user-friendly. The new edition has been brought up to date with entries encompassing the latest scholarship, and updated references and annotations throughout, capturing the continued growth of literature on choral music since the publication of the second edition.

This MUSA volume makes an important contribution to American music studies by presenting a scholarly edition of selected choral works by Dudley Buck (18391909). Buck was arguably the finest composer of choral music among the group of musicians who had come of age by the end of the Civil War. The works chosen for this volume, some of which became icons of American Victorian culture, represent the three most popular choral genres during the Guilded Age: the anthem, the sacred and secular cantata, and the partsong. All of the works included here found immediate publication and stayed in print well into the twentieth century. Buck's works became the standards, not only by their intrinsic merit, but owing to their widespread performance throughout the country. His services, canticles, anthems, and hymnsmusically engaging, well-crafted, and often genuinely movingwere considerably more professional than the homegrown music in use when he began his work. Included here are three works, a hymn anthem ("Rock of Ages"), a liturgical text ("Festival Te Deum No. 7 in E-flat"), and a late, through-composed work ("Grant to Us Thy Grace"). Buck's sacred and secular cantatas along with his partsongs also enjoyed widespread success among the growing number of church choirs and community choral groups. The two partsongs come from his earliest and latest periods. "In Absence" represents the early Victorian partsong, and the second, "The Signal Resounds from Afar" is both Buck's longest partsong and the one showing the greatest contrapuntal complexity. Both The Centennial Meditation of Columbia, written for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, and the Forty-Sixth Psalm, from 1872, are in full score and typify some of the finest cantata writing in Victorian America.