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part I
The Chorus: Traditions, Evolutions, and a New Perspective
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chapter 1
The Book, its Context, the Author
There are hundreds of millions—perhaps billions—of people around the world who sing, whether in groups or alone, to pray or to sell, to console or to politicize, and for myriad other reasons. Of these many, many people, millions sing in the type of ensemble we call a choir or chorus. Indeed, the International Federation for Choral Music estimates that more people around the world participate in choral singing than in any other single form of musical participation. According to a 2009 Chorus America study, an estimated 42.6 million American adults and children sing in a chorus.1 The Singing Europe project’s data for the European Choral Association-Europa Cantat, asserts that 30 million Europeans, almost 4.5 percent of the population, sing in choirs.2 It is reasonable therefore to suggest that millions more participate in choral music worldwide. Research and writing on choruses has predominantly focused on choral history and repertoire in the West as well as technical aspects of practice and pedagogy. Choral Music in Global Perspective attempts to open a different line of inquiry and a way of seeing a largely unexplored choral world by examining the social processes at work in the choral world writ large and asking both how choral traditions are transmitted and how they engage their participants and the communities of which they are a part.
The emphasis in publications for choral conductors has largely been on how to conduct and direct choruses, how and what to sing; in other words, the technique of conducting and the choral repertoire. The standard choral texts of choral literature pay scant attention to works outside of the European/American canon. The Two-Year College Repertoire and Standards—Standard Choral Repertoire of the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA)—has ten listed works, all by white composers, only two by living composers (John Rutter and James Mulholland), and none by women or by composers from outside Europe or the United States.3 In general, this is how the majority of choral conductors view the canon, although numerous examples show the growing interest in living and non-Western composers.
Not much has been written about the choir as a social entity common to many ages, societies, and faiths. Although the roots of these worldwide choral activities lie in Europe, little appears in print about the choral instrument as it emerges and transforms from its traditional Western beginnings into its current worldwide manifestations.4 Furthermore, scholars have generally not given their attention to how choruses integrate—or pass over—indigenous vocal traditions, programming instead dominant Western traditions and repertoires. In presenting the 2010 symposium “The Choir—Artistic, Pedagogical and Scholarly Perspectives,” organizers at the Sibelius Academy and the Finnish Musicological Society suggested that the choir “can be regarded as a conceptual prism, through which to look at Western history as a whole in all its social and institutional manifestations.” They note that the chorus could be “regarded as a significant cultural phenomenon in the history of various art forms, social communities and institutions, and ultimately the surrounding society as a whole.”5 This conceptual prism invites us to examine how choirs engage in context and how they mirror and contest the local and the global.
My Story
In this chapter, I share my personal history with choral music—a story that spans my early musical education in India to my current position as a professor in the United States and artistic leader of four ensembles: Voices 21C (United States), the Manado State University Choir (Indonesia, see Chapter 4), Common Ground Voices (Israeli-Palestinian-international, see Chapter 5), and the Muslim Choral Ensemble of Sri Lanka (see Chapter 3). My professional life takes me as a clinician and conductor for choral festivals and competitions to different parts of the world and I serve as project leader for several community choral activities. This personal history affords me a unique, perhaps subaltern, location from which to comment on the global phenomenon of choral music. It is this perspective that informs my place in the varying privileges and competing hierarchies of the choral world. Partly for this reason, this book makes a case for the importance of examining the emergent choral practices fast becoming the new normal practices. They deploy the choral instrument to give voice to oppression and marginalization, to build community in diverse contexts, to envision new models for power-sharing and collaboration in rehearsal and performance, and to construct multiple manifestations of exceptionality.
It is clarifying to talk about myself through a post-colonial lens, using the connective tissue between Spivak and Sharp. In her chapter “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Sharp (2009) takes up Spivak’s (1988) essay of the same title and argues that the subaltern operates as a coercive interaction in which, in order to be comprehensible, Western ways of knowing must be adopted to be understood. Sharp notes that the subalterns typically discard their cultural thought customs and adopt Western values, which is necessary in many contexts. The oppressed, she maintains, can be heard best by rulers through speaking their language, and this language contaminates the authenticity of the subaltern voice.
Through 40 years of living and working in the West, I have learned how to speak in such a manner, even while facing a conflict of identity in my own experience as a conductor. Obstacles included the dress, repertoire, modes of engagement, and performative paradigms embedded in Western ways of knowing and understanding. I have understood how to be seen and heard by adopting Western ways of knowing. Almost by way of contradiction, the manner in which I sought to be noticed in my initial ventures, was to represent the Indian choral voice. In 1993, I gave my first presentation at a choral event in the United States at the American Choral Directors Association Convention in San Antonio. I was noticed because I wore Indian clothes and presented on Indian choral music. Additionally, I share some of this sense of being the other with my South Asian and Indonesian partners—conductors and singers—who frequently saw me as a fellow other when negotiating their practice with American or European conductors. Missing from this discourse is the fact that the subaltern does not always find himself or herself at the bottom of the heap. While I have to adopt Western ways of choral culture, I am a privileged person in the Indian context.
My subalternity is troubled by a distinct cultural and ethnic hybridity. I was brought up as a Goan in Bombay from a Catholic family with Hindu Brahmin roots, educated in a school run by Spanish Jesuits in a curriculum devised by the British.6 The colonial reality of Goan Christians means they must traverse the boundaries of hybridity precisely because they have embraced, or been forced to embrace, Portuguese colonization and have had little contact with the central Indian narratives, epic stories, and rituals. The retention by Christians of the Hindu caste system is incomprehensible to most Indians.7 These varying and competing elements of class hierarchies and religious separateness informed my cultural and musical tastes.
A love affair with choral music started in my childhood in Bombay. My earliest choral memory was listening to the choir of the Holy Name Cathedral singing the “Hallelujah” chorus from Messiah on special feast days. As a teenager, I passed a Protestant church in Colaba, a south Bombay (now Mumbai) area. I overheard “Surely” from Messiah. Riveted, I stood outside the window listening to the choir, and I made sure to walk past the church at the same time to hear the chorus again. I can still remember the feeling of listening to many voices together, singing different melodies at the same time, with high and low voices singing together, and of being stirred by the beauty and feeling a deep sense of inner awakening I had never experienced before.
As a Goan Catholic and the son of a doctor who had completed his pre-medical studies at St. Xavier’s College in Bombay, it was almost foretold that I would attend the same institution. One of my close friends, Peter Braganza, also a Goan, was the accompanist of the St. Xavier’s College Choral Society, an extra-curricular choir. He took me to one of the rehearsals to turn pages; the singers were waiting for the arrival of the conductor. A startling message arrived. The conductor was never going to return, which provoked consternation all round. “Who would conduct the concert on the coming weekend?” they asked. All eyes fell on the page-turner. I was musically literate in treble clef and one line of music, having played the violin for a few years. I confessed my inability to read a musical system with more than one line of music and my ignorance as to what conductors did. That seemed to be no obstacle to the singers. As it turned out, they were singing three or four relatively easy songs. “Just stand in front of us and move your hands,” they said, “and we’ll do the rest.” Soon I discovered I was in love with this feeling that my gestures directly affected the sound of the singers, that such gestures signaled dynamics, tempi, entries and exits, and much more.
At about the same time, the German conductor Joachim Buehler arrived to conduct the Bombay Chamber Orchestra and to teach conducting. He brought the German approach to c...
