"Miserere mei, Deus" is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard and I'm not religious nor do I understand the language it's written in. I've never thought of those as prerequisites to enjoying a piece of music.
For me, the Kyrie from Tomás Luis de Victoria's Officium Defunctorum (1605) is the best piece of music ever written, period. And I say this after having listened to a lot of music of various styles.
Honestly? Join a community choir and you will very quickly learn to appreciate all forms of choral music. Choral music is about groups of humans acting in an extremely organized and coordinated way. It's a kind of collabarative effort that requires full engagement of the senses: you have to LISTEN and FEEL and EXPRESS all in rhythmic time while also WATCHING each other and your director. It takes concerted effort and everyone has to be locked in or it all falls apart....but when you check all those boxes? Absolute transcendence.
It seems like the author is referring specifically to the style of choral music found in churches, although the same thing can be said about other choral genres like barbershop.
However, Backstreet Boys or many of the Korean idol groups do music that could be classified as choral that's highly accessible.
The main difference is drums. Music without drums or some rhythmic equivalent is less accessible.
The other main difference is not in accessibility, but economics. Is cheaper and easier to make a band with only one featured vocalist, so most professional bands do this. It's what people hear, and therefore what they identify with and therefore what they go out of their way to listen to.
I listen to a fair amount of choral music, from plainchant and organum up through modern and contemporary works. I think the short answer is missing, which is that most choral music just isn’t that exciting.
The Wikipedia article for the Motet has an interesting quote which echoes the sentiment here:
> [the motet is] not to be celebrated in the presence of common people, because they do not notice its subtlety, nor are they delighted in hearing it, but in the presence of the educated and of those who are seeking out subtleties in the arts.
This quote is attributed to Johannes de Grocheio in the 1200s! That means that people have been saying that choral music is hard to appreciate for more than seven hundred years.
I don't really know what's meant by "exciting" here, but there's plenty of choral music that's upbeat, joyful and rhythmical. For me the most enjoyable form of musical "excitement" is frisson, which choral music has in great abundance. Nothing can give you goosebumps like a good choir.
I disagree with the premise. I don't think there's anything inherently "harder to appreciate" about choral music. It's just a personal, and no doubt culturally influenced, preference. I struggle to enjoy opera and hip-hop, but that's on me. I don't go around writing articles about how hard they are to appreciate.
i think is also matter where you listen it. i think its very dull, but in a good church or room with a choir who is used to that specific place suddenly its like magic.
It's not harder to appreciate. Opera has swept the floor regarding popular sung music from the 1700s onwards, and has created quite a barren landscape. We have to thank England and Germany for having kept the repertoire alive enough during the last 3 centuries. It's merely a cultural thing.
Yeah, I reject the premise. My enjoyment of choral music predates and led to my participation in it, not the other way round. The key moment was getting a set of Tallis Scholars CDs as a kid. I fell in love as soon as I pressed play.
There's nothing "harder to appreciate" about a group of voices vs any other way of making music.
One thing that stands out to me about choral music is how much smoother it makes dissonance sound. Eric Whitacre is one of the most popular living composers of choral music and he routinely uses huge tone clusters in his works. When sung by a choir, his pieces sound dreamy and atmospheric, but if you were to play them on the piano they would be much more challenging to listen to. I have a theory that choral music tends to be sidelined by more "serious" classical music for precisely this reason.
As an addendum, for anyone interested in choral music I highly recommend listening to Caroline Shaw. She is among the most interesting new voices in the genre. Her piece Partita for 8 Voices [1] won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back. For a somewhat more accessible piece I also really like Its Motion Keeps [2].
Caroline Shaw is one of my favorite contemporary composers, despite her mostly writing for voice.
Smoothing out the dissonance may be a bug, not a feature. I live for timbre and new sounds. Choral music can have the feel of overly polished rocks.
And funnily enough, as I wrote this, music of Bernard Parmegiani started playing. This gave me a (mostly) good jolt, following the more atmospheric music of Alan Hovhaness.
My coworker from years ago said it best. I’d had us listening to King’s College, Giovanni Gabrielli, etc. during Christmas. One day the station was switched to contemporary Christmas. My coworker said, “I’m really sorry, I tried to like it, but I’ll go insane if we have one more day of music without a beat.”
My wife is a successful Australian-American choral composer, and riding shotgun as her career has taken off, if I were to make a few observations right before I turn in for the night:
"Choral music is harder to appreciate than say either symphonies or chamber music" - unlike orchestras and smaller string ensembles, choirs are champions of new music. The end of the article cites opera's growing popularity (an idea I'm not sure I buy into) but opera companies are famously stuck in rep from 100-300 year old, because that's what the donor class wants to hear.
The perspective painted by this article isn't all that different from the boomer who thinks there hasn't been good rock n' roll since the Beatles and the Stones. It's out there, all around you - you're just not looking in the right places. Choir music has a built-in network effect; when one choir sings a piece that goes over well, often times there are members who are in one or two other choirs, or are even choir directors themselves. There's a very dynamic scene, not even touching on religious choirs. And to people who think it's not that exciting, again I think you might just not be going to the right concerts. I've seen a choir reduce an entire audience to tears, and I've heard choral pieces that send the hair up on the back of my neck. I say this as someone who normally listens to Nine Inch Nails, Fever Ray, Queens of the Stone Age, Autechre, Aphex Twin... Some of my favorite choral works have very catchy rhythms, others border on math rock.
Choral organizations could do with better marketing; it's hard to compete in today's media landscape. One of my favorite groups, the St Louis Chamber Chorus, performs new and old works, and makes it a point to perform in unique spaces all around the St Louis area - part of the attraction to a concert is getting to go into that church you've always wondered about, or an old theater that's been brought back to life by the community. The Mid-Columbia Master Singers have performed in the Hanford B reactor site in the Tri-Cities area of Washington state. Or even seeing The King's Singers perform with Voces8 in an old mainstay like Royal Albert Hall, it's a sensory experience that can't be replicated.
And again, it's a community thing. You meet other people who appreciate this stuff when you go to the concerts and stay for the receptions. If you feel like you could make things better, become a subscriber, a major donor, join the board of one of these things. It's incredibly rewarding.
Back to marketing: outside of a few long-running groups like Chanticleer, Cantus, Voces8, the King's Singers, and so on, it's really challenging to build a brand around choral music. The industry's just not there for it. But seek out local choral concerts, talk to some strangers there, and you'll find a whole ecosystem that operates is more typically consumed live and in person, than it is via recording.
Going back to the title of the article, I suppose that does make it harder to appreciate than something you've heard in movie trailers and can stream from Spotify.
For choral music listeners I strongly recommend works of contemporary Polish composers Paweł Bębenek and Piotr Pałka. Some of their pieces are really innovative I'd say, without breaking the classics rules. Also their works has recently been translated quite often to other languages
Acapella is quite popular, with lots of different groups hitting >10 million views on YouTube. Pentatonix is the obvious example, but even relatively 'unknown' groups (eg university acapella) get many listens.
I think it's a lot about economics, too. Choirs of any significant size have to be amateur. It's hard enough to do a 4 person band playing popular music full-time, with 20-30 people performing more niche music it just doesn't happen.
Small group a capella is slightly more viable, but it's very "amateur coded": even very good a capella groups perform a lot of covers, and rarely stick with one genre. They perform whatever they want, which is often also things with commercial appeal, but isn't ideal for long-term musical identity building.
Take Rajaton for instance. Extremely technically brilliant, but their own compositions are a relatively small part of their repertoire (and still more than most a capella groups!). Pop music covers and Christmas music are obviously a big part of what makes them commercially viable, in addition they perform commissioned work from acknowledged choral composers (Mia Marakoff, Michael McGlynn). When they do the occasional album with good stylistic coherence and their own compositions (like 2016 Salaisuus) it doesn't look like a commerical success.
Some music is only 'exciting' for performers ... and that's OK! Watch a performance of a late Schubert string quintet or Beethoven string quartet for example ... see how much fun they're having. My high-school chorus teacher put together a group to sing madrigals; it sure was fun, and whether there was an audience made no matter.
I once heard a live a cappella performance in a church, and the moment the voices began, it felt like the whole space wrapped around me in silence. That was when I really understood the beauty of choral music. It is not just about the melody but about how the sound blends in the room and resonates with the air. It is something you simply cannot feel through headphones.
Choral music is boring because the tempos tend to be slow. The instruments used are generally incapable of fast passages in which notes have a sharp, clear attack. Not just fast passages, but interesting passages. Choral melodies tend to be uninteresting, because they have to be singable. If there are too many awkward leaps, only some rare genius with a perfect ear and vocal control can pull it off; yet the same melody would be nothing to a violinist, pianist, or flutist, at twice the tempo, who would have all the notes crisply articulated with good intonation and a quick attack.
In a nutshell, some people like their Western Art music when it shreds.
Otherwise, not so much.
Which is not to say that vocals as such are unexciting; far from it. The problem is that choral works often just have too many people singing. Exciting vocals mainly have one vocalist, or at most a very small number, doing something powerful with their voices, not just hitting the notes in a score.
I'd rather listen to a good barbershop quartet than some Baroque chorale---even if it's by Bach! However, if the latter were reduced to an ensemble of just four people, it could work a lot better.
E.g. this actually sound pretty cool: five ladies singing the Toccata and Fugue in Dm:
Much more fun than any random Bach chorale, sorry J. S.
But still, only to a point. Though they are hitting the notes and the harmonies are crisp, there is a lot of portamento (gliding from note to note). The attack of an instrument isn't there.
In terms of vocal power, it's a joke compared to swing, blues, rock.
Summary: The mainstream ear has changed. As a result, traditional choral compositions have become less accessible to mainstream audiences, but the form of choral music remains accessible. People who participate in choral music train themselves into a traditional taste as a side-effect of participation.
Sung pentatonic music seems to be accessible to everyone from a young age.
For most things beyond that, our brains need exposure to the form to be able to appreciate it. This affects rhythm, melody and instruments.
My three-year-old hates the sound of guitar distortion. I am confident he will acclimatise to it.
Accessibility of traditional choral music will be influenced by what the audience knows. People who grew up with sung carols on at Christmas will be more open to it than people who have grown up with post-war pop Christmas.
Everyone now living in the developed world has been exposed to beat-backed major/minor easy-listening music by television, films, car radio and shopping centres. This is recent. People a hundred years ago did not have the same ear. The large choral work Elijah was easy-listening to audiences who had heard sung mass hundreds of times.
In 2025, a church music director wanting a twentieth century composer would schedule Rutter easily - Rutter writes music that suits the ear of pop Christmas. They would prefer Howells if they thought the congregation had a more traditional ear. They would schedule Messiaen only for a particular occasion.
The OP wrote - "It has struck me that most recommenders and lovers of choral music [are] themselves singers (or conductors) of choral music."
It is easy to get involved, so many people who are curious get involved. Once involved, people will find their tastes becoming traditional as a side-effect of exposure to the repertoire. This creates a running division between people who participate and the mainstream.
Note that before seventy years ago, almost everyone who loved music would have participated in it, even if only singing to young children or helping out at church. Outside royal circles, the practice of loving music yet being a pure consumer is a recent phenomenon.
Some forms of choral music will have a different relationship with pop than high-church music. For example - Gospel, accompaniment to rock songs like /Under the Bridge/ or /You can't always get what you want/. The Beatles were a mainstay of post-war pop, but /Because/ on Abbey Road has the character of a Renaissance choral work - George Martin was classically trained.
The mainstream ear may be making another shift now to more sophisticated beats with closer melodies (smaller pitch jumps) and simpler chords. If it happens, we will see evidence of it in popular Christmas music. As far as I know there has not been a new addition to that repertoire since /All I want for Christmas is You/ which is c20 pop.
I'm in a choir. We just performed Mendelssohn's Elijah (translated into Spanish). Last year we performed Brahms' Deutsches Requiem in its original language. Both were exhilarating experiences.
The article is a great set of talking points for discussion, although I might not agree with all of them. Some counterpoints which might be more or less effective in rebutting the article's assertions:
- Languages are different, but in our context, many choral pieces are in Latin which is very close to Spanish, and there's also the Roman Catholic liturgical tradition; Masses were said in Latin until not that long ago. Thus, for many works and in our particular context, the language gap is not as wide as one might think.
- About the context of the works themselves, a good set of program notes or a small, brief talk prior to performance could be quite helpful.
- Why something serious should have less appeal? There's a place for everything, and the serious stuff has a place under the sun, too.
- If we "go to church less", well. We should go more often to church, then.
- Several points attest to this general idea: the best way to enjoy a choral performance is by being a choir member and perform the work itself. The second best way is to attend a live choral performance in a suitable venue.
Still, there are very good choral recordings. For example, Carus is a label with outstanding recordings, such as Rilling and the Gächinger Kantorei rendition of Brahms' Deutsches Requiem.
30 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 58.9 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aQXehmVDLc (trad)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE01DAATf6s (remix)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p4qcbzKWeY (deodorant ad)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwFXR5ett6U
Here's the piece with two great performers:
- The Sixteen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO-C_zC6KiQ
- The Tallis Scholars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOko0MqkNcc
Enjoy!
At 40 distinct melodies, it is certainly the 'grandest' piece in early English church music.
However, Backstreet Boys or many of the Korean idol groups do music that could be classified as choral that's highly accessible.
The main difference is drums. Music without drums or some rhythmic equivalent is less accessible.
The other main difference is not in accessibility, but economics. Is cheaper and easier to make a band with only one featured vocalist, so most professional bands do this. It's what people hear, and therefore what they identify with and therefore what they go out of their way to listen to.
The Wikipedia article for the Motet has an interesting quote which echoes the sentiment here:
> [the motet is] not to be celebrated in the presence of common people, because they do not notice its subtlety, nor are they delighted in hearing it, but in the presence of the educated and of those who are seeking out subtleties in the arts.
This quote is attributed to Johannes de Grocheio in the 1200s! That means that people have been saying that choral music is hard to appreciate for more than seven hundred years.
I disagree with the premise. I don't think there's anything inherently "harder to appreciate" about choral music. It's just a personal, and no doubt culturally influenced, preference. I struggle to enjoy opera and hip-hop, but that's on me. I don't go around writing articles about how hard they are to appreciate.
It feels like Enya falls squarely into the 'choral' sound despite them being 'solo'. (lots of overdubs I imagine)
And then there's African choir. Popular example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AGtd2-jv0U
There's nothing "harder to appreciate" about a group of voices vs any other way of making music.
As an addendum, for anyone interested in choral music I highly recommend listening to Caroline Shaw. She is among the most interesting new voices in the genre. Her piece Partita for 8 Voices [1] won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back. For a somewhat more accessible piece I also really like Its Motion Keeps [2].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDVMtnaB28E
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT1PqR97urc
Smoothing out the dissonance may be a bug, not a feature. I live for timbre and new sounds. Choral music can have the feel of overly polished rocks.
And funnily enough, as I wrote this, music of Bernard Parmegiani started playing. This gave me a (mostly) good jolt, following the more atmospheric music of Alan Hovhaness.
"Choral music is harder to appreciate than say either symphonies or chamber music" - unlike orchestras and smaller string ensembles, choirs are champions of new music. The end of the article cites opera's growing popularity (an idea I'm not sure I buy into) but opera companies are famously stuck in rep from 100-300 year old, because that's what the donor class wants to hear.
The perspective painted by this article isn't all that different from the boomer who thinks there hasn't been good rock n' roll since the Beatles and the Stones. It's out there, all around you - you're just not looking in the right places. Choir music has a built-in network effect; when one choir sings a piece that goes over well, often times there are members who are in one or two other choirs, or are even choir directors themselves. There's a very dynamic scene, not even touching on religious choirs. And to people who think it's not that exciting, again I think you might just not be going to the right concerts. I've seen a choir reduce an entire audience to tears, and I've heard choral pieces that send the hair up on the back of my neck. I say this as someone who normally listens to Nine Inch Nails, Fever Ray, Queens of the Stone Age, Autechre, Aphex Twin... Some of my favorite choral works have very catchy rhythms, others border on math rock.
Choral organizations could do with better marketing; it's hard to compete in today's media landscape. One of my favorite groups, the St Louis Chamber Chorus, performs new and old works, and makes it a point to perform in unique spaces all around the St Louis area - part of the attraction to a concert is getting to go into that church you've always wondered about, or an old theater that's been brought back to life by the community. The Mid-Columbia Master Singers have performed in the Hanford B reactor site in the Tri-Cities area of Washington state. Or even seeing The King's Singers perform with Voces8 in an old mainstay like Royal Albert Hall, it's a sensory experience that can't be replicated.
And again, it's a community thing. You meet other people who appreciate this stuff when you go to the concerts and stay for the receptions. If you feel like you could make things better, become a subscriber, a major donor, join the board of one of these things. It's incredibly rewarding.
Back to marketing: outside of a few long-running groups like Chanticleer, Cantus, Voces8, the King's Singers, and so on, it's really challenging to build a brand around choral music. The industry's just not there for it. But seek out local choral concerts, talk to some strangers there, and you'll find a whole ecosystem that operates is more typically consumed live and in person, than it is via recording.
Going back to the title of the article, I suppose that does make it harder to appreciate than something you've heard in movie trailers and can stream from Spotify.
Small group a capella is slightly more viable, but it's very "amateur coded": even very good a capella groups perform a lot of covers, and rarely stick with one genre. They perform whatever they want, which is often also things with commercial appeal, but isn't ideal for long-term musical identity building.
Take Rajaton for instance. Extremely technically brilliant, but their own compositions are a relatively small part of their repertoire (and still more than most a capella groups!). Pop music covers and Christmas music are obviously a big part of what makes them commercially viable, in addition they perform commissioned work from acknowledged choral composers (Mia Marakoff, Michael McGlynn). When they do the occasional album with good stylistic coherence and their own compositions (like 2016 Salaisuus) it doesn't look like a commerical success.
Choral music is boring because the tempos tend to be slow. The instruments used are generally incapable of fast passages in which notes have a sharp, clear attack. Not just fast passages, but interesting passages. Choral melodies tend to be uninteresting, because they have to be singable. If there are too many awkward leaps, only some rare genius with a perfect ear and vocal control can pull it off; yet the same melody would be nothing to a violinist, pianist, or flutist, at twice the tempo, who would have all the notes crisply articulated with good intonation and a quick attack.
In a nutshell, some people like their Western Art music when it shreds.
Otherwise, not so much.
Which is not to say that vocals as such are unexciting; far from it. The problem is that choral works often just have too many people singing. Exciting vocals mainly have one vocalist, or at most a very small number, doing something powerful with their voices, not just hitting the notes in a score.
I'd rather listen to a good barbershop quartet than some Baroque chorale---even if it's by Bach! However, if the latter were reduced to an ensemble of just four people, it could work a lot better.
E.g. this actually sound pretty cool: five ladies singing the Toccata and Fugue in Dm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKI9VThPB4w
Much more fun than any random Bach chorale, sorry J. S.
But still, only to a point. Though they are hitting the notes and the harmonies are crisp, there is a lot of portamento (gliding from note to note). The attack of an instrument isn't there.
In terms of vocal power, it's a joke compared to swing, blues, rock.
The textures emerging from the the overlapping voices is just amazing…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZJQMEa9_2I
Sung pentatonic music seems to be accessible to everyone from a young age.
For most things beyond that, our brains need exposure to the form to be able to appreciate it. This affects rhythm, melody and instruments.
My three-year-old hates the sound of guitar distortion. I am confident he will acclimatise to it.
Accessibility of traditional choral music will be influenced by what the audience knows. People who grew up with sung carols on at Christmas will be more open to it than people who have grown up with post-war pop Christmas.
Everyone now living in the developed world has been exposed to beat-backed major/minor easy-listening music by television, films, car radio and shopping centres. This is recent. People a hundred years ago did not have the same ear. The large choral work Elijah was easy-listening to audiences who had heard sung mass hundreds of times.
In 2025, a church music director wanting a twentieth century composer would schedule Rutter easily - Rutter writes music that suits the ear of pop Christmas. They would prefer Howells if they thought the congregation had a more traditional ear. They would schedule Messiaen only for a particular occasion.
The OP wrote - "It has struck me that most recommenders and lovers of choral music [are] themselves singers (or conductors) of choral music."
It is easy to get involved, so many people who are curious get involved. Once involved, people will find their tastes becoming traditional as a side-effect of exposure to the repertoire. This creates a running division between people who participate and the mainstream.
Note that before seventy years ago, almost everyone who loved music would have participated in it, even if only singing to young children or helping out at church. Outside royal circles, the practice of loving music yet being a pure consumer is a recent phenomenon.
Some forms of choral music will have a different relationship with pop than high-church music. For example - Gospel, accompaniment to rock songs like /Under the Bridge/ or /You can't always get what you want/. The Beatles were a mainstay of post-war pop, but /Because/ on Abbey Road has the character of a Renaissance choral work - George Martin was classically trained.
The mainstream ear may be making another shift now to more sophisticated beats with closer melodies (smaller pitch jumps) and simpler chords. If it happens, we will see evidence of it in popular Christmas music. As far as I know there has not been a new addition to that repertoire since /All I want for Christmas is You/ which is c20 pop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMLkrTJ9BZI
Sure, the HALO track has instrumental sections too but music is all about contrast.
Frankly a lot of purely monastic stuff was boring on purpose, that was the whole point. They also wore the same garb every day for decades.
The article is a great set of talking points for discussion, although I might not agree with all of them. Some counterpoints which might be more or less effective in rebutting the article's assertions:
- Languages are different, but in our context, many choral pieces are in Latin which is very close to Spanish, and there's also the Roman Catholic liturgical tradition; Masses were said in Latin until not that long ago. Thus, for many works and in our particular context, the language gap is not as wide as one might think.
- About the context of the works themselves, a good set of program notes or a small, brief talk prior to performance could be quite helpful.
- Why something serious should have less appeal? There's a place for everything, and the serious stuff has a place under the sun, too.
- If we "go to church less", well. We should go more often to church, then.
- Several points attest to this general idea: the best way to enjoy a choral performance is by being a choir member and perform the work itself. The second best way is to attend a live choral performance in a suitable venue.
Still, there are very good choral recordings. For example, Carus is a label with outstanding recordings, such as Rilling and the Gächinger Kantorei rendition of Brahms' Deutsches Requiem.