18 - The making of a choir: individuality and consensus in choral singing

Summary

A fundamental question facing any choir is how best to respect the individuality of each of its singers while getting them all to work together for the good of the group as a whole. In this sense, a choir is a microcosm of human social life. The voice is the most personal and individual form of human expression – we can recognize people within seconds by the sound of their voice alone. Yet when people join their voices together in a choir they cannot assert that full individuality without disrupting the communal voice of the collective.

Within the Western art tradition, it is generally seen as the conductor's job to manage the negotiations between the needs of the group as a whole and those of its individual members. John Bertalot, for example, tells directors:

At the beginning of a practice you have before you a collection of individuals. It's your job, within the first ten seconds of the practice, to weld them together into a choir – and a choir is a body of singers which feels a corporate sense of identity.

Joseph Lewis, meanwhile, puts it this way:

Team-work or what we call ensemble is more to be desired than outstanding voices, and the only possible way to obtain this “togetherness” is by the part being subservient to the whole; by each voice singing into the other voices, listening as well as singing, being content to be a strand in the rope, and not the whole rope, but all the while handing his or her contribution up to the conductor.