A choir is a musical ensemble of singers. Choral music, in turn, is the music written specifically for such an ensemble to perform. Choirs may perform music from the classical music repertoire, which spans from the medieval era to the present, or popular music repertoire. Most choirs are led by a conductor, who leads the performances with arm and face gestures.
Frank Martin was a Swiss composer, who spent much of his life in the Netherlands.
The 20th Annual Grammy Awards were held February 23, 1978, and were broadcast live on American television. They were hosted by John Denver and recognized accomplishments by musicians from the year 1977.
Randall Thompson was an American composer, particularly noted for his choral works.
M. Lewis Spratlan Jr. is an American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music.
The Fantasy (Fantasia) for piano, vocal soloists, mixed chorus, and orchestra, Op. 80, usually called the Choral Fantasy, was composed in 1808 by then 38-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven.
Georgy Vasilyevich Sviridov was a Soviet and Russian neoromantic composer. He is most widely known for his choral music, strongly influenced by the traditional chant of the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as his orchestral works which often celebrate elements of Russian culture. Sviridov employed, in his choral music especially, rich and dense harmonic textures, embracing a romantic-era tonality; his works would come to incorporate not only sacred elements of Russian church music, including vocal work for the basso profundo, but also display the influence of Eastern European folk music, 19th-century European romantic composers, as well as neoromantic contemporaries outside of Russia. He wrote musical settings of Russian Romantic-era poetry by poets such as Lermontov, Tyutchev and Blok. Sviridov enjoyed critical acclaim for much of his career in the USSR.
Alleluia is a piece for unaccompanied SATB chorus by Randall Thompson. Composed over the first five days of July in 1940, it was given its world premiere on July 8 of that year at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood under the direction of G. Wallace Woodworth.
The Testament of Freedom is a four-movement work for men's chorus and piano composed in 1943 by Randall Thompson. It was premiered on April 13, 1943, by the Virginia Glee Club under the direction of Stephen Tuttle; the composer served as pianist. Thompson later orchestrated the piece, and also produced an arrangement for mixed chorus. The music was published in 1944.
Géza Frid was a Hungarian–Dutch composer and pianist.
The Quattro pezzi sacri are choral works by Giuseppe Verdi. Written separately during the last decades of the composer's life and with different origins and purposes, they were nevertheless published together in 1898 by Casa Ricordi. They are often performed as a cycle, not in chronological sequence of their composition, but in the sequence used in the Ricordi publication:
Ingvar Natanael Lidholm was a Swedish composer.
Paul Alan Levi is an American composer whose compositions have been performed in Carnegie Hall, among other major venues in United States and Europe, as well as on national television. He is the composer of the 1971-1984 PBS identity music.
Bruno Bettinelli was an Italian composer and teacher.
Slamet A. Sjukur was the founding father of contemporary Indonesian music. He studied and worked in Paris under Olivier Messiaen and Henri Dutilleux. He was a lecturer at IKJ but because of his unconventional ideas, he finally had to leave. He had been living in Jakarta and Surabaya as a freelance composer, teacher and music critic. Developing the idea of minimax in music, his compositions are "notable for their minimal constellation of sounds and for their numerological basis which indicate the composer’s interest in a new ‘ecology of music’". This idea views limitation not as obstructions but as a challenge to work with a simple material, maximally.
Ernest Walker was an Indian-born English composer, pianist, organist, teacher and writer on music.
William Mayer was an American composer, best known for his prize-winning opera A Death in the Family.
Abendzauber, WAB 57, is a song composed by Anton Bruckner in 1878.
Charles Clement Fussell is an American composer and conductor of contemporary classical music. He has composed six symphonies and three operas. His symphony Wilde for solo baritone and orchestra, based on the life of Oscar Wilde and premiered by the Newton Symphony Orchestra and the baritone Sanford Sylvan in 1990, was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Music. He received a citation and award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992.
Babel is a neoclassical religious cantata composed by Igor Stravinsky in 1944.
