A women's choir or women's chorus is a choir formed exclusively by women. If all singers are young it is called a girls' choir. The voice types are usually soprano and alto, SSAA. The names are also used for music especially composed for such groups.
In Egypt, women's choirs were documented for singers in temples since the Middle Kingdom. In Assyria and Palestine, women's choirs sang to honour a victorious king. Women's choirs appeared in ancient Greek tragedy. Laments of deaths were performed by groups of women in Assyria and Judaism, among others.
In early Christianity, responsorial singing was practiced by women alternating with men, but with the late 4th century, women's singing in church was repressed. In nuns' monasteries, singing of women's choirs was regular in church services. Hildegard von Bingen composed sacred plays with music for women's choir.
Venetian orphanages (ospedali) for girls became a focus for music for women's voices. The girls received musical training, beginning in the 16th century, and their concerts attracted tourists for centuries. [1] Composers such as Giovanni Legrenzi, Johann Rosenmüller, Johann Adolph Hasse, Nicola Antonio Porpora, Baldassare Galuppi, Niccolò Jommelli, Domenico Cimarosa and Antonio Vivaldi wrote choral and instrumental compositions for these institutions. Charles Burney, Johann Joachim Quantz and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe reported positively of performances. Usually the choral music was set for four vocal parts, two soprano and two alto parts. Some lists contain names classified as tenor and bass. Johann Friedrich Reichardt mentioned in 1791 women tenors in a bass function.
Women's choirs have a tradition in many countries. [2] They are frequent in schools, colleges and universities. [3] Some, such as the Mädchenkantorei Limburg, a group at the Limburg Cathedral founded in 1971, are associated with ecclesiastical organizations. Others operate independently, such as the Mädchenchor Hannover, an award-winning choir of girls and young woman founded in 1951 in Hanover, the Anna Crusis Women's Choir, the oldest feminist choir in the U.S. founded in 1975, and the Melodia Women's Choir, founded in 2003 to promote new music.
In music, a quartet is an ensemble of four singers.
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, hand, and facial gestures.
A countertenor (also contra tenor) is a type of classical male singing voice whose vocal range is equivalent to that of the female contralto or mezzo-soprano voice types, generally extending from around G3 to D5 or E5, although a sopranist (a specific kind of countertenor) may match the soprano's range of around C4 to C6. Countertenors often have tenor or baritone chest voices, but sing in falsetto or head voice much more often than they do in their chest voice.
The musical term alto, meaning "high" in Italian, historically refers to the contrapuntal part higher than the tenor and its associated vocal range. In 4-part voice leading alto is the second-highest part, sung in choruses by either low women's or high men's voices. In vocal classification these are usually called contralto and male alto or countertenor.
Vocal range is the range of pitches that a human voice can phonate. A common application is within the context of singing, where it is used as a defining characteristic for classifying singing voices into voice types. It is also a topic of study within linguistics, phonetics, and speech-language pathology, particularly in relation to the study of tonal languages and certain types of vocal disorders, although it has little practical application in terms of speech.
Bella Voce is a Chicago-based chamber chorus specializing in classical a cappella music. It has been called "Chicago's premier professional chamber choir."
Kanon Pokajanen is a 1997 composition by Arvo Pärt for four-part (SATB) choir. The text is the "Canon of Repentance to Our Lord Jesus Christ", an Orthodox hymn. The text is sung in Church Slavonic and following the tradition of Russian sacred choral music, it is sung a cappella.
Johann Sebastian Bach's Magnificat, BWV 243, is a musical setting of the biblical canticle Magnificat. It is scored for five vocal parts, and a Baroque orchestra including trumpets and timpani. It is the first major liturgical composition on a Latin text by Bach.
The De La Salle Zobel Chorale is a musical group from De La Salle-Santiago Zobel School in Muntinlupa, Philippines. The DLSZ Chorale consists of two sub-groups, Grade School Choir, which operates from grades 5-6, and High School Choir, which operates from grades 7-12. The Chorale features different voice range groups, such as Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass.
The North Carolina Boys Choir was founded in 1971 by Dr. William J. Graham, in Durham, NC, who directed the choir until late 2014. Originally named the Durham Boychoir, it was designated the state boys choir of North Carolina in 1983 by Governor Jim Hunt. In 1992 the chamber choir of tenors and basses was founded to supplement the touring concert choir. Since its inception, the choir concludes each semester with a concert in Duke Chapel at Duke University.
A voice type is a group of voices with similar vocal ranges, capable of singing in a similar tessitura, and with similar vocal transition points (passaggi). Voice classification is most strongly associated with European classical music, though it, and the terms it utilizes, are used in other styles of music as well.
There is no authoritative system of voice classification in non-classical music as classical terms are used to describe not merely various vocal ranges, but specific vocal timbres unique to each range. These timbres are produced by classical training techniques with which most popular singers are not intimately familiar, and which even those that are do not universally employ them.
Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht mit deinem Knecht, BWV 105 is a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. He composed it in Leipzig for the ninth Sunday after Trinity and first performed it on 25 July 1723. The musicologist Alfred Dürr has described the cantata as one of "the most sublime descriptions of the soul in baroque and Christian art".
Hans Vogt was a German composer and conductor.
Johann Sebastian Bach composed the church cantata Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot, BWV 39, in Leipzig and first performed on 23 June 1726, the first Sunday after Trinity that year. Three years earlier, on the first Sunday after Trinity in 1723, Bach had taken office as Thomaskantor and started his first cycle of cantatas for Sundays and Feast Days in the liturgical year. On the first Sunday after Trinity in 1724, he began his second cycle, consisting of chorale cantatas. The cantata Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot is regarded as part of Bach's third cantata cycle which was written sporadically between 1725 and 1727.
O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, BWV 34.2 is an incomplete wedding cantata composed by Johann Sebastian Bach, of which only the complete libretto and some parts have survived.
The listing shows recordings of the Mass in B minor, BWV 232, by Johann Sebastian Bach. The selection is taken from the 281 recordings listed on the Bach Cantatas Website as of 2018, beginning with the first recording by a symphony orchestra and choir to match, conducted by Albert Coates. Beginning in the late 1960s, historically informed performances paved the way for recordings with smaller groups, boys choirs and ensembles playing period instruments, and eventually to recordings using the one-voice-on-a-vocal-part scoring first argued for by Joshua Rifkin in 1982.
In allen meinen Taten, BWV 97, is a church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. He composed the chorale cantata in Leipzig in 1734 for an unspecified occasion. The text consists of the unchanged words of the hymn by Paul Fleming (1642).
The Mass in B minor is Johann Sebastian Bach's only setting of the complete Latin text of the Ordinarium missae. Towards the end of his life, mainly in 1748 and 1749, he finished composing new sections and compiling it into a complex, unified structure.
Antonio Vivaldi made several versions of his G minor setting of the Magnificat canticle. He scored his best known version, RV 610, for vocal soloists, four-part choir, oboes and string orchestra, which also exists in a version for two groups of performers. He based these versions on an earlier setting for voices and strings only (RV 610b). His ultimate version, in which some choral and ensemble movements are replaced by five arias, to be sung by girls from the Ospedale della Pietà orphanage, was catalogued as RV 611. The concise work is well suited for use in vesper services.
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