The Death of Choral Style

This past summer I had the opportunity to play the piano for several choral reading sessions. These are gatherings of singers — most of them church and school choir directors — who have come together to sing, hear, and be introduced to a number of choral publications. These sessions, usually lasting an hour, are often sponsored by one or more publishers of choir music or a music retailer with the hope that directors will hear new selections that they will then order for their own choirs.

As I practiced the music ahead of the reading sessions and as I played during the reading sessions, I noticed a number of style characteristics present in much of the music. I've noticed these same characteristics in other choir music over the past several years, but they were so much a part of these numbers that I believe they can be gathered together and named as a style, or at least a trend. Within the large sweep of continuous musical style change, there are many small trends and short-term blips. Disco, once so big in pop music, is long gone, nearly forgotten, and only heard today on exercise tapes and videos. Time will tell if the success of hip-hop and rap in commercial Christian music — less of a success, but still notable in sacred music for worship — will enjoy a long life and have a great impact on future styles or will soon fizzle out.

At its most fundamental, style change, of course, is nothing more than changes in the basic elements of music — melody, rhythm, harmony, form, text, voicing, and instrumentation. Here are some of the trends I've noticed in recent choral reading sessions:

• In past choral styles, melodies often match the text's phrase length. They are derived from a consideration of the words. In the new style, this is not the case. Melodies may be short, constructed by adding together short melodic and rhythmic motives; or at the other extreme, they may be long, spun-out melodies with no clear direction (compare the uniformity, for example, of the "Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee" melody). The concept of melodic form or structure has seemingly been forsaken.
• Melodies often contain nonharmonic tones or unresolved dissonances, frequently on accented beats. Often these dissonances are unresolved or added seconds, ninths, or fourths. I find this trait to be an irritation, with the dissonance so common that it is a nagging distraction.
• Melodies are predominantly constructed of steps and repeated notes with leaps and intervals of more than a third rare.
• Harmonies contain similar nonharmonic and unresolved dissonances. Choral style since the Renaissance has been careful in the preparation, introduction, use, and resolution of dissonance. Some styles of the twentieth century made it a point to liberate dissonant harmonies from those choral conventions. Today we may be seeing one result of that liberation in the loss of traditional choral harmonic discipline and conventions. It's not so much that the music is dissonant as it is that the music contains dissonance that disregards musical conventions.
• Despite the unconventional use of dissonance, the music is uninteresting harmonically. It uses mostly the primary harmonies with some secondary harmonies, but phrases are often spun out in a single harmony. Passages in parallel thirds and sixths are ubiquitous. There is a lack of independence between the vocal parts, and contrapuntal movement is almost unknown.
• There is a love for cluster chords, sometimes in the voices, but more in the accompaniments. Chords consisting of a root, second, fourth, and fifth and other configurations are common. Chords with an added second or ninth are now considered consonant rather than dissonant and can often be found as the concluding harmony to a phrase or a composition.
• Keyboard accompaniments are often conceived with no thought to unity with or support of the choral parts; that is, the accompaniment is fully independent of the vocal parts, consisting of chords and melodic passages not thematically or motivically related to the voices. Accompaniments often ignore traditions and conventions of voice leading and dissonance resolution. They do not share in the development of melodic material in the voices. They use extended ranges and added notes to build emotion. Accompaniments often simply wander.
• Texts are emotional and experiential, often sentimental.

What is happening in today's sacred choral style is not, of course, the death of choral style. What is happening is that modern choral style, at least for much of the choral literature intended for small- to medium-sized church choirs, is being recast, reconceived, and redefined. It is becoming a different kind of style — music with an identifiable tune, still sung by a dominant voice, still harmonized by other voices and instruments, but defined by very different characteristics from those of previous eras. We now see new characteristics quite different from those that evolved over the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Style, not really dead, is clearly changing — and not for the better, in my opinion.