Indeed, one of my aims with Magenta has always been to explore how much one can operate as a chamber ensemble with a choir of up to 20 singers. The extremes remain clear, but individual ensembles can blur the edges. The director is also much more likely to be more functionally separate in a choir: standing outside the group and listening rather than singing as part of the ensemble.īut these descriptions, again, are contextual and prototypical. In terms of operation, both forms of ensemble will have a leader, though the role may be implicit and shifting for a chamber group, whereas it will be clear and titular for a choir. If you have 6 singers and don't want to recruit any more, that's much more likely to be a chamber group. If you have 6singers, but would like 120, you're a choir. The point about artistic intent is that it matters less how many singers the group has than how many they want. This made me realise that whilst the one-per-part versus body of singers offers the prototypical distinction between chamber groups and choirs, it needs to be applied more at the level of artistic intent and mode of operation than the objective criterion of raw numbers. I think many directors of fledgling or struggling choirs would sympathise there: it is wonderful moment when your new choir hits double figures! And you wouldn't want to be told that you don't count as a choir while your making that journey. Other participants wrote much more pragmatically: Anthony Doherty's comment that, 'Sometimes it's just whoever shows up on Sunday,' received agreement from several other participants. Suzi Digby, for instance, talked about doing a 12-part piece with 12 singers, which she felt was a big enough body of performers to call a 'choir' even with only one singer per part. These are both reasonably generalisable conditions, but participants in the discussion found enough exceptions to suggest that they're neither necessary nor sufficient. Philip hints at two: naming conventions for small ensembles that acknowledge the individual identity of each member, and the distinction between one-per-part and more-than-one-per-part performance. This is because there are multiple factors going on at ones in the act definition. But it's harder than you'd think to define a numerical value to where one becomes the other. Some ensembles are clearly chamber ensembles, and some are clearly larger bodies of singers, and it's to the latter that we'd usually apply the term 'choir'. I found the discussion interesting because, on the face of it, you'd think it was a simple question. What is the minimum number of singers that constitute a choir - is it 2 voices per part (depending on the number of parts) or is it 9 singers as anything under already has a name (Octet, trio, etc)? ![]() It was started by ChoralNet stalwart, Philip Tolley, who articulated the question thus: ![]() There was an interesting discussion in the LinkedIn Choral Enthusiasts group last week about how many singers it takes to make a choir.
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