Episode 6: Church Choir vs. Opera Chorus

A follow-up Podcast to the blog post, Writing for Singers. The capabilities of instruments are generally known and standardized: range limits, how dynamics affect sound, which mutes to use, how to use them, and how long one must budget for a player to insert or remove them before they can be ready to continue playing.Not so with singers. Singers do not have a set array of performance options that are uniform across voice types, styles, or any other parameter. They are individual.///Church choir is where I learned to sing, and - through collaboration with those around me - learned what singers could do. Later, my experience singing in opera chorus opened up the available possibilities of writing for singers on the stage. But, Church Choir and Opera Chorus are not the same animal, and my writing had to adapt to handle both.