Choir

So this will be a bit of a departure from my normal posts about travel and random bits of the internet, but I think it will, at least, be interesting.

Most people may not know this, but I am a big fan of choral music.  I sing in a large chorus and direct a rather small (but fun) one.  Recently I have become somewhat obsessed with choral music on YouTube.  In specific, The King's Singers and Eric Whitacre.  So I've decided to devote this post to talking about some of my favourites that I've found.

The King's Singers
The King's Singers are a British group formed in the late 1960s by a group of choral scholars from King's College in Cambridge.  Since then, there have been a few changes in membership but they have always remained supremely British in styling.  Their tone is generally pure with only a hint of vibrato as a colour rather than a staple.  They also make fantastic use of a very uniquely British tongue-in-cheek sense of humour.

Their repertoire is impressively wide and varied.  The core of this repertoire has always been madrigals, mostly French and English.  The French madrigal Il Est Bel et Bon by Pierre Passereau best shows off the incredible skill and flexibility that this group possesses.  For those not familiar with choral works, singing that quickly and accurately is extremely difficult.  Contrasting the traditional madrigals, the King's Singers are also big fans of modern and pop music.  This ranges from their love of the Beatles (such as Blackbird) to more "untraditional" choir repertoire such as Duke Ellington's Creole Love Call which has no actual words but simply sounds mimicking a jazz ensemble.

However, my two favourite pieces (as far as I've discovered) are Masterpiece and Spem In Alium.  These two pieces could not be any more unique from each other but both manage to highlight the King's Singers' immense talent.

Masterpiece is a rather recent piece by Paul Drayton in which each section is devoted to a composer or period of music throughout the history of western classical music.  Each composer's distinctive style is cleverly, accurately, and humourously imitated producing a very interesting look at the last 400 years of music history.

Spem in Alium is a motet composed by the English composer Thomas Tallis in the 1570s.  The unique part of it is that it was written for a total of 40 voices in 8 choirs of 5.  To accomplish this, the King's Singers' "perform" the piece in a recording studio and use a technique called multitracking to layer their own voices on top of each other producing a uniquely thick and warm texture.

The King's Singers have also recently published two full concerts to YouTube.  This includes 2006's From Byrd to The Beatles and their 2008 Live at the BBC Proms celebrating their 40th anniversary.  The first is especially interesting to me as it includes some behind-the-scenes information on Spem In Alium.

Eric Whitacre
Eric Whitacre is an American choral composer who focuses on very dense pan-diatonic chords which produce a unique sound and style.  However, the more interesting thing about Whitacre is his new concept of the virtual choir.  He will publish a video of himself conducting one of his pieces and requests people from around the world to submit a video recording of them singing one or more parts.  Not only is this notable for the fact that he essentially gives away the music for this purpose, it produces choirs which are uniquely diverse and massive.

The first virtual choir was put together in 2010 and featured Whitacre's Lux Aurumque.  Over 200 videos were submitted by 185 people in 12 countries.  It was an immense success with over 2.5 million views to date.  In the light of that success, another virtual choir was put together this year using Sleep.  The response was impressive.  Over 2000 voices from 58 countries submitted themselves.  This included several full choirs who recorded the piece together.  The result is beyond impressive.  Having 2000 choristers sing together in a single physical location would be nearly impossible, but through the magic of the internet, we can hear what that might sound like.