Customer Reviews

A Survey of Choral Music (Harbrace History of Musical Forms)

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This book's best feature is its anthology of choral music designed for classroom use. Rehearsal outlines, problematic passages, and rehearsal technique are all discussed. Another particularly valuable feature is the appendix of lists of repertoire by voicing and genre. Quite extensive. After using it in a class, I find myself coming back to it constantly for reference. The spiral binding is convenient.

This paperback text is aimed at the student or amateur looking for a solid grounding in the history and evolution of choral genres and forms from the Renaissance to 1973 (date of publication).

Buyers should note that this book does not necessarily include the spiral bound, very useful-sounding anthology mentioned above, but does include texts and translations of the Mass, Stabat Mater, and other oft-set texts. For a more extensive text/translation resource, check out Ron Jeffers' Translations and Annotations of Choral Repertoire.

Students of recent choral music should note that the publication date (1973) means that some influential composers' outputs are truncated (Penderecki), and others absent (Part, Tavener, Adams, Whitacre). For more on this, check out Nick Strimple's Choral Music in the Twentieth Century. The Ulrich is not an ethnologically broad text either, focusing on the European and American traditions.

Despite these limitations, the book is a compact (1/2 inch) and informative entry-level book for scholars of choral music.