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Choralities

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Repository DOI


Type

Article

Change log

Authors

CONNOR, STEVEN 

Abstract

jats:titleAbstract</jats:title>jats:pThe voice has often been identified with the assertion of idiosyncrasy or exception (The Chanting Crowd: ‘We are all individuals!’ An Individual: ‘I'm not.’ Monty Python,jats:italicThe Life of Brian</jats:italic>). This article explores why humans (though not uniquely them) feel urged to merge and magnify the individual voice through assimilating it to the voices of others. What are the powers, menaces, and satisfactions of these singular–plural megavoices, in choirs, collective chants, and other forms of what may be calledjats:italicchorality</jats:italic>, that have become more familiar than ever in the mass spectacles (‘audicles’?) of sport, entertainment, and politics? I suggest that the chorus represents the challenge of the inchoate, in that it is the making manifest of what menaces music, the matter that must be made into form, a reservoir of unschooled energy that must be converted to information. I suggest that there may be an implicit relation between the individual voice and the collective voice it may seem to convoke, such that every individual vocality has a connection to a phantasmal chorality. Finally, I consider the political force of chorality, and the fantasy focused on and through the collective voice, and what this means in a world that seems to have moved from the dominion of the mass to that of the multitude.</jats:p>

Description

Keywords

3603 Music, 36 Creative Arts and Writing

Journal Title

Twentieth-Century Music

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1478-5722
1478-5730

Volume Title

13

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)