THE CHOIR

Shannon News, 29 December 1925, Page 3

THE CHOIR

ENGLISH DEVELOPMENT. HISTORY OF CHORAL SINGING. At the present time many choirs in Christchurch are practising hard for the Christmas services, when they will give us many of the fine old English Nativity anthems and choruses. A note of the development of English choirs, which are the ancestor® of our New Zealand ones, is therefore not out of place. England may well be termed the home of choirs, as from very early times part-,songs have been. a uational heritage. The musical history of England has been chequered and broken in all respects save one —choral singing. English people have always delighted in singing in company, which accounts for the popularity and higii standard of such festivals as that which is held annually at Leeds. To England belongs tho first of known part-songs —the 13th century “Sumer is icumen in.” Its primitive art was to culminate in the unmatched glories of the Elizabethan madrigalists, who wrote for a society in which all persons of education sang, writes Richard Capell in the “Daily Mail.” In Pepys we see how partsinging was enjoyed in the 17fli century.

Later on, Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn wrote masterpieces for English choirs, and their names are still honoured by us, and their notes’sung. In recent times, while the Continent has surpassed us in many branches of music, English choral singing has remained quite unrivalled. It is curious that in Italy, land of supreme, solo singers, one does not hear choral singing that is, by our standards, good. In Paris there are no choral societies. at all such as we knows and a' performance of a choral masterpiece is a rarity.