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A history of choral literature: canons and peripheries in the development of an American discipline

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A history of choral literature: canons and peripheries in the development of an American discipline

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Content A History of Choral Literature:
Canons and Peripheries in the Development of an American Discipline
by
Emily May Sung
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC THORNTON SCHOOL OF MUSIC
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS
(CHORAL MUSIC)
August 2023
Copyright 2023 Emily May Sung
ii
Dedication

To Uncle Bill, who loved both history and music.

iii
Acknowledgements

This dissertation would not have been possible without the support and guidance of my
faculty, mentors, friends, and family. Thank you to my committee members, Dr. Tram Sparks,
Dr. William Coppola, and Dr. Cristian Grases, for their unfailing support throughout this
process. I am deeply indebted to the entire faculty of the USC Thornton Department of Choral
and Sacred Music for welcoming me into this program and for mentoring me with such
generosity throughout my years at USC. Special thanks to Dr. Nick Strimple for sharing his
inexhaustible enthusiasm and knowledge in all matters concerning choral literature, and to Dr.
Andrew Megill for inspiring my interest for this subject as a master’s student at Westminster
Choir College. I am grateful as well to Professor Nate Sloan for stimulating my interest in jazz
history and for generously providing me with some helpful resources when I began to explore
this topic in 2021. Sincere thanks to Alexis Bard Johnson, a wonderful friend and brilliant
curator, who shared numerous art history resources with me and helped me see the connections
between canonicity in choral music and art history. To my former professors Dirk Hartog and
Tony Grafton, my gratitude for you only grows over the years––thank you for teaching me how
to “do” history and for instilling in me a deep love for this discipline. To my dear friend Emily
Rutherford, who helped me hone my ideas more than anyone else during this process––thank
you for sharing your insights on invented tradition and Cold War history. I have no doubt that
this dissertation would have been significantly less interesting without our many stimulating
conversations. Last but not least, my deep gratitude goes to my wonderful friends, my amazing
family, my incredible partner Caroline, and my beautiful dog Hazel, whose generosity, patience,
and love have sustained me through this degree and without whom I surely would not be the
person I am today.
iv
Table of Contents
Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... v
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1: American Choral Culture during the Cold War and the Culture Wars ......................... 6
Introduction: An Overview ....................................................................................................................... 6
The Birth of ACDA: The Rise of a National Choral Culture during the Cold War ................................ 14
An Expanding World: Multiculturalism, the Choral Canon, and the Culture Wars ............................... 31
Conclusion: The Resilience of the Choral Canon ................................................................................... 51
Chapter 2: A Review of Choral Literature Textbooks Published from 1962–2023 ..................... 52
Introduction: Canon Formation in Choral Literature .............................................................................. 52
The Choral Tradition by Percy Young, 1962, revised 1981 ................................................................... 57
Choral Music: A Symposium by Arthur Jacobs, 1963............................................................................. 60
A Survey of Choral Music by Homer Ulrich, 1973 ................................................................................. 64
Choral Music: History, Style, and Performance Practice by Robert L. Garretson, 1993 ...................... 67
Choral Music in the Twentieth Century by Nick Strimple, 2002 ............................................................ 70
Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century by Nick Strimple, 2008 .......................................................... 74
Choral Repertoire by Dennis Shrock, first edition 2009, second edition 2023 ...................................... 76
A History of Western Choral Music, by Chester Alwes, Vol. 1, 2015; Vol. 2, 2016 ............................. 80
Conclusion: Choral Literature in Comparison to Other Art Historical Disciplines ................................ 84
Chapter 3: A Case Study in Jazz ................................................................................................... 87
Introduction: The Exclusion of Jazz from Choral Literature .................................................................. 87
Origins of Vocal Jazz .............................................................................................................................. 91
Choral Music Is Not Entertainment......................................................................................................... 95
Origins of Choral Jazz ........................................................................................................................... 103
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 109
Chapter 4: Colonialism and the Canon in Choral Literature Curricula and Pedagogy ............... 111
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 111
The Hidden and Null Curricula in Choral Literature ............................................................................ 114
Decolonizing and Decanonizing Choral Literature ............................................................................... 117
Areas of Further Research in Graduate Choral Literature Curricula and Pedagogy ............................. 128
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 133

v
Abstract

This dissertation investigates the formation of choral literature as an American discipline,
focusing on notions of canonical repertoire that developed within the national choral culture of
the latter half of the twentieth century. The Cold War and the culture wars of the 1980s–1990s
are established as a crucial historical context within which American choral standards were
developed, promoted, and contested. Seminal choral literature textbooks published between the
1960s and the present are situated within and read against this history, with special attention paid
to the promotion of ideas about choral heritage and the use of methods that are idiosyncratic to
academic choral literature. Through this reading, the Cold War era mythology of a unified Judeo-
Christian Western culture is identified as a key influence upon definitions of choral music and
choral heritage that persist to the present day, which has resulted in the solidification of a choral
canon grounded in historical European repertoire dominated by Christian choral forms and
genres. A case study in jazz illuminates how the American choral establishment has promoted
this choral canon in part by policing the boundaries of the choral art against repertoire that defies
received expectations of Western art music. Finally, this dissertation considers the implications
of the choral canon and the exclusion of non-canonical repertories upon curricula and pedagogy
in the graduate choral literature classroom. In the absence of established scholarly discourse on
canonicity or decolonization in choral literature, curricular reform efforts are explored in music
education, music history, and art history––neighboring disciplines that are also grappling with a
Western art canon in light of recent efforts to improve diversity and inclusion throughout higher
education. This dissertation concludes by identifying areas of further research into canonicity
and decolonization in graduate choral literature curricula and pedagogy.
1
Introduction

Over the past sixty years, authors of choral literature texts in the United States have made
herculean efforts to research and disseminate information on the most seminal and influential
choral literature in the Western world. As a result, a variety of scholarly resources are available
to choral literature instructors today, from the most recently published choral literature
textbooks––Dennis Shrock’s Choral Repertoire and Chester Alwes’s A History of Western
Choral Music––to specialized essay anthologies like Nineteenth Century Choral Music, edited
by Donna M. Di Grazia, and resources that explore choral music outside “the West,” like The
Cambridge Companion to Choral Music, edited by André de Quadros, and Nick Strimple’s
Choral Literature in the Twentieth Century. Yet this accumulated scholarship, while extensive
and impressive, is glaringly incomplete without a historicization of the choral literature
discipline itself. As with any historical practice, “doing” choral literature is not equivalent to the
neutral transmission of information; rather, those who “do” choral literature apply historically
contingent values and assumptions to create narratives about the evolution of choral music across
time and space. What counts as influential or seminal literature? How has that literature been
identified and canonized? When did the process of canonization happen––and how does it
continue to happen today? How do we define “the West” as an ideologically coherent place or
identity, and why do we define it in this way?
To answer these questions is to demand a new view of choral literature, or to borrow the
words of art historian Donald Preziosi, “to give body to the ghosts in the machinery of
disciplinary theories, methods, dogmas, and doctrines.”
1
Illuminating disciplinary practice in

1
Donald Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 4.
2
choral literature shows us that the “machinery” of choral literature does not merely consolidate
and transmit information; it enacts an epistemological framework––a particular way of knowing
and creating knowledge about the choral world that developed at a particular time and place.
In the first chapter of this dissertation, I identify that time and place as the developing
national community of American choral directors in the latter half of the twentieth century. This
chapter explores America’s Cold War era mythology of a Judeo-Christian Western heritage,
examining how notions of choral standards and canonical repertoire emerged within this context
and solidified throughout the social revolutions of the 1960s–1970s and the culture wars at the
end of the century. I use forty years of articles in The Choral Journal, the periodical journal of
the American Choral Directors Association, as a rich body of primary source material within
which efforts to establish, promote, and contest these choral standards can be illuminated.
The second chapter reviews eight influential choral literature textbooks that were
published from 1962 to the present, situating each text within the historical context established
by the first chapter. In discussing each text, I consider implicit and explicit understandings of
choral music and Western heritage; the tension between practical and scholarly agendas that
defines the discipline of choral literature; the tradition of drawing upon personal teaching and
performance experience to generate scholarly knowledge; and the subsequent blurred boundaries
between opinion and fact that characterize choral literature scholarship to the present day.
Throughout, I draw attention to the fact that choral literature is a discipline that does not have
established methods and does not engage in historiographical discourse. It is therefore a
discipline that is susceptible to being unconsciously or unknowingly shaped by received ideas
about canonicity and aesthetic value in choral music.
3
The third chapter takes jazz as a case study, examining how a genre with more than sixty
years of vocal ensemble activity was written out of the established body of choral literature. I
explore the emergence of vocal jazz and choral jazz as unique idioms, placing both against the
backdrop of a new national choral establishment that sought to reinforce standards of choral
excellence by distancing choral music from “entertainment.” I also consider how these tensions
shaped vocal jazz and show choir as increasingly divergent and marginalized subgenres
competing for legitimacy.
The fourth chapter considers the choral canon in the context of recent, widespread efforts
to improve diversity and inclusion in the choral field. I discuss the ways in which monocultural
understandings of choral music have created an insidious hidden curriculum, perpetuating
minority exclusion and colonialism in the choral literature classroom. Since decanonization and
decolonization in choral literature curricula and pedagogy are not yet a part of widespread
discourse, I explore possible solutions in the reform efforts of educators in music education,
music history, and art history––three neighboring fields that are also currently grappling with a
canon of historical Eurocentric art. This chapter concludes by discussing the need for further
research into current practices in choral literature curricula and pedagogy, as well as the need for
discourse on changes that are already under way in the discipline of choral literature.
The scope of this dissertation is limited in several ways. A more thorough attempt to
historicize American choral activity and the discipline of choral literature would ideally draw
upon a wealth of other primary sources, such as interviews with members of the choral field who
were active between the 1960s–1990s and letters, journals, and other written material that could
illuminate the development of American choral culture. My primary source material in the first
chapter focuses on the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA). The United States
4
currently has multiple other national choral organizations, including Chorus America, founded in
1977, and the National Collegiate Choral Organization (NCCO), founded in 2005, as well as
organizations for music educators like the National Association for Music Education (NAfME)
and organizations for musicians working in religious institutions, such as the Church Music
Association of America. I chose to focus on ACDA, which was the first national choral
organization in the United States and has grown into the largest choral organization in the world.
My analysis of choral literature texts is also limited to a sample of survey textbooks
published between ACDA’s establishment in 1959 up to the present. This limitation enabled me
to focus on well-known texts that make broad arguments about choral heritage and standard
repertoire in “the West,” and to make use of contemporaneous reviews that shed light on each
textbook’s reception in the choral field. There is, of course, a wealth of other published material
on Western choral literature that choral literature instructors have used in their classes, and
which therefore deserves consideration and study.
In the case study on jazz, my discussion of choral jazz focuses on two composers, Mary
Lou Williams and Duke Ellington, who made seminal contributions to the development of the
genre. Other composers deserve in-depth consideration as well, including Frank Tirro, Edgar
Summerlin, Dave Brubeck, Jonathan Klein, Billy Taylor, Trudy Pitts, Hannibal Lokumbe, and
Wynton Marsalis. A future study of choral jazz could offer a fuller picture of the many
composers who have contributed to the choral jazz repertoire. My discussion of seminal figures
in both vocal jazz and choral jazz is limited to the 1950s–1970s; further research is needed to
connect this narrative to vocal jazz and choral jazz from the turn of the century to the present
day. I acknowledge the issue of racism briefly at the end of my case study, but a more in-depth
discussion is needed to fully explore this crucial side of jazz exclusion in the choral world.
5
Finally, my discussion of canonicity and decolonization in choral literature curricula and
pedagogy is heavily dependent on scholarly work outside the choral field, due to the absence of
published discourse on this subject in choral circles. A future study would ideally incorporate
research and materials generated from within the choral profession, including curricular content
and pedagogical methods currently in use by choral literature instructors.
In exploring the influence of received, historically contingent notions of canonicity and
aesthetic value in choral literature, I hope to illuminate the American discipline of choral
literature as surprisingly resilient––in having survived decades of social and political change––
but certainly not ancient, sacred, or permanent. The choral literature courses that graduate
students are required to take today are not the reincarnations of a timeless heritage, but rather the
products of a belief system that was built in the mid-twentieth century and reinforced during the
social upheavals of the 1960s–1990s. Today, the discipline of choral literature faces new and
existential challenges. Instead of clinging to the notion that long-treasured repertoire has
permanent aesthetic value unaffected by social and political change, I hope that choral literature
instructors reading this dissertation will gain perspective on their own agency in recreating old
standards of choral excellence or creating new ones that prepare their graduate students for a
changing world.
6
Chapter 1: American Choral Culture during the Cold War and the Culture Wars

Introduction: An Overview
In November of 1999, the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) published a
special issue of its monthly periodical, The Choral Journal, which celebrated the organization’s
fortieth anniversary. Russell Mathis, a charter member and former president of ACDA (1974–
1977), contributed a fifteen-page retrospective on the organization’s history since its founding,
recounting how and why ACDA was created and the legacies of each president’s tenure.
ACDA’s rapid growth in membership, the establishment of robust regional and national
conventions, the growth of division organizations and state chapters, the movement of ACDA
national headquarters from Tampa, Florida to Lawton, Oklahoma, and the vitality of The Choral
Journal itself are among many successes recounted in detail. Mathis also mentions the
negotiation of a few issues, such as conflicts between “the jazz show-choir directors and the
exponents of more traditional types of choral music” in the late 1970s and “attacks on the fine
arts” in the early 1990s.
1
By and large, however, Mathis’s narrative portrays forty years of
continual growth, stability, and success with few challenges or setbacks––a remarkable feat
given the turbulence of this time period in the United States.
If American choral culture was at all affected by the social and political upheavals of the
Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., and the culture wars that raged throughout 1980s–1990s, there is little to suggest it in
Mathis’s version of ACDA’s forty-year history. Furthermore, these omissions are reflected
throughout The Choral Journal’s publications from 1959 to 1999, which include few references

1
Russell Mathis, “ACDA’s Forty-Year Journey,” The Choral Journal 40, no. 4 (1999): 19, 23,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23553037.
7
to the monumental changes occurring in American life aside from the occasional oblique
reference to “chaos in society” or “what is going on around us these days.”
2
Notably, issues of
race and civil rights are not mentioned even once in The Choral Journal during the 1960s,
although there are a few publishers’ advertisements for choral works setting texts by Dr. King
and a brief notice about music provided by the Stillman College Singers for a memorial service
for Dr. King in 1969.
3
Mathis concludes his retrospective of ACDA history by observing:
“ACDA has succeeded because the elected leaders have had a passion for the choral art. Politics
has been remarkably absent: let us keep it that way!”
4

Mathis believed that ACDA’s history could and should be understood apart from its
political context. Decades of publications by The Choral Journal establish a convincing record
that Mathis’s view was not unique; on the contrary, this attitude seems to have been pervasive
throughout the nation’s first and largest organizing body of choral directors. Yet context is a
crucial part of ACDA’s story, and of American choral history writ large, just as political, social,
and cultural events have always formed an essential context for choral activity in every era.
While many American choral scholars and conductors have produced studies and anthologies of
choral repertoire over the past sixty years, the history of American choral culture during this
period––the environment within which the study of this repertoire came into being––has yet to
receive serious scholarly attention. In tracing the formation of choral literature as a discipline of
study, I therefore begin with an examination of this unexplored context. In doing so, I take

2
“Hirt Letter Strikes Keynote to National Convention,” The Choral Journal 8, no. 3 (1968): 16–20,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23542867; Howard Swan, “The ‘Lost’ Art of Inspiration,” The Choral Journal 9, no. 4
(1969): 5–9, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23543167..
3
R. L. Landers et al., “Choral Reviews,” The Choral Journal 8, no. 5 (1968): 29–32,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23542957; Theron Kirk, “President’s Message,” The Choral Journal 9, no. 1 (1968): 4,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23542833; “Industry News,” The Choral Journal 9, no. 4 (1969): 38,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23543193.”
4
Mathis, “ACDA’s Forty-Year Journey,” 23.
8
inspiration from Donald Preziosi, the noted art historian and editor of The Art of Art History, an
acclaimed and widely used art history methods textbook in the United States. In justifying the
study of disciplinary methods in art history, Preziosi asserts the importance of “the exposure
from within of what is frequently concealed in institutional and professional practice: an
ambivalence and amnesia about what has produced and maintained institutional beliefs about art
and artistry in the first place.”
5
Preziosi points to a weakness in the institutionalized academic
study of art: a tendency to overlook the forces that shape fundamental beliefs, values, and
assumptions held by those who claim the authority to study art in the first place. While the study
of methods is well-established in the art historical field, this “ambivalence and amnesia”
regarding institutional beliefs is glaringly obvious in the discipline of choral literature.
Nearly every influential choral literature text published in the past sixty years emphasizes
the importance of situating choral works within their historical context. However, the discipline
of choral literature has yet to examine its own historical context––in other words, choral
literature has yet to study its own disciplinary methods. What does it mean to “do” choral
literature? How has the study of choral literature changed over time, and why has it changed in
these ways? In this chapter, I prepare to answer these questions by examining the formation of
American choral culture in the latter half of the twentieth century through a close reading of The
Choral Journal, which functioned as an important vehicle for the creation of a national choral
culture during a time before the internet gave rise to mass culture and decentralized
communication among choral professionals on a nationwide scale. I consider the ways in which
two monumental conflicts––the Cold War and the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s––
challenged and reshaped American ideas about Western culture in choral music. In doing so, I

5
Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, 4.
9
seek to establish this decades-long, nationwide contest over America’s cultural heritage as a
crucial context within which to explore the formation of choral literature as a discipline centered
around a Christian and European artistic canon.
Choral literature took shape as a discipline during a pivotal period for music in the United
States. In the fifteen years after World War II, the first doctoral programs in choral music were
established and began turning out some of the most influential American choral conductors,
pedagogues, and scholars of the late twentieth century. ACDA, the first national organization for
American choral directors, embarked upon an ambitious mission to define and uphold choral
standards for the entire country through the generation and dissemination of new scholarship,
aggressive recruitment and the fostering of grassroots leadership in every state, regular
opportunities for networking and professional development, and above all, the establishment of a
national platform for elevating influential opinions and showcasing idealized choral
performances and pedagogical methods. At the same time, unprecedented social and political
changes played an important role in shaping choral musicians’ notions of Western choral
heritage while dramatically raising the stakes of the moral and artistic standards that leading
choral directors had just started to promote widely through ACDA.
In the late 1950s, arts educators and organizations across the country began to grapple
with a new and existential need to advocate for the arts following the Soviet Union’s successful
launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the United States government’s National Defense Education Act
of 1958, which spurred a nationwide pivot towards science and technology in both education and
industry. Starting in this period, through the publication of choral literature resources and the
establishment of required choral literature courses in doctoral programs throughout the United
States, choral literature also began to solidify into an academic discipline centered around a
10
standard repertory variously called “Western choral music,” “the choral canon,” “choral
masterworks,” or sometimes simply “choral music.” As the next chapter will demonstrate in
detail, these terms––with few exceptions––have served as a powerful shorthand for an extensive
body of historical American and European repertoire which, for all its breadth, is firmly centered
on sacred Christian choral forms and large-scale choral and choral-orchestral works. This
canonical repertory only sometimes encompasses the peripheral repertories of twentieth-century
American popular choral music and the choral music of other nations, cultures, and religions. In
short, the development of choral literature during the postwar era closely paralleled other arts
and humanities disciplines, including art history, musicology, and literature, which also
reinforced American cultural legitimacy against the threat of godless, amoral communist forces
in part by claiming a Christian and European classical heritage anchored by a canon of
masterworks.
Following the Civil Rights Movement and social justice revolutions of the 1960s and
1970s, disciplinary methods in musicology began to transform in response to new and urgent
scrutiny upon racist and classist hegemonies and white European colonialist structures in the
classical instrumental music canon. However, these conversations did not gain traction in the
choral field. Whereas the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement––in conjunction with the rise
of postmodern theories––spawned discussions about racism, multiculturalism, and canon
deconstruction in art history, literature, musicology, and music education, the choral field largely
remained focused on establishing its core repertory, solidifying a European-American concept of
choral heritage, and controlling the encroachment of American popular music into “traditional”
choral programs.
6

6
Anne Shreffler discusses the influence of literary and art historical canon deconstruction on music: “Even
mainstream scholars, following similar discussions in literary and art history in the 1970s, began to examine the
11
Only in the late 1980s did American choir directors begin to engage directly with the
concept of multiculturalism.
7
Those efforts were quickly tempered in 1989 by the dual crises of
President Bush’s America 2000 education plan, which omitted the arts as a core school subject,
and widespread conservative political attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
following the controversies of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and Robert Mapplethorpe’s “The
Perfect Moment,” provocative artworks connected to institutions funded in part by the NEA.
8
As
the NEA––a vital source of funding for ACDA and many other arts organizations––became
entangled in the culture wars, the arts became a focal point of fierce political criticism, dragging
rank-and-file music educators into a public battle to defend the moral and aesthetic value of their
work. These events prompted ACDA to join other music organizations in a massive advocacy
effort to protect crucial funding for school music programs as well as the reputation of music and
music education more broadly. Leading choral directors responded to the culture wars by
redoubling their efforts to define choral music as a fine art of serious moral and aesthetic value
that was linked to a priceless European heritage hundreds of years in the making––and which
was not to be confused with entertainment or associated with a radical or “politically correct”

forces behind the formation of a canon of Western musical masterworks, questioning its origins, its sustaining
mechanisms, and ultimately its legitimacy. Rather than simply taking on faith that the invisible hand of ‘tradition as
authority’ will determine the canon, critics wanted to know, as Joseph Kerman asked in 1983, ‘How are canons
determined, why and on what authority?’ This question reflects the view that the canon is constructed in ways that
are visible and identifiable, rather than simply ‘given.’” Anne C. Shreffler, Musical Canonization and
Decanonization in the Twentieth Century (Original English Version), ed. Klaus Pietschmann and Melanie Wald,
Der Kanon Der Musik: Theorie Und Geschichte. Ein Handbuch, Edition Te (Munich, 2013),
https://www.academia.edu/241625/Musical_Canonization_and_Decanonization_in_the_Twentieth_Century_origina
l_English_version_.
7
The first use of multiculturalism in The Choral Journal occurs in Gail Mottola, “The Intercultural Concert: A New
Approach,” The Choral Journal 27, no. 8 (1987): 23–29, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23547237. Early efforts to
engage with multiculturalism primarily took the form of additive approaches, e.g. through the celebration of Black
History Month. For further reading additive approaches to multiculturalism, see James A. Banks and Cherry A.
McGee Banks, eds., Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives, 10th ed. (John Wiley & Sons, 2019).
8
For further reading on the NEA and the culture wars, see Elizabeth Kastor, “Funding Art That Offends,” The
Washington Post, 1989, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1989/06/07/funding-art-that-
offends/a8b0755f-fab9-4f7f-a8ef-2ccad7048fe2/.
12
agenda.
9
Until the recent reckoning in the professional choral field following the murder of
George Floyd in 2020, these hegemonic values have remained both evident and pervasive
throughout a vast national choral ecosystem encompassing school music programs, community
choirs, church choirs, collegiate choral programs, and professional ensembles, which have
overwhelmingly reinforced the high value placed on canonical, often Christian European and
American literature through their programming choices. This emphasis has been especially
evident in required choral literature curricula at the graduate level, which for generations have
focused heavily on “choral masterworks,” usually to the complete exclusion of “popular” choral
genres like jazz, gospel, and show choir, choral repertoire outside the United States and Europe,
and literature for children and youth.
10

In 2021, leading members of the choral field directly addressed issues of canonicity and
exclusion for the first time, openly acknowledging the ways in which powerful hegemonic
structures have shaped American choral culture. Then-Interim Executive Director of ACDA,
Hilary Apfelstadt, summarized a year of collective soul-searching: “As a profession, we have
thought a lot in the last year about ‘drawing the circle wider’ to encompass a broader span of
music, to represent an expanded range of composer voices and ideas. We have debated about the
role of the western art music canon. (Should we keep it? Should we reject it? How about finding
balance?)”
11
In his keynote address at the 2021 ACDA Virtual National Conference, Anton
Armstrong, the renowned longtime director of the St. Olaf Choir, also acknowledged the role of

9
John Haberlen, “Volunteerism at Its Very Best,” The Choral Journal 34, no. 4 (1993): 3,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23549399.
10
These claims derive from common knowledge in the choral field. More data-driven research is needed in this area.
To date, the only scholarly study of graduate choral literature curricula and pedagogy is Andrew Minear’s 2017
dissertation: Andrew T. Minear, “Graduate Choral Literature Curricula and Pedagogy” (Doctoral diss., Michigan
State University, 2017).
11
Hilary Apfelstadt, “From the Interim Executive Director 62,” The Choral Journal 62, no. 1 (2021): 2–3,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27089707.
13
the choral canon in cultural exclusion while reassuring listeners of its continued value and
importance: “Hear me well when I say I am not advocating throwing out the baby with the
bathwater. In my own programming, I still continue to program music from the Western canon.
However, it is incumbent upon me to make that music of the Western canon relevant to the lives
of the singers that I ask to sing these compositions.”
12
The National Collegiate Choral
Organization (NCCO) went even further, revising its Mission Statements in May of 2021 to
state, “We acknowledge that our profession has been a site of harm for many through our
colonial ideals of repertoire, pedagogy, aesthetics, and perspectives,” and vowing to “work to
uncover and understand the ways in which the post-secondary choral field has perpetuated
harm.”
13

Widespread calls for change have explicitly implicated the Western choral canon in the
entrenched diversity and inclusion issues of American choral culture. However, the choral field
has yet to begin serious discourse on the role of the canon in graduate choral education, which
has operated as a primary pipeline to leadership positions in America’s choral institutions ever
since the first doctoral programs were founded. Understanding how the choral canon attained its
position of primacy in American choral culture and education is key to deconstructing its
influence. This story begins with the birth of ACDA, the first national choral organization in the
United States.

12
Anton Armstrong, “20212 ACDA Virtual National Conference Recap: Anton Armstrong Keynote Address,” The
Choral Journal 62, no. 1 (2021): 45, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27089714.
13
“National Collegiate Choral Organization | Vision & Mission,” 2021, https://ncco-usa.org/about/vision-mission.
14
The Birth of ACDA: The Rise of a National Choral Culture during the Cold War
The American Choral Directors Association was the brainchild of a self-appointed
committee of choral leaders including Archie Jones, choir director at the University of Texas and
the first ACDA president, Robert Landers of the U.S. Air Force, Harry Robert Wilson of
Columbia University, R. Wayne Hugoboom of Marshall College in Florida, James Aliferis of the
University of Minnesota, and four future ACDA presidents: Charles Hirt, founder and director of
the nation’s first doctoral program in sacred music at the University of Southern California
(USC); Harold Decker, founder of the nation’s first DMA in choral music at the University of
Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); Warner Imig of the University of Colorado; and Elwood
Keister of the University of Florida.
14
The organization was officially formed in February, 1959,
with a select roster of 130 members comprised of specially invited “distinguished choral
directors who were leaders in education, church, and other professional choral music areas.”
15

The original constitution listed ten purposes devoted to establishing high artistic standards in
choral teaching, performance, and research. Over the next few years, ACDA’s leadership––
especially Jones, Keister, and Decker––used The Choral Journal to articulate the meaning of
these standards to ACDA’s rapidly growing membership, which more than quadrupled by 1962,
surpassed a thousand by 1963, and reached two thousand by 1965.
16
A review of journal articles
from 1960–1964 shows that during these formative early years, ACDA leaders were unanimous
in their desire to establish a nationwide notion of choral heritage that was staked upon European
art music repertoire and that also explicitly excluded American popular music.

14
Mathis, “ACDA’s Forty-Year Journey,” 10; Shawna Lynn Stewart, “Charles C. Hirt at the University of Southern
California: Significant Contributions and an Enduring Legacy,” Journal of the American Chemical Society
(University of Southern California, 2013), 25–27.
15
Mathis, “ACDA’s Forty-Year Journey,” 10.
16
“From the Executive Secretary’s Desk,” The Choral Journal 5, no. 5 (1965): 4,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23542263.
15
The first few issues of The Choral Journal display a strong sense of urgency in relation to
a perceived national need for higher standards in the choral field. In the second issue of The
Choral Journal (the first issue to feature essays and articles), ACDA leadership urged members
to assist with recruitment and to “help make the American Choral Directors Association a great
National force in raising both literature and performing standards and making America aware of
our vast choral heritage and program.”
17
In the following issue, Keister contributed an essay
titled, “Standards of Choral Music,” which laid out an argument for more rigorous training of
choral conductors in order to raise standards and “help supply the national needs.”
18
While the
nature of those needs was not defined, we can infer from the high number of diatribes against
entertainment and “commercial music” in these early issues that upgrading widespread notions
of worthy repertoire––in other words, controlling the influence of contemporary popular music––
was of utmost importance to ACDA. In 1960, ACDA President Archie Jones wrote a summary
discussion of a panel he had recently facilitated with well-known choral leaders including Elaine
Brown of Singing City, Warren Martin of Westminster Choir College, and Charles Hirt of USC.
These panel members advocated for the establishment of “solid standards of literature” and
stated unequivocally that the “drawback to contemporary music” lay in its “lack of a rich
repertoire of modern works comparable to that of earlier periods.”
19
Future ACDA President
Warner Imig contributed an essay on the “obligation” of collegiate choral directors to “take a
definite stand to make music a living art, not merely entertainment,” an opinion later echoed in
1961 by Harold Decker, who argued that choral directors “should all be imbued with the same

17
“Purposes of ACDA: Article II,” The Choral Journal 1, no. 2 (1960): 2, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23541617.
18
Elwood J. Keister, “Standards of Choral Music,” The Choral Journal 1, no. 3 (1960): 1,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23541625. 1
19
Archie N. Jones, “Choral Music In America,” The Choral Journal 1, no. 3 (1960): 4,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23541634.
16
high purposes––for we are dealing with one of mankind’s highest expressions, an art which is
comparable to painting, sculpture, literature, or any of man’s most noble endeavors.”
20
In a 1962
essay titled “Quality in Choral Groups,” Harry Robert Wilson bemoaned the lack of nationwide
choral standards, asking, “Have our choral groups gradually become organizations devoted to
entertainment of both singers and listeners?... Have our choirs been deliberately used as media
for public display and community relations rather than the vehicle of aesthetic experience which
they should be?”
21

The first ten years of articles published in The Choral Journal portray a fledgling
organization in unanimous agreement not only about “the negative effects of popular singing,”
but also about the sort of repertoire that ought to be the standard-bearer for choral excellence in
America: historical European choral literature.
22
In 1960, Don Malin advocated for integrating
music performance with the study of historical European styles and values, for instance by using
English madrigals to teach students about the Elizabethan Age, the “works of Bach and Handel”
to “help to illustrate the art of the Baroque,” and the music of Haydn and Mozart to “illustrate the
elegance which was characteristic of their century.”
23
In 1962, Harry Robert Wilson advised
choir directors who needed direction to rely on “fine music” that had already stood the test of
time: “If a director does not trust his own musical taste in selecting music, he should use music
written by composers of recognized worth. After all, we have that rich heritage of choral music
written by the Renaissance composers as well as the compositions of the classicists, the

20
Warner Imig, “Choral Music in The College,” The Choral Journal 1, no. 3 (1960): 3,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23542380; Harold Decker, “Choral Art,” The Choral Journal 1, no. 5 (1961): 3,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23541756.
21
Harry Robert Wilson, “Quality in Choral Groups,” The Choral Journal 2, no. 3 (1962): 3,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23541943.
22
Keister, “Standards of Choral Music,” 1.
23
Don Malin, “Choral Music And The Humanities,” The Choral Journal 1, no. 3 (1960): 5,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23541636.
17
romanticists and many of our contemporaries.”
24
In 1970, Raymond Moreman, who had recently
retired from his post teaching choral music at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote a
reflection piece connecting the aesthetic value of contemporary choral music back to “the music
of the Renaissance and the masterpieces of other eras,” which he reminded readers were “our
inheritance––gifts of beauty given to us by our forebears to be cherished in perpetuity.”
25

Beyond publishing numerous opinion pieces on historical European repertoire as the gold
standard for American choirs, ACDA also took the early step of starting a recording library that
would bring ACDA-approved choral literature directly into the offices, living rooms, and choral
rehearsals of its members. In May of 1960, Decker was appointed Chairman of the ACDA Tape
Bank Committee, whose purpose was “to provide a recording source for choral music in the
standard repertoire which is not available at the present time on records.”
26
The following year,
Decker shared the initial fruits of his work in an article titled, “Recommended Listening for
Choral Directors,” which reviewed forty recordings “selected on the basis of performance quality
and musical interest.”
27
ACDA members were advised to “listen to these recordings and be
stimulated to use some of the material” with their choirs.
28
Of the forty recordings, thirty-two
consisted exclusively of literature from the European Renaissance and Baroque periods. A two-
album set recorded by the Roger Wagner Chorale, titled Folk Songs of the Old World and Folk
Songs of the New World, featured well-known European and American melodies such as “Loch
Lomond,” “Greensleeves,” “Shenandoah,” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”
29
Most of

24
Wilson, “Quality in Choral Groups,” 12.
25
Raymond Moreman, “Choral Music Comes of Age: Has It? Hasn’t It?,” The Choral Journal 11, no. 1 (1970): 7,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543735.
26
“Decker Appointed Chairman Tape Bank Committee,” The Choral Journal 1, no. 3 (1960): 1,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23541628.
27
Harold Decker, “Recommended Listening for Choral Directors,” The Choral Journal 2, no. 1 (1961): 4,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23541742.
28
Decker, 4.
29
Decker, “Recommended Listening for Choral Directors.”
18
the remaining albums featured a mixture of repertoire from other European historical style
periods, including works by Igor Stravinsky, Lili Boulanger, Benjamin Britten, Johannes
Brahms, and Béla Bartók. Only one album featured works by twentieth-century American
composers, including Ulysses Kay, Daniel Pinkham, and Halsey Stevens. Together, these forty
recordings created a portrayal of American choral heritage as inextricably sourced from Europe.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, ACDA leadership emphasized the importance of the
tape bank, extolling the benefits of otherwise unavailable recordings that could be “heard on
loaned tapes or dubbed on your own tapes.”
30
In 1970, Elwood Keister provided ACDA
members with a progress report on the tape library, which had grown to more than a thousand
recordings. Reiterating the original purpose behind the collection, Keister observed, “The choral
art has been blessed beyond belief with a staggering wealth of literature. However, not all of it is
of the best quality nor does it all fit our exact individual needs. Critical choices need to be made.
Looking at the printed music or playing it on the keyboard is not good enough… we need to hear
it sung.”
31
Reassuring readers of the high quality of the library, Keister stated, “Extreme
interpretations have been avoided, as well as compositions which through type or arrangement
would not be considered as standard literature.”
32
By that point—only about a decade into
ACDA’s existence—there was apparently little need to clarify what repertoire was considered
“standard.”
Through its sustained efforts to select, reproduce, and disseminate a specific body of
choral literature, the work of the Tape Bank Committee reads clearly as an argument for the

30
“Growth of ACDA Rapid Since It’s Inception in 1959,” The Choral Journal 1, no. 6 (1961): 3–8,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23541768.
31
Elwood J. Keister, “Choral Tape Library–A Progress Report,” The Choral Journal 11, no. 4 (1970): 13,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543324.
32
Keister.
19
canonization of historical European repertoire and the exclusion of music deemed substandard or
overly connected with entertainment. Notably, ACDA intended for the Tape Bank to amass
recordings of works that were not commercially available, resulting in the construction of an in-
house canon of choral performances encompassing idealized performance practices as well as
valued repertoire. In this way, ACDA’s leadership used the Tape Bank to help establish national
notions of “great choral literature” and to educate choir directors on proper approaches to
interpretation and performance.
33
The role of the Tape Bank in the standardization of choral
literature in the United States thus fits into a larger narrative about recording technology and
canonicity. Since the dawn of the phonorecord, recording technology has played a “conserving
force in the Western music canon,” as well as in the creation of canons in jazz, gospel, musical
theater, country, and countless other musical subgenres, by enabling the unlimited replication
and dissemination not only of musical works but of specific performances and interpretations of
musical works.
34

The political context of the late 1950s and early 1960s sheds light on the forces
contributing to the fierce commitment of ACDA’s early leaders to the establishment of choral
standards of excellence rooted in a specific body of choral literature. The first years of ACDA’s
existence coincided with seismic shifts in American geopolitics that affected national views on
education, religion, and American identity for generations to come. The Soviet Union’s launch of
Sputnik in 1957 inaugurated the Space Age and sparked broad popular concern over the quality
of American education in math, science, and technology, prompting Congress to take immediate
action to meet the challenge of Russian scientific superiority. In 1958, Congress passed the

33
Keister.
34
Timothy Odell Hays, “The Music Department in Higher Education: History, Connections, and Conflicts, 1865-
1998” (Loyola University Chicago, 1999), 96–100.
20
National Defense Education Act (NDEA), dedicating millions of dollars in fellowships, grants,
and loans to the study of science, math, and foreign languages in secondary schools, colleges,
and universities.
35
While science education had been enlisted for a national political agenda at
least as early as the Second World War, Sputnik and the NDEA spurred a new and urgent
national investment in science instruction, placing the onus on arts educators to advocate for the
arts as an essential subject in secondary and post-secondary institutions.
36
Notably, one of the
only mentions of politics in the first six years of The Choral Journal involves Sputnik: in 1965,
Keister (who had by then finished his term as ACDA president), noted that the “swing away”
from the arts and humanities during the “Sputnik Era” had resulted in “a three to six year gap” in
public music education, producing “a situation in which considerable numbers of students
interested once again in singing arrive for membership lacking the musical experience, voice
maturity and skills needed to qualify.”
37
At the end of the decade, Harriet Holt Buker contributed
another rare reference to the influence of politics on arts education: in colorful language, she
celebrated the humanist’s long-awaited “re-emergence as an entity in a scientific world,” tossing
his “shaggy, long hair and throwing bouquets” in a “rebuttal” to the “science-math oriented
educational system since Sputnik.”
38
From occasional comments like Keister’s and Buker’s, we
can infer that ACDA’s mission to raise the standards of choral education and promote choral

35
Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade American Education, 1945-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 229;
Campbell F. Scribner, “‘Make Your Voice Heard’: Communism in the High School Curriculum, 1958–1968,”
History of Education Quarterly 52, no. 3 (2012): 351–54, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23251453.
36
See Terzian for an interesting case study on a national weekly radio broadcast program, “Adventures in Science,”
which sought to raise public interest in secondary science education. From 1942-1958, this radio program profiled
scientifically high-achieving youth as future elite scientists who could one day “help compensate for the perceived
scientific manpower shortages during World War Two and the postwar era.” Sevan G. Terzian, “‘Adventures in
Science’: Casting Scientifically Talented Youth as National Resources on American Radio, 1942–1958,”
International Journal of the History of Education 44, no. 3 (2008): 309,
https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230802041575.
37
Elwood J. Keister, “Choral Music,” The Choral Journal 5, no. 6 (1965): 9, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23542667.
38
Harriet Holt Buker, “Choral Music – The Personal Equation,” The Choral Journal 10, no. 1 (1969): 10,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543024.
21
music as a serious art form was fueled in part by the urgency of arts advocacy under the shadow
of the Cold War.
The Cold War also precipitated important shifts in American attitudes towards religion.
Of particular significance to choral culture was the concept of an American Judeo-Christian
heritage, which in religious historian K. Healan Gaston’s words was “enshrined in national lore”
during the Cold War years.
39
A relic of the anti-fascist movement of the 1930s, the construct of
Judeo-Christianity had originally been used to promote “the shared heritage of Christianity and
Judaism to counter anti-Semitism and fascism.”
40
The religious philosopher Mark Silk, who
traced the evolution of the Judeo-Christian concept in his groundbreaking 1984 article on the
subject, situated the origins of Judeo-Christianity in the wake of the Holocaust: “After
revelations of the Nazi death camps, a phrase like ‘our Christian civilization’ seemed ominously
exclusive; greater comprehensiveness was needed for proclaiming the spirituality of the
American Way.”
41
During the Cold War, the myth of Judeo-Christianity was mobilized anew
against communism, replacing government rhetoric that had previously described America as a
Christian nation with language that emphasized “generalized religiosity and patriotic
moralism.”
42
This public shift revealed an understanding that if America was to achieve success
in championing an international coalition against communism, it would have to go beyond

39
K. Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America : Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 279.
40
Dianne Kirby, “The Cold War and American Religion,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, 2017,
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.398.
Also see Mark Silk: “After the revelations of the Nazi death camps, a phrase like ‘our Christian civilization’ seemed
ominously exclusive; greater comprehensiveness was needed for proclaiming the spirituality of the American Way.
‘When our own spiritual leaders look for the moral foundations for our democratic ideals,’ observed Cornell's
Arthur E. Murphy at the 1949 Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, ‘it is in 'our Judeo-Christian
heritage,'’ the culture of 'the West,' or 'the American tradition,' that they tend to find them." Mark Silk, “Notes on the
Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1984): 69,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2712839.
41
Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” 69.
42
Kirby, “The Cold War and American Religion.”
22
defending Christianity and Western civilization and appeal to a more general sense of morality
and spirituality.
43
Judeo-Christianity therefore became a powerful myth that Americans used to
distinguish “The Free World” from communist nations. Extending far beyond the religious tenets
of Judaism or Christianity, America’s Judeo-Christian identity encompassed wide-ranging
beliefs and practices such as liberty, tolerance, rational inquiry, altruism, pity, decency, justice,
and humanity.
44
In a particularly expansive view of the term, University of Iowa president Virgil
M. Hancher declared that America stood for the “Judeo-Christian beliefs in the dignity of man
and the sacredness of human personality”––values that “have never been known in Russia or in
much of Asia.”
45
This attempt to merge Judaism and Christianity under an American Judeo-
Christian banner was not without resistance: Silk notes that some American Jews rejected the
concept entirely, asserting that the Judeo-Christian tradition was “no tradition at all” and that
“the history of Jewish-Christian relations was fundamentally a history of social and theological
antagonism, not of common cause.”
46

In The Choral Journal, the Judeo-Christian concept of generalized religiosity is evident
in the pervasive use of “sacred music” as a term that hypothetically encompasses music of all
religions and faith traditions. While the term “sacred music” of course predates The Choral
Journal, the Cold War era marks the beginning of a usage of “sacred” as a euphemism that

43
Kirby.
44
See Appiah: “In the chill of battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna Carta,
Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and
liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that pre-modern Europe was
none of these things, and that until the past century democracy was the exception in Europe – something that few
stalwarts of western thought had anything good to say about.” Kwame Anthony Appiah, “There Is No Such Thing as
Western Civilisation,” The Guardian, November 9, 2016,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civilisation-appiah-reith-lecture. See also Gaston: “‘We
have no choice but to arm,’ declared New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, ‘if we would preserve our
way of life and the Judeo- Christian concept of pity, decency, justice, and humanity.’” In Gaston, Imagining Judeo-
Christian America : Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy, 155.
45
Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America : Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy, 155.
46
Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” 80.
23
eventually morphed into a proxy for ambiguously inclusive religious music beyond even Judaism
and Christianity. When the teaching and performance of Christian choral literature in primary
and secondary schools became a target of heated public criticism during the 1980s, American
choir directors defended this repertoire as “sacred music” that was hypothetically inclusive of
diverse religious traditions, even if in practice, it almost always referred to choral forms and texts
originating in the Christian faith. In 1982, The Choral Journal published a statement on the value
of sacred music that was “endorsed by the National Board of Directors of The American Choral
Directors Association” and intended to represent “the concern of over 11,000 American Choral
Directors”: “The term ‘sacred’ refers to all manner of religious belief and not only to the
practices of Judeo-Christian teachings. It is important to recognize the fact that almost all of the
significant choral music composed before the 17
th
century was associated with a sacred text.”
47

In reality, the amount of commonly known Jewish repertoire in American choral culture has
always been minimal compared to Christian repertoire, and awareness of Muslim, Buddhist, and
Hindu music is practically nonexistent. It is a widely accepted fact in the choral field that
historical European choral music originated in the choral forms and genres of Catholic and
Protestant Christianity, and that Christian music therefore occupies a dominant place in the
literature. This perspective is reflected in every standard choral literature text published since the
1960s, which the next chapter will show. Yet, beginning in the Cold War era, the term “sacred
music” gained common usage in the United States as a euphemism for generalized religious
literature that has persisted to the present day.
During the Cold War, the arts and humanities also became the construction site for the
modern concept of “Western culture.” Historians and philosophers of the Cold War trace the

47
“Music with Sacred Text: Vital to Choral Music Education and to the Choral Art,” The Choral Journal 23, no. 3
(1982): 3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23545788.
24
roots of present-day notions of “the West” to Cold War divisions between the two sides of the
Iron Curtain, which pitted the allied north Atlantic democracies of the United States, Canada,
and western Europe against the Communist Bloc, with the rest of the world mostly disregarded
except for countries aligned with one side or the other––e.g. Cuba with the Soviet Union and
Japan with the United States.
48
The British American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah
summarizes decades of scholarship on the construct of Western culture:

We have used the expression “the west” to do very different jobs. Rudyard
Kipling, England’s poet of empire, wrote, “Oh, east is east and west is west, and
never the twain shall meet”, contrasting Europe and Asia, but ignoring
everywhere else. During the cold war, “the west” was one side of the iron curtain;
“the east” its opposite and enemy. This usage, too, effectively disregarded most of
the world. Often, in recent years, “the west” means the north Atlantic: Europe and
her former colonies in North America. The opposite here is a non-western world
in Africa, Asia and Latin America––now dubbed “the global south”––though
many people in Latin America will claim a western inheritance, too. This way of
talking notices the whole world, but lumps a whole lot of extremely different
societies together, while delicately carving around Australians and New
Zealanders and white South Africans, so that “western” here can look simply like
a euphemism for white.
49

Appiah aptly notes that the business of carving up diverse societies in ideological terms is messy
and fractious work. In the United States, disagreement has persisted about the extent to which
American Jews and Christians are truly united under the common banner of “Western culture.”
In the 1990s, two Yiddish researchers wrote to the New York Times to correct the view of

48
For resources on the notion of “the West,” see: Appiah, “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilisation”; James
Kurth, “NATO Expansion and the Idea of the West,” ORBIS 41, no. 4 (1997): 555–67,
https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A20377515/PPCJ?u=usocal_main&sid=bookmark-PPCJ&xid=3e9e93a4; David
Gress, From Plato to NATO : The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (New York: Free Press, 1998); Gunther
Hellmann and Benjamin Herborth, eds., Uses of “the West”: Security and the Politics of Order (Cambridge
University Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316717448; James Loeffler, “The Problem With the ‘Judeo-
Christian Tradition,’” The Atlantic, August 1, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/the-judeo-
christian-tradition-is-over/614812/.
49
Appiah, “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilisation.”
25
Jewish studies as part of the “Western canon.”
50
They situated Jewish culture within the cultures
of the Middle East, citing centuries of European hostility to Jews as a primary reason: “Today
most Jews live in countries with Christian majorities, but Jewish and Christian cultures remain
distinct. A little more than a half-century after the Jews of Europe were subject to a genocidal
assault, Jewish culture remains little known to Christians.”
51
Although understandings of
“Western culture” have been contested since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Cold War-era
conception of “the West” still has relevance in the present. This is nowhere more evident than in
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s destructive attempt to claim Ukraine by force and thereby
forestall further encroachment of “the West” into former Soviet territory.
The construct of Western culture exerted a powerful influence on concepts of artistic and
aesthetic heritage in choral music during the Cold War, despite forceful challenges to this
ideology from the Civil Rights and antiwar movements. Both explicit and implicit references to
notions of “Western” heritage are evident throughout The Choral Journal’s publications during
this period. Perhaps the most telling example occurs in a 1968 statement by Charles Hirt (who
would assume the ACDA presidency in 1970) that was promoted as the “theme and key idea” of
the following year’s national convention.
52
Hirt began by describing the previous quarter-century
as an inspiring time during which the choral ensemble emerged “from a lethargic and static
past,” citing the nineteenth century Russian composer Dmitri Bortniansky’s “Cherubim Song”
and “gaudy arrangements of spirituals” as standard fare during the Dark Ages of American
choral music.
53
To Hirt, the reasons for the recent renaissance were clear: the American choir

50
Charles Nydorf and Elinor Robinson, “Jewish Studies Isn’t Part of Western Canon,” The New York Times, July
30, 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/30/opinion/l-jewish-studies-isn-t-part-of-western-canon-023140.html.
51
Nydorf and Robinson.
52
“Hirt Letter Strikes Keynote to National Convention,” 16.
53
“Hirt Letter Strikes Keynote to National Convention,” 16.
26
director had at last become “motivated by an increasing awareness of his rightful heritage––the
choral literature of the past which still lay dust covered in the archives.”
54
The new American
choral conductor was finally learning “stylistic correctness” in European Renaissance, Baroque,
and Classical music, elevating artistic standards and transforming choral music into “a
significant thread in the fabric of American life and in the mores of our people.”
55
Yet there was
still much work to be done to solidify the choral conductor’s role as “a constructive influence in
today’s society”: Hirt shared his personal experience on a recent tour of the USSR, where the
high status of the Russian musician was “almost equal to that of the military” and the
government viewed music as a vital power to be “properly harnessed and controlled.”
56
In
contrast to Americans, who deserved admonishment for viewing music as similar “to other forms
of entertainment or creative expression,” Hirt warned that “Russia today acknowledges music’s
fullest capabilities and has added them to its arsenal.”
57
In Hirt’s view, American choir directors
had a clear responsibility: to meet the Russian challenge by shunning popular music and lifting
up the greatest music in Western culture, namely, the European masterworks of the Renaissance,
Baroque, and Classical periods.
The development of American choral culture from 1959 to 1999 was thus shaped by two
interrelated but distinct processes: first, the recovery and renewal of historical choral repertoire
and practices originating in western Europe; and second, the construction of a new American
choral tradition that explicitly defined choral excellence through the myth of a Judeo-Christian
Western culture, centering the prized “inheritance” of historical European choral forms and
marginalizing well-established genres of American popular and contemporary vocal ensemble

54
“Hirt Letter Strikes Keynote to National Convention,” 16.
55
“Hirt Letter Strikes Keynote to National Convention,” 16.
56
“Hirt Letter Strikes Keynote to National Convention,” 18–19.
57
“Hirt Letter Strikes Keynote to National Convention,” 18.
27
music as well as the choral repertories of other nations and cultures. The concept of invented
tradition, pioneered by the eminent British and Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, is both
applicable and illuminating in our exploration of this period. In The Invention of Tradition, a
groundbreaking 1983 historical essay anthology edited by Hobsbawm and fellow British
historian Terence Ranger, Hobsbawm introduces the term “invented tradition” as the “creation of
a set of practices” used to imply “continuity with a suitable historic past.”
58
More specifically, he
calls attention to processes of “ritualization” and “repetition” by which “ancient materials” can
be used “to construct invented traditions of a novel type for quite novel purposes.”
59
Hobsbawm
notes that in the post-World War II era, countries around the world worked to invent nationalist
narratives using newly created symbols and practices as well as those adapted from a historical
past. These invented traditions were used to “foster the corporate sense of superiority of élites,”
particularly when this elite class “had to be recruited from those who did not already possess it
by birth or ascription.”
60
Hobsbawm’s ideas provide an intriguing perspective on the new
American choral culture championed by ACDA during this period. While many American choir
directors certainly valued historical European choral repertoire before the 1959, the use of these
“ancient materials” to create a new set of national choral standards and to foster a corporate
sense of “superior” choral artistry (in comparison to popular choral music) was unprecedented in
twentieth-century America.
61

58
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 1.
59
Hobsbawm and Ranger, 6.
60
Hobsbawm and Ranger, 10.
61
It is worth noting that figures promoting European repertoire existed in the choral field before the twentieth
century. Music director Lowell Mason (1792–1872) offers one early example of an American choral leader who
emphasized European “masterworks.” While these historical precedents date back to colonial America, this chapter
focuses on the ways in which European classical heritage was conceptualized as a source of national identity under
the unique circumstances of the Cold War and the culture wars of the twentieth century. Todd R. Jones, “The
Relationship Between Lowell Mason and the Boston Handel and Haydn Society, 1815-1827” (University of
Kentucky, 2017), http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9464-8358.
28
These efforts to legitimize of American choral artistry through a European heritage were
visible in another trend that began in the 1960s: tours to Europe and the Soviet Union. These
tours constituted a new phenomenon of American choral diplomacy, through which American
directors and singers sought exposure to a rich European heritage (endorsing a view of Russian
music as drawing from the same well of historical choral practice) while simultaneously
promoting American choral standards abroad. In 1964, the USC Chamber Singers, under Charles
Hirt’s direction, undertook a four-month concert tour of Europe and Israel sponsored by the U.S.
State Department and heavily publicized in multiple issues of The Choral Journal.
62
Shortly after
returning, Hirt announced plans for a three month lecture tour on “American choral techniques”
in the Soviet Union and other Eastern European nations, funded by the Ford Foundation and the
U.S. State Department.
63
Thomas A. Sokol, the Director of Choral Music at Cornell University,
brought the Cornell Glee Club on concert tours of England and the Soviet Union in 1960 and
later took a research tour in 1963 on a fellowship from the Ford Foundation that “afforded him
the opportunity to study the national performance styles in choral music in the Soviet Union,
Spain and England.”
64
In 1965, Harold Decker took a six month research tour of Europe with his
wife, and upon returning submitted an article to The Choral Journal summarizing his
experiences of choral culture and performance practice in England, Holland, and Germany. After
describing the vast scale of choral education in England in the Anglican cathedral choir schools,
the high quality of professional radio choirs in Germany, and many impressive choral

62
Stewart, “Charles C. Hirt at the University of Southern California: Significant Contributions and an Enduring
Legacy,” 57–59; “Hirt’s USC Chamber Singers Plan Europe - Mid-East Tour,” The Choral Journal 4, no. 3 (1964):
28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23542028; “From the Editor,” The Choral Journal 4, no. 6 (1964): 6,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23542398; “Hirt on Russian and East European Tour,” The Choral Journal 5, no. 2
(1964): 27, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23542481.
63
“Hirt on Russian and East European Tour.”
64
“Russo-American Vocal Aspects Discussed,” The Choral Journal 5, no. 3 (1964): 10,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23542508; Thomas A. Sokol, “National Performance Style and Russian Choral Art,” The
Choral Journal 5, no. 5 (1965): 23–30, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23542280.
29
performances including “a genuine baroque performance of Handel’s Messiah” conducted by
Wilhelm Ehmann, Decker concluded, “Quite obviously, the art of music is deeply imbedded in
the lives of the educated man in Europe.”
65

American choir directors saw clear benefits to be gained from bringing their choirs “back
to the source” of the choral art.
66
In 1966, the editorial board of The Choral Journal proudly
summarized the successes of multiple recent European tours undertaken by American collegiate
choirs, including the University of Michigan’s Men’s Glee Club, the Varsity Men’s Glee Club of
the University of Illinois, the University of Illinois Concert Choir, the Occidental College Glee
Clubs, the North Fulton Special Choir, and the Chapman College Madrigal Singers. “America no
longer bows to Europe in standards of musical performance,” the article boasted, “but passing
the test of acceptance by sophisticated European audiences still presents a stimulating challenge
for many U.S. musical groups.”
67
Quoting an official from the Institute of European Studies,
which had assisted many U.S. schools in planning their tours, The Choral Journal summarized
the benefits of the European concert tour in unequivocal terms: American students should have
the opportunity “to discover the tradition from which Europe’s contributions to western culture
have sprung, both in music and the other arts.”
68

The number of announcements about European tours published in The Choral Journal
from 1965 to 1969 is a strong indication that the popularity of touring increased dramatically

65
Harold Decker, “The European Choral Scene,” The Choral Journal 5, no. 5 (1965): 10,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23542267.
66
“Most Americans are yet predominantly European in origin. Naturally, the music culture represents this bias; most
of the music performed in American schools, therefore, is of European origin… There is a natural inclination, when
leaving the U.S., to head ‘back to the source,’ to sing Gabrieli where Gabrieli wrote and performed in Venice’s St.
Mark’s Cathedral.” Anthony J. Palmer, “Choral Music in Japan,” The Choral Journal 27, no. 4 (1986): 15,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23547184.
67
“American Choirs Win Acclaim In European Tours,” The Choral Journal 6, no. 6 (1966): 8,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23542720.
68
“American Choirs Win Acclaim In European Tours.”
30
during this period. By the early 1970s, The Choral Journal began running advertisements for
tour companies and limiting announcements about choir tours in order to conserve space for
more substantive articles.
69
In 1973, the popularity of touring was such that ACDA President
Morris Hayes actually dedicated his monthly open letter to the membership to the problem of too
many choirs undertaking European tours. In this letter, Hayes brought to light an alarming trend:
an increasing number of American choirs touring in Europe “have been so poor in musical
excellence that an adverse opinion on the quality of American Music is in danger of developing
in parts of the European Continent.”
70
He therefore exhorted choir directors to evaluate “the
musical quality of your organization to ensure that they truly represent the finest in musical
excellence that ACDA is constantly striving for in American Music” before deciding to bring
their choir to Europe.
71
Hayes reminded his readership that upholding and promoting American
standards of choral excellence should be every ACDA member’s first priority. Performing in
Europe was an effective way to foster American choral excellence, as it brought American choirs
directly into contact with the source of their choral heritage. But excellence also required quality
control: only choirs of a sufficiently high caliber were worthy of promoting the American choral
cause abroad.
In summary, several trends were established in ACDA’s first decade that would continue
shaping American choral culture in the years to come: first, the need for arts advocacy in a social
and political climate that placed greater emphasis on math and science as core disciplines;
second, the invention of new American choral standards and a canonical body of repertoire

69
Paul W. Peterson, “So Your Choir Wants to Go to Europe Next Summer: An Open Letter from an Experienced
Traveler,” The Choral Journal 9, no. 4 (1969): 39, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543195; “Service Sources for
Touring Choirs,” The Choral Journal 13, no. 3 (1972): 6, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543069; “Concerning News
for the Choral Journal,” The Choral Journal 13, no. 3 (1972): C2, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543879.
70
Morris Hayes, “President’s Open Letter To the Membership,” The Choral Journal 13, no. 7 (1973): 4,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543924.
71
Hayes.
31
grounded in the myth of a Judeo-Christian Western heritage; third, the deliberate marginalization
of popular music and “non-Western” music in the service of protecting new standards of choral
excellence; and fourth, the beginnings of international touring as a form of choral education and
diplomacy (or propaganda). These trends would lay the groundwork for American choir
directors’ responses to multiple changes and upheavals that rocked the choral field in the
aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. The remainder of this chapter will explore the rise of
multiculturalism during the culture wars, focusing on the growing awareness of racial and ethnic
exclusion in the choral field, increased exposure to choral music repertoire and practices outside
“the West,” and the threat of widespread budget cuts to music programs during the education
reform movement at the end of the century.

An Expanding World: Multiculturalism, the Choral Canon, and the Culture Wars
On March 4, 1971, ACDA President Charles Hirt delivered an unusual address at the
biennial ACDA National Convention, held that year in Kansas City. Speaking to an audience of
1,600, which included “more than 800 ACDA members, 100 Student Members, several hundred
members of the various performing groups, and over 250 wives, guests, and exhibitors,” Hirt
said, “It is a crazy, turbulent period in which to live, isn’t it? Is there any precedent in history to
help us understand what’s happening?”
72
Without naming any names, policies, ideologies, or
movements, Hirt reflected on the “violent changes” that “have shaken our nation and the world”
since ACDA’s founding in 1959.
73
He acknowledged the feelings of fear, insecurity, bafflement,

72
“First Independent Convention Proves Highly Successful,” The Choral Journal 11, no. 8 (1971): 11,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543611; Charles C. Hirt, “President’s Open Letter To the Membership: Convention
Address, Kansas City, Missouri, March 4, 1971,” The Choral Journal 11, no. 8 (1971): 4,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543609.
73
Hirt, “President’s Open Letter To the Membership: Convention Address, Kansas City, Missouri, March 4, 1971,”
4.
32
and excitement felt by choir directors nationwide, and he placed those feelings within the context
of extreme social and global change:

A growing one-world concept is replacing the parochial one, with a consequent
reassessment of values and a consequent conflict between the so-called
establishment and youth, between races, classes of people and nations. We are
experiencing a social earthquake with continuing vicious aftershocks!
74

Hirt did not elaborate on the origins of this “social earthquake” in his speech. However, we can
infer that he was most likely speaking of the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Vietnam War, widespread antiwar protests and
violent police crackdowns, the Stonewall Uprising, the beginning of the modern gay rights
movement, and concurrent racial justice movements in the Black, Asian, Latin American, Native
American, and Jewish communities. In the spring of 1971, American choir directors could look
in any direction and see society in open rebellion against the myth of a unified, patriotic, Judeo-
Christian nation held together by the belief in a common Western heritage.
How could American choir directors respond to societal changes that so explicitly
challenged the world view upon which ACDA was founded? In his speech, Hirt offered three
proposals. First, he called on ACDA to “re-define [its] goals as an organization” and help choir
directors across the country “strengthen our faith in ourselves and in the power implicit in our
art.”
75
Second, he urged ACDA members to renew efforts to connect with young people and to
try to understand their values and desires: “Youth is not liberal—it is radical, and it will not
tolerate compromising overtures. There is a new spiritual quest among these youth! … We must
try to understand it and to temper it by making available to them the wisdom which we have

74
Hirt, 5.
75
Hirt, 6.
33
acquired through years of experience.”
76
Third, Hirt challenged ACDA to “move aggressively to
encourage and develop new, vigorous leadership among our members, leadership which will
help us pursue new social commitments with deeper and broader vision.”
77
In sum, Hirt
encouraged his audience to respond to “these chaotic years” with openness, engagement, and a
renewed commitment to the choral art and the mission of ACDA.
78

Beginning in the early 1970s, numerous essays, articles, and speeches like Hirt’s address
to the National Convention illuminate the ways in which American choral culture was grappling
with a rapidly changing and expanding world. The encroachment of jazz and show choir into
school music programs, the rise of avant-garde and experimental choral music, and the growth of
the international choral scene all posed thorny challenges to the canon of “traditional” choral
music promoted by ACDA in its founding years. Above all, widespread social and political
upheaval forced American choir directors into growing awareness of racial and ethnic
marginalization in the choral discipline, which eventually paved the way for the acceptance of
multiculturalism as a concept in the late 1980s. Throughout these years, choral literature was a
central source of controversy in debates between self-appointed defenders of “the American
past” and an increasingly vocal minority of Black ACDA members who demanded greater
inclusion and representation of “ethnic” music.
79
Yet these decades-long contests did not lead to
efforts to diversify choral literature as an academic discipline, as will be discussed in Chapters 2
and 4.

76
Hirt, 7.
77
Hirt, 8.
78
Hirt, 4.
79
“We artists and teachers could have quite a stake in these next three years of preparation and realizations, for in a
sense we are trustees of the American past and guardians of its future…The past is our culture and no great
technological revolution can be allowed to rob us of it.” Gregg Smith, “The Bi-Centennial Celebration: A Look
Forward and Backward,” The Choral Journal 13, no. 4 (1972): 6, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543862.
34
One month after Charles Hirt’s 1971 convention speech in Kansas City, Albert McNeil
delivered a blistering critique of racial exclusion in American choral culture in an address at the
Western Division convention of the Music Educators National Conference (MENC, now named
the National Association for Music Education or NAfME). McNeil, a Black music professor at
the University of California, Davis, would later be known for his careerlong dedication to the
performance and preservation of African American spirituals.
80
In contrast to Hirt’s general
description of the “chaos” and “turmoil” facing American choral culture, McNeil explicitly
named every leading choral organization in “the reigning establishment” as a “white power
structure” in need of serious reform.
81
Calling on his white colleagues to recognize “the
magnitude of the social problems facing currently the blacks, [C]hicanos, Asian-Americans,
Indians, and Jews in our society today,” McNeil declared, “It is impossible for a younger
generation… to take over, intact, the social and cultural heritage that an older generation has
handed on by a process of education… It is impossible for America’s minority groups to accept a
subservient role in shaping this country’s destiny.”
82

While The Choral Journal did not publish any articles or letters responding to McNeil’s
statement in the following months, the rest of the 1970s saw a significant increase in the number
of articles addressing the music of Black composers and the concerns of Black choir directors.
83

80
“Remembering Albert J. McNeil, Professor Emeritus,” 2022,
https://arts.ucdavis.edu/announcement/remembering-albert-j-mcneil-professor-emeritus.
81
“This organization, ACDA. SCVA, MENC, the Musicians’ Union, AFTRA, AGMA–you name it–they are all
representative of the white ‘power structure.’ Hence, attendance by minorities at these meetings is sparse… What
have you done to encourage participation by your black, chicano, Asian-American associate, not as a ‘do-gooder,’
but as a seriously concerned person in building secure human relationships?” Albert J. McNeil, “Choral Music—A
Force in Social Change,” The Choral Journal 11, no. 9 (1971): 14, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543532.
82
McNeil, 13. McNeil’s article also notably included an extensive list of resources on Black music to help
conductors educate themselves.
83
For examples of these articles, see: Robert D. Herrema, “The Choral Works of Ulysses Kay,” The Choral Journal
11, no. 4 (1970): 5–10, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543321; Haywood Jr. Hygh, “The Fisk Jubilee Singers,” The
Choral Journal 12, no. 3 (1971): 18–19, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543577; Anthony C. Cappadonia, “Review of
Record of the Month: William Dawson Song Book, Black Heritage Series, Vol. II, Virginia State College Choir, Dr.
Eugene Thamon Simpson, Director,” The Choral Journal 11, no. 6 (1971): C3,
35
In addition, this decade saw the emergence of a new term, “ethnic music,” which was sometimes
used interchangeably with Black or “Afro-American” repertoire and sometimes used as an
umbrella term for all nonwhite idiomatic music. For example, in 1975, The Choral Journal
published an advertisement for summer workshops on “Techniques for Teaching Ethnic Music”
at Westminster Choir College.
84
Also in 1975, Frank Pooler used the term “trans-ethnic” to
discuss repertoire by “Australians who reflect an Asian point of view.”
85
In 1979, ACDA
President H. Royce Saltzman announced the establishment of a new National Committee
dedicated to “Ethnic Music and Minority Concerns,” led by the Black choral conductor Eugene
Simpson of Glassboro State University.
86
This committee became a significant platform for
projects, initiatives, and opinions aimed at improving diversity and inclusion, especially for
Black musicians. In 1981, the Ethnic Music and Minority Concerns committee presented its first
session at an ACDA National Convention, featuring a performance by the Albert McNeil Jubilee

http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543378; Dominique-Rene De Lerma, “A Selective List of Choral Music by Black
Composers,” The Choral Journal 12, no. 8 (1972): 5–6, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543452; Carl Harris, “The
Negro Spiritual: Stylistic Development Through Performance Practices,” The Choral Journal 13, no. 9 (1973): 15–
16, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544050; Arthur Lee Evans, “The Development of the Negro Spiritual as Choral
Art Music by Afro-American Composers with an Annotated Guide to the Performance of Selected Spirituals,” The
Choral Journal 15, no. 2 (1974): 16–17, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544485; “National Convention Theme to Be
Our American Choral Tradition,” The Choral Journal 15, no. 4 (1974): C2, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544667;
Richard Thomas Hadley, “The Published Choral Music of Ulysses Simpson Kay,” The Choral Journal 15, no. 5
(1975): 32, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544660; Horace Clarence Boyer, “An Analysis of Black Church Music
with Examples Drawn from Services in Rochester, New York,” The Choral Journal 16, no. 3 (1975): 23–24,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544723; Tilford Brooks, “A Historical Study of Black Music and Selected Twentieth
Century Black Composers and Their Role in American Society,” The Choral Journal 16, no. 3 (1975): 24,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544724; Carl Harris, “The Unique World of Undine Smith Moore: Teacher —
Composer — Arranger,” The Choral Journal 16, no. 5 (1976): 6–7, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544906; Daniel
Josef Brenner, “Review: Soul Music Black and White: The Influence of Black Music on the Churches, by Johannes
Riedel,” The Choral Journal 16, no. 9 (1976): 35, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544858; André Jerome Thomas, “A
Brief Analysis of Masses by Black Composers: Baker, Bonds, Ray, and Walker,” The Choral Journal 27, no. 5
(1986): 7–11, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23547149.
84
“Westminster,” The Choral Journal 15, no. 6 (1975): 18–19, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23544543.
85
Frank Pooler, “Where Are We Going?,” The Choral Journal 16, no. 1 (1975): 5,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544766.
86
H. Royce Saltzman, “President’s Comments,” The Choral Journal 20, no. 4 (1979): 4,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23545449.
36
Singers directed by Albert McNeil.
87
In 1983, Simpson, on behalf of the Ethnic Music and
Minority Concerns committee, contributed a forcefully worded article to The Choral Journal on
the offensiveness of racial slurs in choral music. Responding to colleagues and music editors
who erroneously believed that racial slurs were not only inoffensive but in fact inspired “Blacks
of the present day” to feel “pride in their historical background and the struggle and ascent which
the language marks,” Simpson presented the results of a survey of “sixty leading Afro-American
conductors and other musicians” who displayed unanimous agreement “that racially derogatory
terms in choral music are objectionable, that such terms do not imbue them with pride, and that
choral music using such texts should be revised or withdrawn from publication.”
88

These modest gains in the promotion of racial inclusion were accompanied by a
corresponding backlash from choir directors who felt that excessive attention to racial and
cultural inclusion was marginalizing the core repertory of the “Western tradition” that ACDA
had worked so hard to establish. In 1971, Marie Joy Curtiss acknowledged the new “world
picture” of diverse choral repertoire but centered the American choral tradition around historical
European “masterpieces,” arguing that the American choir director had a “strong responsibility”
to present to audiences “that which represents the best of what his tradition has preserved.”
89

Speaking to the myth of “the West,” Curtiss declared, “We have been part of the Western
tradition ever since our founding and have adapted these arts as our own.”
90
While choir
directors should exercise open-mindedness to “the voices of other parts of the world and to his
own popular expression,” this music was not “a safe total diet” because it would “come and go

87
John Van Nice, “ACDA Convention To Have Variety Of Interest Sessions,” The Choral Journal 21, no. 4 (1980):
13, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23545551.
88
Eugene Thamon Simpson, “From the National Committee on Ethnic And Minority Concerns: Raising Sensitivity
to Human Values in Choral Texts,” The Choral Journal 24, no. 4 (1983): 15, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23546316.
89
Marie Joy Curtiss, “Choral Singing: A Phenomenon of Western Musical Culture,” The Choral Journal 12, no. 3
(1971): 8, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543573.
90
Curtiss.
37
with each age.”
91
She therefore advised ACDA members to hold fast to their true identity as
stewards of a historic tradition against the tides of “a fast-changing society.”
92
In Curtiss’s view,
programming too much diverse music was unhealthy for American choirs: “We need the
‘vitamins’ of the tried and accepted choral literature.”
93
In 1972, the renowned conductor Roger
Wagner, director of the Roger Wagner Chorale, similarly advocated “balance” between “new
music” and “the great masterpieces” of the past: “Yes, we have extremists, but as leaders we
have to keep a sane outlook and a balanced outlook. We must neither close our minds to new
music, nor must we eliminate the great works of the past so that we deprive these young students
of the B minor Mass, and that sort of thing.”
94
Other choir directors went further in warning that
social revolution was actively erasing historical knowledge and destroying the treasures of
traditional choral music. In 1972, Gregg Smith lamented:

The revolutions have been many and, unfortunately as it so often happens in
revolution, many beautiful and worthy things are cast aside or even destroyed. I
fear personally for our young who are taught to believe that there are no wise men
of the past… I fear for the young people who believe, as some of their teachers
have taught, that the age of the masterpiece is through. I can believe only that
what we have in civilization that will be enduring… is the accumulation of the
wisdom of many wise men and great artists of the past.
95

For Smith, America’s European choral heritage was analogous with civilization itself––a view
that would eventually become a central conservative standpoint among American choir directors
during the culture wars.

91
Curtiss.
92
Curtiss.
93
Curtiss.
94
Roger Wagner and Ray Moremen, “In Quest of Answers: An Interview with Roger Wagner,” The Choral Journal
13, no. 2 (1972): 11, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544009.
95
Smith, “The Bi-Centennial Celebration: A Look Forward and Backward,” 7.
38
In contrast to both the Ethnic Music and Minority Concerns committee and conservative
opinions like those of Curtiss and Smith, some ACDA members followed a different path in their
response to the revolutionary spirit of the times: challenging hegemonic traditions by embracing
electronic, avant-garde, and experimental choral music. In 1972, Robert Carey celebrated “the
desire to assert freedom from discipline of any sort” that had been unleashed by recent
revolutions.
96
In a wide-ranging discussion of John Cage, Charles Ives, serialism, jazz, Japanese
Noh music, and the introduction of “musical elements alien to Western music” via globalism,
Carey concluded that the modern choral director had no choice but to step down “as a dictator of
the baton,” to assume a new responsibility to “cultivate novelty,” and to accept that modern
music had created “a situation in which the listener does not know what to expect and may never
find out.”
97

While Carey’s predictions certainly did not come true for all American choir directors,
his views were indicative of increasing acceptance of avant-garde and experimental repertoire as
the natural descendants of serious choral music. In his address to the 1973 ACDA National
Convention, ACDA President Morris Hayes expressed the growing, if reluctant consensus, that
this music was here to stay: “Do you and I find beauty in the ‘groans’ of Penderecki? Do we find
it in a ‘computer print-out’? Are we willing to accept as true in this age of technology that there
are other sounds that will make music that we don’t know of? Perhaps you do not, but I think the
majority of the youth of today do.”
98
Meanwhile, Julius Herford, the renowned American choral
teacher and director of graduate studies in the Indiana University choral conducting department,

96
Robert Carey, “Choral Music and the New Aesthetic,” The Choral Journal 13, no. 1 (1972): 8,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543838.
97
Carey, 11.
98
Morris Hayes, “President’s Address To the 1973 National Convention,” The Choral Journal 13, no. 8 (1973): 5,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543994.
39
admonished conductors who still harbored misgivings about “avant-garde” music. In a guest
editorial on the importance of investing in modern-day composers, Herford outlined a broad arc
of American choral development “from Gregorian Chant to the Avant-Garde music of the late
twentieth century” and warned colleagues that neglecting “the genius of the present” would place
Americans “in danger of losing our sensibility for the genius of the past, or even more for the
genius of man.”
99

By the 1975 ACDA National Convention, “modern music” was well-represented in
performances by multiple invited choirs. As the Reverend Ralph March commented in a review
of the convention, “A good many works employed tape sounds, Moog-type noise makers,
speaking voices, shouts, hissing, clapping, stomping and other non-musical effects… I must
admit that they seldom seemed contrived to me and, almost without exception, they were uttered
or done with amazing precision and stunning effect.”
100
Avant-garde music achieved acceptance
not only in The Choral Journal and at ACDA conventions, but also in the ivory tower of
academia. As the next chapter will discuss, some of the most widely-used choral literature survey
textbooks published after the 1970s include ample coverage of avant-garde and experimental
choral music, despite the almost uniform exclusion of “popular” choral music (e.g., jazz, gospel,
and show choir), Jewish repertoire, and music outside the United States and Europe.
Alongside the “ethnic music” and “new music” movements, “non-Western” repertoire
also began gaining traction. This interest in “non-Western” repertoire was fueled by an
exponential increase in international touring, this time extending far beyond well-established
popular destinations in western Europe like England, France, and Germany. Throughout the

99
Julius Herford, “Guest Editorial,” The Choral Journal 12, no. 5 (1972): 2, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543548.
100
Rev. Ralph S. March, “The 1975 ACDA Convention,” The Choral Journal 16, no. 2 (1975): 2,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544518.
40
1970s and 1980s, The Choral Journal reported on numerous choir tours to eastern Europe,
China, Japan, Israel, India, and Latin America, as well as international research trips and cultural
diplomacy missions undertaken by individual ACDA members or delegations of American choir
directors. These missions inspired many ACDA members to write detailed articles on the choirs,
repertoire, and performance practices of “non-Western” nations, often also providing
commentary on America’s isolation from “non-Western” choral traditions. In 1972, Douglas
Pritchard contributed an extensive commentary on Swedish choirs and choral music, noting that
“Sweden’s remote geographical location” and “American and continental European musical
establishments’ preoccupation with their own music” had given American conductors “little
opportunity to learn of the new music in Sweden.”
101
In 1976, William Ermey led the Brown
University Chorus on a tour of India and Nepal and contributed a long article on the choirs of
India upon returning home “in an attempt to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of non-
Western choral styles, techniques, and repertoire.”
102
Acknowledging that the existence of
“organizations similar to our own” in “third world countries” might “come as something of a
shock” to ACDA members, Ermey proceeded to describe in detail a variety of choral
organizations in India––both those devoted to “Western” music and those specializing in Indian
classical music and arrangements of Indian folk music.
103
In 1979, Ermey contributed another
article following a Brown University Chorus tour to China, stating: “Yes, there are choirs in
China. Many of them. And they are good at what they do… That it comes as such a surprise is

101
W. Douglas Pritchard, “Report From Sweden: Part II The New Music,” The Choral Journal 12, no. 6 (1972): 5,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543677.
102
William Ermey, “Choral Practice in India Today,” The Choral Journal 17, no. 8 (1977): 5,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544239.
103
Ermey, 5.
41
perhaps a comment more on Western cultural chauvinism than on the barrier imposed thirty
years ago by the Bamboo Curtain.”
104

The 1970s and 1980s also saw the birth of a monumental new tradition that greatly
accelerated acceptance of “non-Western” choral literature: the international choir festival.
Throughout this period, ACDA showed high interest in hosting choirs from other countries and
participating in choir festivals with other nations, ultimately playing an instrumental role in the
establishment of the International Federation for Choral Music (IFCM) in 1982 and IFCM’s
subsequent launch of the first Worldwide Symposium on Choral Music in 1987. Whereas the
ACDA of the 1960s was focused primarily on the establishment of a coherent American choral
heritage based in historical European repertoire, the ACDA of the 1970s and 1980s increasingly
valued “the achievements in choral music that have been and are being made by our counterparts
in countries throughout the world and the good that can come through cooperation and
partnership.”
105
This view reflected growing awareness of an expansive world of choral
traditions and the benefits of opening up American choral culture to international exchange.
Noting ACDA’s robust international membership of more than 300 conductors from other
countries, ACDA President Colleen Kirk wrote in 1981 on the eve of the establishment of the
IFCM that “ACDA does have a responsibility to establish communication with choral
federations and associations in other countries; that it has much to learn as well as much to
give.”
106

104
William Ermey, “The Choral Scene in China 1979: An Observation,” The Choral Journal 20, no. 4 (1979): 5,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23545450.
105
Colleen Kirk, “President’s Comments,” The Choral Journal 21, no. 5 (1981): 4,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23545507.
106
Kirk.
42
In 1988, after the successful completion of the first Worldwide Symposium on Choral
Music, IFCM President and former ACDA President Royce Saltzman contributed a guest
column in place of current ACDA President David Thorsen’s usual monthly open letter in The
Choral Journal. Celebrating the rise of a truly “global family,” Saltzman explained the mission
of IFCM:

IFCM’s primary function is to facilitate the exchange of choral literature,
research, workshops, conductors, and choirs. It serves as a vehicle to promote
cooperation between countries through choral music and to enhance the
understanding about repertoire and performance practice as they relate to various
cultural traditions… I encourage ACDA members and their choirs to join IFCM
and become part of this global choral community. Yesterday was where our
respective choirs rehearsed and performed; today it is where choral colleagues in
Africa, Asia, Latin and North America, Eastern and Western Europe are
rehearsing and performing. IFCM makes possible a blending together of these
choirs that is capable of producing harmony in a world of discord.
107

In other words, through IFCM, American choir directors could become a part of a new global
community and experience a worldview that emphasized cultural exchange over American and
“Western” exclusion. These values coincided with the emergence of a new concept in choral
culture: multiculturalism. In 1987, the same year as the first Worldwide Symposium on Choral
Music, Gail Mottola contributed the first ACDA article on the value of an “intercultural” choral
program. Defining an “intercultural concert” as a performance that “presents music, sung in its
original language, from at least 6 cultures, including non-western,” Mottola argued that the
benefits of such an approach were obvious: “The need for the American student to have more
cultural and lingual awareness is evident, due to media coverage of world events as well as the
increase in international political and trade agreements.”
108

107
Royce Saltzman, “President’s Comments,” The Choral Journal 28, no. 10 (1988): 2,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23547713.
108
Mottola, “The Intercultural Concert: A New Approach.”
43
While “intercultural” music was a novel concept for ACDA, multiculturalism had been
an established concept in music education circles for at least fifteen years. In 1972, Music
Educators Journal, a peer-reviewed journal produced by the Music Educators National
Conference (MENC), dedicated an entire issue to the topic, followed by more special issues on
multiculturalism in 1983 and 1992.
109
The late emergence of multiculturalism in the American
choral scene coincided with the ascendant movement in “ethnic” music and racial inclusion,
quickly creating an environment in which multicultural, “ethnic,” and “minority” music were
grouped together as a single cause falling under the responsibility of the Ethnic Music and
Minority Concerns committee. In 1988, the committee noted that “choral conductors have
become increasingly aware of the necessity of the inclusion of multi-cultural choral music,” but
many conductors complained about “their lack of knowledge of repertoire” and the lack of
“sources to assist them in the acquisition of musical scores.”
110
In response to this need, the
committee announced that it would prepare a resource on “performance practices of ethnic
music” and “a repertory list indexed by ethnic categories.”
111

By 1991, multicultural music was well-established as a subgenre of choral repertoire
under the purview of the Ethnic Music and Minority Concerns committee. It was also clearly
conceptualized as separate from “standard” or “traditional” repertoire. That year, ACDA
President William Hatcher reminded ACDA’s more than 15,000 members that “the Ethnic and
Minority Concerns committee can be of service to those who need to know music of various
cultures as well as to the minority members themselves,” implicitly naming “music of various

109
“Music in World Cultures,” Music Educators Journal 59, no. 2 (1972), https://www.jstor.org/stable/i367677;
“The Multicultural Imperative,” Music Educators Journal 69, no. 9 (1983), https://www.jstor.org/stable/i367761;
“Special Focus: Multicultural Music Education,” Music Educators Journal 78, no. 9 (1992),
https://www.jstor.org/stable/i367838.
110
“Ethnic Music and Minority Concerns Committee,” The Choral Journal 29, no. 4 (1988): 32,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23547383.
111
“Ethnic Music and Minority Concerns Committee.”
44
cultures” as a niche interest.
112
In the same issue of The Choral Journal, James Kinchen, the
chair of the Ethnic Music and Minority Concerns committee, expressed concerns “about the
cause and status of multicultural choral issues in ACDA” and questioned “ACDA’s commitment
to fulfilling the constituency’s needs.”
113
Perhaps acknowledging the ways in which ACDA had
separated and marginalized “ethnic” and multicultural music from standard or traditional
repertoire, Kinchen stated, “Many things in our choral community even in 1991 work against
inclusiveness, equality, diversity, progressive racial attitudes, opportunity and access, respect for
other cultures, respect for the dignity of ‘minority’ peoples, etc.”
114

Nevertheless, multiculturalism continued to gather momentum as an important concept in
the choral world. By 1993, the Ethnic Music and Minority Concerns committee had been
renamed the Committee on Ethnic and Multicultural Perspectives. The committee’s new chair,
Marvin Curtis, wrote a guest editorial for The Choral Journal to promote the benefits of
engaging with multiculturalism. “Multicultural music offers the possibility of adventure––a
marvelous adventure that celebrates the creativity of the human spirit,” Curtis wrote.
“Adventures are not always easy, but the journey is usually worthwhile—you are never the same
once you have been on one.”
115
Curtis acknowledged that multiculturalism challenged ACDA’s
worldview, and he reassured readers that to “deal with multiculturalism” did not mean
“abandonment of the literature with which we grew up as singers and directors.”
116
Instead, it
posed an invitation “to augment that repertoire and experience something new.”
117
By the

112
William Hatcher, “From the President,” The Choral Journal 32, no. 5 (1991): 3,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23548335.
113
James Kinchen, “Ethnic Music and Minority Concerns,” The Choral Journal 32, no. 5 (1991): 43,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23548343.
114
Kinchen, 44.
115
John Silantien and Marvin Curtis, “From the Editor,” The Choral Journal 33, no. 10 (1993): 6,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23549436.
116
Silantien and Curtis.
117
Silantien and Curtis.
45
following year, however, Curtis asked American choir directors to go even further and examine
the ways in which adherence to a “Western European choral tradition” had marginalized
minority singers, depriving them of standards they otherwise might have inherited from other
traditions.
118
Curtis asked why “the idea of standards” should relate “only to the performance of
European music” and pointed out lessons to be learned from historically Black colleges and
universities:

They, perhaps, became the best ambassadors of multiculturalism when no one
else knew the word. These schools were told that there was only one standard––a
Western European one by which music was to be judged. The musical
contributions of African-Americans were not discussed in college and university
textbooks. In spite of this, the spiritual lived on and continues to live today.
119

Curtis was asking for a radical change to the American conception of choral standards––he was
advocating for minoritized and multicultural music to be considered on equal footing with “the
Western European choral tradition,” and for American choir directors to consider the possibility
that new standards could be found “in studying the music of our own traditions and our students’
traditions.”
120
In the year 1994, however, there was little chance for this vision to come to
fruition. Curtis’s call to decanonize choral literature remains relevant to choral literature
pedagogy today, as will be discussed in Chapter 4.
Along with the rise of avant-garde music and the burgeoning jazz and show choir
movement, “ethnic” and multicultural music were part of a tidal wave of change that further
destabilized notions of a unified American “Judeo-Christian” choral tradition rooted in “Western
culture.” Faced with compounding challenges to an older status quo, conservative-leaning

118
Marvin V. Curtis, “Ethnic and Multicultural Perspectives,” The Choral Journal 34, no. 8 (1994): 39,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23549777.
119
Curtis.
120
Curtis.
46
members in the American choral scene were primed to participate in a significant backlash by
the time choral music finally became implicated in the culture wars at the end of the century. As
early as 1982, American choir directors began expressing apprehension about “proposed federal
cutbacks for the arts” under the Reagan administration that threatened “dramatic and far reaching
negative impacts on choral music at every level.”
121
By the mid-1980s, a vocal contingent of
ACDA members were beginning to draw connections between federal and state budget cuts in
the arts and the notion that American choir directors had lost their sense of purpose. In the
January 1985 issue of The Choral Journal, ACDA President Maurice Casey called ACDA’s
attention to “problems that plague us today in the name of budget cuts, elimination of programs,
etc.,” and placed the responsibility on choir directors themselves to resist “the influences of
commercialism, of entertainment” and rededicate themselves to the choral standards that were
ACDA’s original mission. Securing the future of arts funding, Casey argued, lay in upholding
tradition: “You have a rich heritage of several hundred years to preserve and to celebrate. The
vitality of your choral ancestry needs to become a part of your experience and fibre. It is the key
to your successful future and to the future of choral music.”
122

By the early 1990s, when funding for the arts came under fierce public attack, ACDA’s
leadership decided that a coordinated defense of choral values and standards was necessary for
choral music programs to “survive this crisis.”
123
In 1989, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and
Robert Mapplethorpe’s “The Perfect Moment”––two controversial artworks that were connected
to organizations with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)––had prompted

121
“The Editor’s Notebook No. 8,” The Choral Journal 22, no. 8 (1982): 3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23545918;
“The Editor’s Notebook,” The Choral Journal 23, no. 7 (1983): 3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23546171.
122
Maurice Casey, “1985 ACDA National Convention,” The Choral Journal 25, no. 5 (1985): 3,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23546770.
123
William Hatcher, “From the President,” The Choral Journal 32, no. 2 (1991): 3,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23548237.
47
a firestorm of political criticism, including a speech from presidential candidate Pat Buchanan
calling for Congress to “close, padlock, and fumigate” the NEA.
124
Then, in the spring of 1991,
President Bush announced “America 2000,” an education reform plan that completely omitted
the arts from basic school curricula. That fall, ACDA President William Hatcher wrote to The
Choral Journal readership, “I am bewildered and dismayed by the assault upon education in our
country!” Calling on ACDA to “use the strength of our numbers to defend, yea, promote that
which we so strongly believe in,” Hatcher vowed, “Music must be taught on a level of such
legitimacy that the public would not dare to cut it from the curriculum… If we wait until the
public corrects us, it will be too late.”
125
In response to the public relations crisis faced by the
arts, Hatcher proposed the formation of ACDA ACTION, “a committee of members who are
interested in exploring ways in which our organization can influence the public and government
toward a better awareness and support of choral music.”
126

The “America 2000” crisis prompted several significant changes in the way choral
standards were conceptualized by American choral directors throughout the 1990s. Many ACDA
members intensified attacks on “entertainment” or “commercial” music (frequently used as
euphemisms for jazz and show choir music) and emphasized the importance of upholding the
value of choral music as a “fine art.” To conservatives who believed that the historical European
canon provided the strongest antidote to the crisis of standards in choral music, the value of
“aesthetics” took on a new and potent meaning. For instance, in 1992, Randall Gill argued that
all choir directors should work with “repertoire that contains significant aesthetic value.”
127

124
Michael C. Dorf, “Artifactions: The Battle over the National Endowment for the Arts,” The Brookings Review
11, no. 1 (1993): 32, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/artifactions-battle-over-national-endowment-
arts/docview/195565461/se-2.
125
Hatcher, “From the President,” 1991.
126
Hatcher.
127
Randall Gill, “Understanding and Applying Aesthetics,” The Choral Journal 33, no. 1 (1992): 22,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23548776.
48
Cautioning colleagues against choosing music “that is created primarily for commercial
reasons,” Gill argued that programming historical repertoire was the surest way to increase the
aesthetic value of their work: “Fine art has the capacity to transcend time and remain eternally
relevant to human experience… many of the works that have established themselves as audience
favorites over the years have achieved that popularity because they meet the very aesthetic
requirements we have been addressing.
128
Meanwhile, ACDA’s leadership devoted significant
energy to providing a powerful “justification of the choral art” to the American public and the
government.
129
The ACDA Advocacy Commission (the result of Hatcher’s proposal for an
ACDA ACTION committee) was created and dedicated to “dispelling a cultural perception that
music and the arts are a ‘nice frill’” by “aligning ACDA with other organizations to increase the
size of a lobby for music.”
130
This coalition, including the National Association of Music
Merchants (NAMM), National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), and Music
Educators National Conference (MENC), successfully lobbied for the inclusion of the arts in a
new education reform plan: Goals 2000, the Clinton administration’s Educate America Act of
1994.
131
A second coalition, the Coalition of National Arts Education Associations, created the
National Standards for Arts Education, which have played a key role in shaping arts education
across the country to the present day.
As the choral field faced intensifying pressure to define and defend the value of choral
music, the cause of multiculturalism and minority representation was redirected. Instead of
realizing the vision laid out by Marvin Curtis, in which the standards of diverse musics could be

128
Gill, 24.
129
Haberlen, “Volunteerism at Its Very Best.”
130
Haberlen.
131
“Advocacy Report: Where Do We Go from Here? Music Education in Mid-Passage,” The Choral Journal 35, no.
7 (1995): 39–40, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23549896.
49
valued on their own terms, multiculturalism was transformed into a concept that encompassed
not only marginalized and “non-Western” music but all repertoire. In 1994, Joshua Jacobson
wrote an article on the importance of diversity in which multiculturalism was ironically
reconceptualized as a way to raise awareness of the choral canon. In Jacobson’s view, historical
European repertoire should be the priority of the multicultural agenda: “My first fear is that
Western European art music now represents a culture that is alien to most of our students. So we
can begin our multicultural education by programming repertoire that is foreign to most
Americans––music by composers such as Palestrina, Handel, Bach, Mozart, and Ravel.”
132
In
1995, ACDA President Lynn Whitten similarly warned that canonical European repertoire was
being outbalanced by overzealous efforts at inclusion: “In an attempt to be inclusive and broad-
minded, we must not exclude the very music that is the heart of our art!”
133
This renewed interest
in protecting the “heart” of choral repertoire was widely shared: following the 1995 ACDA
National Convention, a majority of respondents to an evaluation form “complained about the
plethora of post-1950s music performed and the dearth of music from the historical past.”
134

In terms of choral literature standards, one of the most consequential results of the arts
funding crises of the culture wars was thus a pivot back towards the historical European canon,
often in the guise of promoting multiculturalism and inclusion. Even while the Ethnic and
Multicultural Perspectives committee continued to facilitate groundbreaking work in the area of
marginalized and minoritized music, this second, contradictory usage of multiculturalism
enabled other choir directors to hold fast to the old ideal of a historical Western canon while

132
Joshua Jacobson, “On the Trail of Beauty and Grace: Some Thoughts on Standards,” The Choral Journal 35, no.
2 (1994): 17–20, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23550507.
133
Lynn Whitten, “From the President,” The Choral Journal 36, no. 1 (1995): 3,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23550935.
134
Lynn Whitten, “From the President,” The Choral Journal 36, no. 2 (1995): 3,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23550440.
50
paying lip service to the importance of diversity and inclusion. In this way, multiculturalism
allowed choir directors to offer modest support to the promotion of popular, international, and
minority music while distancing American choral culture from a radical or “politically correct”
agenda. In 1997, Robert Provencio, the Chair of the Western Division of ACDA, rejected the
idea that “the use of multicultural choral music” amounted to “a form of political correctness” or
“choral affirmative action.”
135
On the contrary, he stated that “all music is multicultural. Bach’s
Christ lag in Todesbanden is a product of eighteenth-century Germany and Escalada’s
Tangueando reflects the culture of twentieth-century Argentina. Each is properly the domain of
our choirs today not for political reasons but because each piece celebrates an essential, universal
human expression, and, simply stated, each is superb music.”
136
In similar fashion, Anthony
Palmer acknowledged in 1999 that it was “increasingly difficult” for choir directors to ignore
“the multicultural emphasis in music education” but offered an accessible way out of this
quandary: “Examining the range of world musics compatible with the Western choral form
would be a reasonable start. For example, African-American spirituals are indigenous to
American culture and, therefore, well within the boundaries. Japanese contemporary choral
music sounds much like Western choral music except for language. Much of European music fits
the profile.”
137
Thus, at the end of the century, American choir directors were gaining new
awareness and acceptance of a wide world of choral traditions while simultaneously using
concepts of multiculturalism and inclusion to reinforce a standard repertory of historical
European literature.

135
Robert Provencio, “Ethnic and Multicultural Perspectives: An Open Letter on Multicultural Choral Music,” The
Choral Journal 37, no. 8 (1997): 44, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23551364.
136
Provencio, 45.
137
Anthony J. Palmer, “Ethnic Musics in Choral Performance: A Perspective on Problems,” The Choral Journal 40,
no. 5 (1999): 9, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23553092.
51
Conclusion: The Resilience of the Choral Canon
By ACDA’s fortieth birthday, seismic forces had changed the American choral
landscape. Contrary to Russell Mathis’s belief, politics were anything but absent in ACDA’s
journey. Under the shadow of the Cold War, an existential need for arts advocacy combined with
widespread efforts to establish a unified American identity in the face of communism played a
significant role in the construction of a mythological Judeo-Christian Western choral heritage.
This concept of heritage resulted in a durable body of canonical repertoire, practices, and beliefs
centered in historical Christian and European choral forms and genres, which then faced multiple
compounding challenges during the 1970s and 1980s in the form of avant-garde music, the jazz
and show choir movement, the birth of the international choral scene, growing awareness of
racial and cultural exclusion in the choral field, and the rise of multiculturalism as a new reality.
As the culture wars forced choir directors into pitched public battles over the value of their work,
however, the resilience of America’s adopted choral heritage became evident. Even as diverse
forms of popular, experimental, culturally idiomatic, and international repertoire increasingly
gained attention and acceptance throughout the country, the century ended with the American
choral art still anchored in the Cold War era canon of historical European masterworks.

52
Chapter 2: A Review of Choral Literature Textbooks Published from 1962 –2023

Introduction: Canon Formation in Choral Literature
In the latter half of the twentieth century, as multiple social and political revolutions
reverberated through American society, the increasingly powerful recording industry
dramatically increased the availability and reproducibility of popular music, giving rise to many
new and distinct musical canons that challenged the cultural clout of the classical music sphere.
In a humorously excoriating 1998 article, musicologist Robert Fink observed that “the entire
budget of Sony’s classical music subsidiary is less money than the conglomerate has tied up in a
single unstable pop star like Michael Jackson,” concluding wryly that classical musicians “have
lost control of what constitutes ‘art music’” and that “the canon of Western classical music is
now just one among many, and not the most culturally prestigious anymore, at least in
America.”
1
Fink argued that popular music had arguably already won the battle for cultural
relevance. While musicologists were spending their time “nerving ourselves up to challenge the
awesome cultural power of the Great Works,” that same music was already regarded as
“marketing fodder” or even “totally ignored” outside the Music Department.
2

At the time his article was published, the field of musicology had been debating the
relevance of the classical canon for fifteen years. Following Joseph Kerman’s groundbreaking
article on canon formation in 1983, the field of musicology had begun to shift from the study of
“grand narratives” to “local, multi-voiced and discursive accounts” of music.
3
Many

1
Robert Fink, “Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon,” American
Music 16, no. 2 (1998): 139, 146, 148, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/elvis-everywhere-musicology-
popular-music-studies/docview/215872493/se-2.
2
Fink, 142.
3
Vesa Kurkela and Juha Markus Mantere, Critical Music Historiography : Probing Canons, Ideologies and
Institutions, book, ed. Vesa Kurkela and Juha Markus Mantere (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 2.
53
musicologists in the 1990s were grappling with Kerman’s now-famous questions regarding the
source of status itself: “How are canons determined, why, and on what authority?”
4
These
questions paved the way for contemporary musicology, which is now all but “unanimous in its
deconstruction of canons, norms and conventions.”
5
Since Fink’s 1998 article, new scholarship
has established the ways in which “[n]ationalistic historiographies of music” have valued and
therefore canonized “symphonic music, religious music and authentic folk music,” relegating
“popular music, music of ethnic minorities and music by composers outside classical or national
canons” to the periphery.
6
As Markus Mantere and Vesa Kurkela note in the introduction to their
2015 anthology, Critical Music Historiography: Probing Canons, Ideologies and Institutions,
postmodern scholarship in the humanities largely accepts as “unquestioned reality” that “there is,
indeed, no history ‘as it actually happened.’”
7
Instead, there are competing narratives of
historical events, each of which “only tells one possible version of the ‘truth.’”
8

In contrast to this evolution of disciplinary practice in musicology, canons continue to
form the backbone of academic studies of choral literature. As this chapter will discuss, nearly
every major choral literature text published between the 1960s to the present is explicitly based
upon the concept of a choral canon: i.e. a body of composers, repertoire, and practices that
together comprise the foundation of a hegemonic “Western” choral tradition. In policing the
boundaries of this canon, choral literature textbooks repeatedly define “Western choral music”
(often used synonymously with “choral music”) as a largely European-American musical genre
that excludes well-established forms of popular vocal ensemble music, such as vocal jazz, choral

4
Joseph Kerman, “A Few Canonic Variations,” Critical Inquiry 10, no. 1 (1983): 124,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343408.
5
Kurkela and Mantere, Critical Music Historiography : Probing Canons, Ideologies and Institutions, 9.
6
Kurkela and Mantere, 9.
7
Kurkela and Mantere, 2.
8
Kurkela and Mantere, 2.
54
jazz, gospel music, and show choir, as well as the music of Canada and Latin America, which are
generally not considered part of “the West” despite being part of the western hemisphere. Some
choral literature texts published during this period acknowledge the existence of Jewish choral
music and music outside the United States and Europe, but nearly all deny this repertoire’s
importance or relevance in advanced studies of Western choral literature by omitting key
composers or repertoire, or by according this music a minimal amount of coverage compared to
Christian and European historical works, as will be discussed below. Having established a
historical context for the resilience of canonicity in American choral culture in the previous
chapter, I use this chapter to examine both explicit and implicit definitions of choral music and
choral “masterworks” in prominent choral literature textbooks published between 1962 and
present, taking this body of writing as a site in which historically contingent notions of Western
choral heritage and canonicity have been created, reinforced, and occasionally disrupted.
This discussion interrogates canonicity in choral literature through several different
themes. First, I examine the ways in which “choral music” is implicitly defined through
European compositional techniques and bel canto singing practices, and the subsequent
implications for the inclusion or exclusion of popular, indigenous, non-European, non-American,
and non-Christian literature. Second, I consider the role of choral literature as an academic
subject for choral conducting students, and the resulting ways in which choral literature texts
seek to serve both a scholarly, musicological purpose (educating students about historical
repertoire and performance practices) and a practical purpose (providing a useful repertoire guide
for choir directors). Third, I seek to illuminate a tradition in which authors of choral literature
texts have drawn heavily upon personal teaching and performance experience to generate
scholarly information, which has resulted in blurred boundaries between opinion and fact and an
55
inconsistent acknowledgement of bias, scope, and sources. Finally, I consider each work within
the context of the choral field’s evolution from the conservative adherence to a canon in the
1960s to an increasingly widespread endorsement of multiculturalism in the twenty-first century.
Since choral literature does not have established methods or a tradition of historiography, I posit
that it is therefore a discipline that continues to be highly susceptible to being unconsciously or
unknowingly shaped by received ideas about canonicity, even while those ideas have lost value
in the present day. Examining these roots of canonicity in the choral literature field will lay the
groundwork for my discussion of decanonizing and decolonizing choral literature pedagogy and
curriculum design in Chapter 4.
The chapter will focus on eight choral literature survey textbooks: Percy Young’s The
Choral Tradition (1962, revised edition in 1981), Arthur Jacobs’s Choral Music: A Symposium
(1963), Homer Ulrich’s A Survey of Choral Music (1973), Robert Garretson’s Choral Music:
History, Style, and Performance Practice (1993), Nick Strimple’s Choral Music in the Twentieth
Century (2002) and Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century (2008), Dennis Shrock’s Choral
Repertoire (2009, second edition published in 2023), and Chester Alwes’s A History of Western
Choral Music, Volumes 1 & 2 (2015 and 2016). Each of these volumes is well-known in the
choral field, and a majority include a preface or foreword stating the author’s intention for the
book to serve as a resource for choral literature education. The volumes by Strimple, Shrock, and
Alwes are the most commonly used choral literature reference books in the choral field today,
and all three authors are known in the choral field for their careerlong work as instructors of
graduate choral literature.
9

9
Strimple’s, Shrock’s, and Alwes’s books are the most frequently mentioned choral literature textbooks in The
Choral Journal. As discussed later in the chapter, contemporaneous reviews of Shrock’s and Alwes’s texts make
clear references to the outdated reputation of earlier texts, such as those by Ulrich and Jacobs, characterizing
Strimple’s, Shrock’s, and Alwes’s volumes as long-awaited reference books. Andrew Minear’s 2017 doctoral
56
In discussing each text, I will borrow vocabulary on canon types from Edward Komara,
who synthesized scholarship on canonicity by two literary scholars, Alastair Fowler and Wendell
Harris, and adapted their terminology for musicological use.
10
Komara proposed ten ways of
understanding canons in music, four of which I will apply to this study of choral literature:
11

1) Official canons: “‘standard’ lists promoted and ‘institutionalized through education,
patronage, and journalism,’” as exemplified by the “standard repertory” typically covered
in graduate choral literature classes;
2) Personal canons: “what individual readers subjectively ‘know and value,’” a definition
that is applicable to personal lists of “great works” that every musician “ought to know”
assembled by individual professors and choral conductors;
3) Critical canons: “works repeatedly treated in critical articles or books,” such as works
like the Bach B minor Mass, which receive regular attention in academic choral articles,
lectures, conferences, and interest sessions;
4) Diachronic canons: “the timeless core canon such as that studied in college Great Books
curricula,” analogous to the notion of timeless “choral masterworks” that are assured an
eternal place of status in the choral world, regardless of how frequently or infrequently
they are performed or studied.
12

Komara notes that some canons are classifiable in multiple categories. Rather than trying to force
a text into a single designation, I also take “multi-classification” as a useful concept in examining
diverse treatments and understandings of the choral canon.
13

dissertation finds Strimple’s, Shrock’s, and Alwes’s books to be the most commonly-used required texts in graduate
choral literature classes, though his dissertation has a very small sample size of six institutions. No other formal
study exists of choral literature course resources. Minear, “Graduate Choral Literature Curricula and Pedagogy.”
10
Edward Komara, “Culture Wars, Canonicity, and A Basic Music Library,” Notes for the Music Library
Association 64, no. 2 (2007): 236,
https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A171851731/BIC?u=usocal_main&sid=bookmark-BIC&xid=9595a5f8.
11
The other categories include canon types that are not as relevant to this study, such as the “potential canon,”
which includes the entire written and oral corpus, the “accessible canon,” which is the “portion of the potential
canon available at a given time, and the “closed canon,” which is represented by authoritative bodies of texts like the
Bible and which Komara acknowledges has no clear musical analogy. Komara, 236–37.
12
Komara, 237.
13
Komara, 238.
57
The Choral Tradition by Percy Young, 1962, revised 1981
Percy Marshall Young (1912–2004) was a leading British musicologist and a prolific
music writer known especially for his studies of Elgar, Handel, Vaughan Williams, and Bach.
14

Beginning in 1970, he served as a visiting scholar and lecturer at collegiate institutions in the
U.S., but his scholarship was known and valued by the American choral community years before
he began teaching in the U.S.
15
In 1962, Theron Kirk reviewed Percy Young’s The Choral
Tradition for The Choral Journal, the periodical journal of the American Choral Directors
Association (ACDA). In this review, Kirk gives the work a strong stamp of approval: “As a
concise history of choral art and its creators and a source of reference material for a large number
of choral works, this book is certainly one which should be in the library of every choral
director.”
16
The warm reception of The Choral Tradition in America’s first and very recently
formed national choral organization is unsurprising––at that time, amassing and promoting
reputable choral literature resources was a high priority for ACDA, as noted in the previous
chapter. Moreover, the scope and format of the book was likely appreciated by American choir
directors who were in the midst of setting up the nation’s first doctoral programs in choral music
and working hard to establish a new standard of education in choral literature. Young dedicated
the book to a presentation of “the great choral works,” organizing them chronologically by
century and using specific composers and compositions to spotlight important innovations in
style and form in each period.
17
Pedagogically, this framework would enable students of choral

14
“Percy Young, 91, Prolific Music Scholar,” The New York Times, May 24, 2004,
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/24/arts/percy-young-91-prolific-music-scholar.html.
15
David Scott, “Young, Percy M(Arshall),” Grove Music Online, 2004, https://doi-
org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.30724.
16
Theron Kirk, “Review of The Choral Tradition, by Percy M. Young,” The Choral Journal 3, no. 2 (1962): 16,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23541975.
17
Percy Marshall Young, The Choral Tradition: An Historical and Analytical Survey from the Sixteenth Century to
the Present Day (London: Hutchinson, 1962), 11.
58
literature to learn the significance of seminal works and composers in the context of major
historical style periods.
Young summarized the scope and methodology of his book as follows: “The greater
works––those which are in the general repertoire––are discussed in some detail but also set in
their environment so that we have in effect a history of choral music since the sixteenth
century.”
18
Describing the rationale behind this method, Young wrote, “No music, I suggest, can
be more classical––in poise, serenity, proportion and determination––than that of Palestrina; and
no music can more richly secure the essential feeling of Romanticism than the great Requiem of
Verdi.”
19
Focusing on “the greater works” in the limited space of a single volume necessarily
resulted in high coverage of a small number of composers and works that Young deemed
representative of each era. For instance, Young’s discussion of the seventeenth-century oratorio
is limited exclusively to Giacomo Carissimi, and two whole chapters are devoted to “The Period
of Bach and Handel” and “The Period of Haydn and Mozart.”
20
In the late nineteenth century,
Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and Bruckner carry the weight of all of Germany
and Austria, while all of Italy is represented by Verdi’s Requiem (with a brief mention of the
Quattro pezzi sacri).
21

Throughout The Choral Tradition, Young implicitly creates a definition of “choral
music” that is limited by geography, style, religion, and ethnicity. The Choral Tradition is almost
completely confined to a discussion of Christian and secular works by white European and
American composers. The exceptions include two pages on Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service, a
brief mention of the Black American composer William Grant Still’s And They Lynched Him on

18
Young, 12.
19
Young, 11.
20
Young, 58–61.
21
Young, 248–56.
59
a Tree, the inclusion of the Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in a list of
composers who set poems by Walt Whitman in their works, and a discussion of Leonard
Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms (added in the 1981 edition).
22
Since Young characterizes The
Choral Tradition simply as a chronology of “choral music,” readers are therefore led to
understand that choral music as a genre is fundamentally limited to music of a particular
geographical region, religion, style, race, and ethnicity.
In his review in The Choral Journal, Kirk notes the free use of “personal opinion about
the music” throughout Young’s book, but finds these opinions “most refreshing” and reassures
readers that Young “is quite careful to keep pure personal opinion and factual statements
separated so that the authority of the book as a source of facts is not jeopardized.”
23
This
assessment would be disputable by modern-day standards, as Young’s personal opinion on
composers and their music is the determining factor behind which composers and works receive
attention in his book. A great number of composers are completely written off on this basis. For
example, Young defers the responsibility of discussing of a long list of composers that are
considered significant by other authors of choral literature texts, explicitly naming Wagner,
Liszt, Grieg, Cui, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Smetana, Dvořák, Gounod, Franck, Sullivan,
Sibelius, Reger, Wolf, and Strauss as unworthy of discussion on the grounds that their music
shows “imaginative indifference” and “technical disability” and because each composer
allegedly wrote music only “for immediate and easy profit.”
24
Parry is similarly discounted due
to his refusal “to come to life in his music.”
25
Footnotes are few and far between, so while The

22
Young, 304.
23
Kirk, “Review of The Choral Tradition, by Percy M. Young,” 15.
24
Young, The Choral Tradition: An Historical and Analytical Survey from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day,
236.
25
Young, 257.
60
Choral Tradition does include a bibliography, readers would be hard pressed to determine what
facts underlay Young’s assessment of musical quality. In this way, The Choral Tradition is a
prime example of a personal canon. Young’s mission of promoting “the greater works” suggests
that those works were identified through broader public or cultural approval, when in fact
Young’s own preferences and sense of taste play the strongest role in determining the literature
covered.

Choral Music: A Symposium by Arthur Jacobs, 1963
Arthur Jacobs (1922–1996) was a British musicologist and music critic known for his
writing on opera and musical theater. Like Percy Young, Jacobs spent time teaching as a guest
professor of music in the United States.
26
In addition to his columns for the Sunday Times, the
Financial Times, and the Musical Times, Jacobs is known for writing A New Dictionary of
Music, later republished as The Penguin Dictionary of Music.
27
In 1963, the American Music
Educators Journal printed a glowing review of Choral Music: A Symposium, congratulating
Jacobs for fulfilling his goal of paying “full tribute to the glorious heritage of choral music
through some seven centuries of continuity”.
28
Unlike The Choral Tradition, which was authored
entirely by Percy Young, Choral Music: A Symposium is a compendium of essays by British and
American musicologists and music writers, organized chronologically by country and historical
style period. Jacobs characterized the book as a summation of the fading glory of the classical
repertory and an effort to reinstate its cultural value: “Choral music occupies, in current musical

26
Stanley Sadie, “Jacobs, Arthur (David),” Grove Music Online, 2001, https://doi-
org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.14050.
27
Sadie.
28
“Reviewed Work(s): Choral Music by Arthur Jacobs,” Music Educators Journal 50, no. 1 (1963): 146–47,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3390017.
61
life, a place neither as dominating nor as well-defined as it did fifty or a hundred years ago. It is
the editor’s hope that this book, by putting the heritage of choral music in historical and aesthetic
perspective, may make some contribution towards its re-establishment.”
29

In the preface, Jacobs stated his intent for the book to serve as “a companion for all
interested in choral music,” and like Young, he explained the book’s focus on placing “major”
works and composers in historical context.
30
Each contributor was asked “to give a general
outline of the music falling within their chapters,” “to treat a few selected major works in some
detail” and “to indicate the relationship of the music to the general social life of its time.”
31
In
Jacobs’s view, providing context was of special importance in the treatment of choral music,
which was “bound up” with the church and with the activities of professional and amateur
musicians of each era.
32
Accordingly, most chapters devote considerable space to a small number
of representative composers, such Walter Emery’s chapter, “Bach and his Time,” and Arthur
Jacob’s own chapter, “England in the Age of Handel.” In keeping with Jacobs’s emphasis on
historical context, certain chapters contain extensive commentary on the political or social
character of the music under discussion. For instance, Gerald Seaman’s chapter, “Slavonic
Nationalism from Dvořák to the Soviets,” includes a long aside on the character of Soviet music:

‘Art must belong to the people,’ wrote Lenin, and this succinctly sums up the
Soviet attitude to music in general. Music must be comprehensible to the masses,
must serve a social purpose; it must edify but not dictate, must show adherence to
the traditions of the Russian past, but not necessarily imitate; it must show
originality but not eccentricity. In a word, it must be communistic. As is well
known, Soviet composers have often found it difficult to fulfil these rather vague
but exacting requirements.
33

29
Arthur Jacobs, ed., Choral Music: A Symposium (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963), 11.
30
Jacobs, 11.
31
Jacobs, 11.
32
Jacobs, 11.
33
Jacobs, 297–98.
62
Choral Music: A Symposium contains no footnotes or bibliography. An appendix of
“Recommended Books” identifies resources for further reading, organized by their relevance to
each chapter. As with The Choral Tradition, evaluating the influence of bias or personal opinion
on each author’s scholarship in Choral Music: A Symposium is therefore an extremely difficult
task, and comments like Seaman’s––on trends that are “well known” or that summarize the goals
or feelings of whole national schools of composers––must be taken completely on faith.
Unlike Young, Jacobs makes a modest acknowledgment of the geographical, religious,
and stylistic limits of choral music as defined in his book: “Choral singing, in our west-European
musical sense, is an art rooted in the church.”
34
This sentence offers an implicit acknowledgment
of choral musics that are not covered: repertoire from outside the United States and “Western”
Europe (though Seaman’s chapter does cover Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union) and non-
Christian religious repertoire. The main exception is Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service, which is
briefly discussed in Peter J. Pirie’s chapter, “A Mixed Modern Group,” as “a setting of the
Jewish Sabbath Morning Service” that nonetheless “transcends purely sectarian bounds.”
35
Two
other Jewish composers, Irving Fine and Kurt Weill, are also given a brief mention. Although
race is not acknowledged as a defining element in Jacobs’s understanding of choral music, only
one Black American composer, Ulysses Kay, is included at the end of Robert Sabin’s chapter on
twentieth-century America in a list of “other American choral composers” who are “worth
attention,” and his status as an important Black composer is not mentioned.
36

In his postscript to the book, Jacobs provides an illuminating discussion of “choralism,”
which he defines as “the establishment of regularly constituted choral performances before the

34
Jacobs, 390.
35
Jacobs, 356–57.
36
Jacobs, 385–86.
63
public”––in other words, a choral practice or tradition with public visibility and value.
37

According to Jacobs, a review of choral history shows that throughout time, choralism “was
anything but revolutionary in its social aspect. It was, on the contrary, anti-radical and
conservative, a manifestation of the idea that ordinary people could be led to moral improvement
within the existing society by the ennobling cultivation of the arts.”
38
However, Jacobs believed
that this deep connection between choral music, social function, and moral improvement had
been eroded in present times, for although modern-day choral musicians were “the possessors of
a magnificent repertory,” they occupied “a grandstand commanding a splendid view of a
procession that is no longer there.”
39

In his hope that Choral Music: A Symposium would help reestablish public appreciation
for the “major works” of choral literature, Jacobs worked to revitalize what Komara would call
an “official canon”––a standard repertory promoted through education and public patronage.
This mission can be read against the backdrop of the Cold War as part of broader efforts to
institutionalize a proud sense of Western cultural heritage. At the end of his postscript, Jacobs
notes that while the “Soviet attempt to make a new choral form out of the ‘mass song’ may bring
our superior smiles,” the idea of manufacturing a new “national choral song” was “not
nonsensical.”
40
Like American efforts to shore up a sense of national identity through choral
tradition in the early 1960s, Jacobs perhaps saw the value and urgency of rekindling national
pride at a critical moment for Great Britain.

37
Jacobs, 392.
38
Jacobs, 392.
39
Jacobs, 396.
40
Jacobs, 395.
64
A Survey of Choral Music by Homer Ulrich, 1973
Homer Ulrich (1906–1987) was an American choral director and longtime head of the
Department of Music at the University of Maryland who was known for his many books on
choral music, symphonic music, chamber music, and other subjects.
41
In 1974, Russell Mathis,
the new president of ACDA, wrote a positive review of A Survey of Choral Music for Music
Educators Journal. Mathis praised A Survey of Choral Music as an effective resource for readers
of many types: its “simplicity and clarity” made it an “informative tool for the music amateur” as
well as “a useful introductory source to undergraduate students of choral music who need to gain
a broad overview of choral music from circa 1250 to the present.”
42
In addition, the book could
serve as “a compact reference work for advanced students of the choral art.”
43
References to
Ulrich’s book also surfaced decades later in reviews of Dennis Shrock’s Choral Repertoire. In
2009, David DeVenney criticized Shrock’s decision to organize his volume by country and
composer, citing the advantages of Ulrich’s organization by form and genre in A Survey of
Choral Music.
44
In 2010, Ian Loeppky welcomed the arrival of Choral Repertoire as Ulrich’s
textbook, previously the “’industry standard’ textbook for choral literature,” was by then
“woefully out-of-date.”
45
These references indicate that A Survey of Choral Music achieved a
reputation as a choral literature reference book in the decades after its publication and most
likely continued to be used past its date of expiration.

41
“Homer Ulrich, Contributor,” Britannica.com, accessed May 25, 2023,
https://www.britannica.com/contributor/Homer-Ulrich/3020.
42
Russell Mathis, “A Survey of Choral Music by Homer Ulrich,” Music Educators Journal 60, no. 9 (May 1974):
68–69, https://doi.org/10.2307/3394547.
43
Mathis, 68.
44
David P. DeVenney, “Research Report: American Choral Literature: Directions for Further Research,”
International Journal of Early Childhood 5, no. 2 (1973): 19, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03175926.
45
Ian Loeppky, “Review of Choral Repertoire by Dennis Shrock,” The Choral Journal 51, no. 4 (2010): 91,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23561251.
65
Like The Choral Tradition and Choral Music: A Symposium, Ulrich’s book has a preface
explicitly stating the purpose and scope. A Survey of Choral Music, Ulrich says, is intended “to
do justice to the monuments of the literature,” suggesting its function as a diachronic canon of
timeless choral masterworks.
46
To keep this survey to “a small volume,” the book prioritizes
“works that represent historical or stylistic turning points.”
47
Like Jacobs, Ulrich highlights the
role of Christianity in shaping the choral art: “Much of the choral literature is sacred in function,
written to be sung in a service of worship,” owing to the “majority” of composers who spent
careers “in the service of the Church.”
48
This view of choral music as an inherently Christian art
form determines the structure of the entire book, which organizes repertoire chronologically by
common forms of church music including the mass, motet, chorale, psalm setting, oratorio,
passion, Te Deum, Magnificat, cantata, and requiem. The few secular repertoire categories
include the chanson, madrigal, and choral symphony. This format works fairly well for
discussions of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods but begins to break down during
the two chapters on the Romantic, in which a number of significant secular compositions are
sidelined as “Other Works” or squeezed into the “Choral Symphony” category.
49
In the final
chapter on the twentieth century, this scheme shows fatal weaknesses, as it forces a majority of
the works discussed into miscellaneous subheadings like “Other Sacred Text Settings,” “Cantata
and Related Forms,” “Other Forms,” and “Orchestral Works with Choir.”
50
This format––which
divides individual composers’ output into multiple categories––also makes it all but impossible

46
Homer Ulrich, A Survey of Choral Music (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), v.
47
Ulrich, v.
48
Ulrich, v, 1.
49
Ulrich, 164–82.
50
Ulrich, 183–214.
66
for a reader to connect composers and works by nation, style, or innovations in compositional
technique.
The introduction to A Survey of Choral Music defines “choral music” as “music written
in parts designed to be performed with several voices on a part,” and “sacred” literature as music
that was “written to be sung in a service of worship.”
51
But as with Young and Jacobs, the only
Jewish choral work mentioned in Ulrich’s volume is Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service––illustrating
Ulrich’s understanding of the term “sacred” as a synonym for “Christian” as well as a
euphemism for “Judeo-Christian” literature.
52
In keeping with his predecessors’ view of choral
music as a distinctly European and American music genre and a form of fine art, Ulrich also
omits any mention of choral activity in other parts of the world, as well as any discussion of
popular or indigenous musics. The volume has no footnotes or citations, and in lieu of a works
cited, Ulrich opts for a “selected bibliography” including sources used as well as “books that
may lead the reader to a wider understanding of some of the points discussed” and “the most
important general reference books.”
53
These sources are listed alphabetically with no indication
of their correspondence to Ulrich’s book chapters. As with Jacobs, Ulrich’s lack of citations
blurs the lines between fact, opinion, and bias, making it all but impossible to evaluate the
quality of his research and highlighting the dependency of choral literature scholarship on
subjective and personal evaluations of music.

51
Ulrich, 1.
52
Ulrich, 193.
53
Ulrich, 230.
67
Choral Music: History, Style, and Performance Practice by Robert L. Garretson, 1993
Robert L. Garretson (1920–1997) was an American choral director who taught at the
University of Illinois, the University of New Hampshire, and Colorado State University. In 1994,
Virginia Kastner Kleeberg reviewed Choral Music: History, Style, and Performance Practice in
The Choral Journal. Kleeberg’s review was resoundingly negative, taking Garretson to task on a
variety of issues including bias, use of sources, inconsistencies in the index, overall organization,
and sloppy coverage of specific topics. The issues identified by Kleeberg indicate changing
standards in the American choral profession. While reviewers of Young, Jacobs, and Ulrich took
no notice of references and sources, Kleeberg’s excoriating criticism of Garretson pays special
attention to his use of outdated materials: “Numerous footnote references in the text suggest that
the material is well-researched, when in fact it is based almost exclusively on pre-1975 studies.
Garretson appears to be oblivious to his out-dated treatment of performance practice.”
54
In
another significant change from past treatments of choral literature textbooks, Kleeberg criticizes
Garretson’s lack of coverage of twentieth century music outside the U.S.: “the rest of the world
is reduced to a footnote on p. 133”.
55
Kleeberg’s reaction to Garretson’s Choral Music suggests
that American expectations of choral scholarship changed substantially in the twenty years since
Russell Mathis reviewed Ulrich’s A Survey of Choral Music in 1974.
Choral Music is a small volume––only 176 pages, excluding references and appendices.
In the preface, Garretson specifically states his hope that the book will “serve as a text for
students in choral literature and choral conducting classes” and as “an authoritative text on choral
music performance practices to which conductors might refer for specific information relating to

54
Virginia Kastner Kleeberg, “Review: Choral Music: History, Style and Performance Practice by Robert L.
Garretson,” The Choral Journal 35, no. 4 (1994): 58, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23550169.
55
Kleeberg, 59.
68
the preparation and performance of their choral music programs.”
56
The book is organized into
five chapters corresponding to five historical style periods: Renaissance, Baroque, Classical,
Romantic, and Modern. The central focus of each chapter is not on composers or repertoire, but
rather on musical style and performance practice, as well as society, culture, and visual arts. For
instance, in the first chapter, “The Renaissance Period,” Garretson’s discussion of composers and
works comprises only about two and a half pages. The remaining twenty-three pages cover
discussions of “Renaissance Society,” “Renaissance Choirs,” “Meter and Stress,” “Tempo,”
“Dynamics,” “Pitch,” “Tone Quality,” and other aspects of performance practice. A few pages
are also dedicated to a cursory description of aesthetics in Renaissance paintings, such as the
tendency to use pastels and rounded contours.
57

This deemphasis on repertoire in favor of historical and artistic context results in some
idiosyncratic choices, which is especially evident in the final chapter, “The Modern Period.”
Garretson spends nine pages, or about one fifth of the chapter, commenting on wide-ranging
topics including immigration, nationalism, world wars, women’s suffrage, the rise of the
automobile industry, the Cold War, color TV, affirmative action, and the SATs.
58
Garretson
mentions the rise of several important popular music genres, including barbershop singing, jazz,
patriotic songs, and rock and roll, but does not connect any of them to choral music except for
jazz. The end of the music discussion in his chapter on the twentieth century comprises a
subsection titled “The Jazz/Pop Idiom,” in which Garretson notes the popularity of jazz and
show choirs in the United States and advocates for their cultural value:

56
Kleeberg, ix.
57
Robert L. Garretson, Choral Music: History, Style, and Performance Practice (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1993), 25.
58
Garretson, 131–40.
69
The use of the elements of jazz in contemporary music does not make it
unacceptable, as some choral conductors presumably believe. Such music should
never be given the status of an ‘unwanted child.’ Rather, in view of the
respectability given this idiom by numerous serious and highly regarded
contemporary composers, it seems fitting and proper to urge that choral musicians
endeavor to better understand the jazz idiom.
59

Of all the choral literature textbooks surveyed in this dissertation chapter, Garretson’s book
contains the only discussion of jazz and show choir music. While Garretson does not make the
same assumptions as other authors that choral music inherently excludes popular music, he does
join company with Young, Jacobs, and Ulrich in implicitly defining choral music as
geographically and religiously bounded. Although the preface makes no mention of a Christian
or Western focus, the book covers only European and American music and does not discuss any
sacred music outside the Christian faith (although Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish” and Chichester
Psalms are both included in a list of Leonard Bernstein’s “more serious choral works with
orchestra”).
60
That said, the idiosyncratic organization and surprisingly light treatment of actual
composers and works makes it unclear whether Garretson’s book participates meaningfully in
choral literature canon formation.
Like Jacobs, Garretson views choral singing as an inherently wholesome, moral, and
conservative activity. Commenting gloomily on the proliferation of “porn shops in every
community” and “the unacceptable on TV, in museums, at the movies, and over the radio,”
Garretson concludes that “no better activity is available to young people than participating in a
choral music group. While they cannot be expected to solve these gigantic problems, choral
musicians can rest assured that they are at least contributing to the betterment of current societal

59
Garretson, 165.
60
Garretson, 150.
70
problems, if only to a minimal extent.”
61
Just as Jacobs’s perspective on the alleged lost glory of
choral music can be read against societal efforts to establish a sense of Western cultural heritage
during the Cold War, Garretson’s views on the moral influence of choral music can be situated in
the context of the conservative backlash during the culture wars crises of the early 1990s.

Choral Music in the Twentieth Century by Nick Strimple, 2002
Nick Strimple (b. 1946) is an American composer, conductor, scholar, and author who is
especially known for his work on Jewish music, the music of the Holocaust, and the music of
Dvořák and other Czech composers.
62
He was a longtime Professor of Choral and Sacred Music
at the University of Southern California, where he was especially known for his work as an
instructor of graduate choral literature. His first book, Choral Music in the Twentieth Century, is
a single-volume choral literature survey and the first of its kind to take a global approach. In
addition to coverage of the U.S. and the western European countries that comprise the focus of
all other choral literature textbooks surveyed in this dissertation chapter, Choral Music in the
Twentieth Century has chapters dedicated to “Africa and the Middle East,” “Mexico, the
Caribbean, Central America, and South America,” “Canada,” and the “Pacific Rim.” The longest
chapter by far is on the United States, which is fifty-nine pages (by contrast, all of Latin America
is covered in only twelve pages, and Africa and the Middle East are dispatched in ten).
Strimple’s treatment of twentieth-century American music is distinctive compared to his
predecessors: this chapter contains subsections on concert music, educational music, church
music, Jewish music, and African American composers and the spiritual, the last of which

61
Garretson, 139–40.
62
“Nick Strimple,” accessed May 25, 2023, https://music.usc.edu/nick-strimple/.
71
includes ample coverage of non-idiomatic Black music as well as spirituals.
63
Two influential
jazz composers are also discussed: Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck.
64
While vocal jazz and
show choir are not discussed, they are mentioned as significant subgenres in the American
educational market: Strimple connects the rise of Broadway musical medleys with “the
development, later in the century, of vocal jazz ensembles and show choirs, for which Kirby
Shaw, Ed Lojeski, and others provided challenging and idiomatic choral arrangements.”
65

Unlike the other texts reviewed in this dissertation chapter, Choral Music in the
Twentieth Century does not have a preface or a foreword stating the envisioned purpose or the
scope of the book. Instead, Strimple provides a brief overview of big-picture trends, concepts,
and changes that affected twentieth-century choral music across the world. In contrast to
Garretson’s emphasis on social context, Strimple devotes the majority of the book to composers
and their output, with the result that each chapter covers an extraordinary quantity of repertoire.
The value of this approach is especially evident in chapters dedicated to world regions that had
never been covered before in an American choral literature textbook: Latin America, Asia, and
Africa and the Middle East. The book does not have standalone discussions on “major” choral
forms and genres––another contrast to Garretson’s approach.
The breadth of repertoire covered, with particular focus on music written by composers
who are considered minor or who are omitted entirely from other choral literature textbooks,
positions Choral Music in the Twentieth Century as an unusually non-canonic resource. In
addition, Strimple’s global perspective, combined with his strong coverage of Jewish repertoire
and acknowledgment of popular music, clearly indicates that Strimple does not share Young,

63
Nick Strimple, Choral Music in the Twentieth Century (Portland: Amadeus Press, 2002), 216–74.
64
Strimple, 240.
65
Strimple, 261.
72
Jacobs, Ulrich, and Garretson’s views of choral music as a geographically, religiously, or
stylistically bounded music genre. Indeed, Strimple concludes the book by reflecting that “when
people wish to express their innermost thoughts and dreams, they sing––and when people sing
together, it is called choral music.”
66

In 2003, Timothy Sharp, who would later serve as the Executive Director of ACDA,
reviewed Choral Music in the Twentieth Century for The Choral Journal. In Sharp’s assessment,
“This is a book for the lover of classical choral literature, the choral scholar and teacher, the
choral audiophile, and the choral nerd… Every choral aficionado should own a copy.”
67

Specifically referencing its pedagogical use, Sharp wrote, “Each chapter is like a graduate lecture
summarizing the choral music of each country highlighted.”
68
As with Kleeberg’s review of
Garretson’s volume in 1993, Sharp also offered commentary on Strimple’s use of sources: “A
curiosity that nagged me often throughout the book was where the author got certain information
and how does he know that? While the bibliography is certainly extensive and a significant
listing in its own right, I would have preferred more frequent documentation throughout the
text.”
69

Sharp’s review is notable in that it is the very first to draw attention to the issue of bias in
a choral literature textbook. He notes that a “politics of war bias” serves as “an important
structural framework.”
70
He also points out Strimple’s skepticism of “composers that have
achieved some degree of public admiration or success” and his special efforts to give attention to
composers who have been “labeled difficult, esoteric, misunderstood, or in some other way

66
Strimple, 298.
67
Timothy Sharp, “Book Review: ‘Choral Works in the 20th Century,’ by Nick Strimple,” The Choral Journal 44,
no. 3 (2003): 67, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23554533.
68
Sharp, 67.
69
Sharp, 67.
70
Sharp, 68.
73
distant from the common choral canon.”
71
Reflecting on Strimple’s broad coverage of repertoire
outside the United States and Europe, Sharp comments cryptically that “only a U.S. author has
this particular world perspective about choral music, and only a U.S. choral musician may care
this much about choral music from other countries and cultures,” perhaps acknowledging the
growing emphasis on multiculturalism in the United States.
72
Sharp also notes that Strimple’s
writing style freely mixes “opinions” and “personal admiration” with “names, titles, and facts,”
demonstrating that the book’s perspective is shaped by Strimple’s own experiences as “a
practicing American choral director with strong skills, insights, and opinions.”
73
Finally, Sharp
provides illuminating commentary on the book’s relationship to the “choral canon”:

Some works that are universally recognized as masterpieces are simply
mentioned, while other works that are less known receive pages of attention. No
doubt, this attention is part of what the author regards as his perspective on the
subject, highlighting underdogs and simply listing commonly recognized giants.
So, don’t expect this book to be an analytical handbook to the masterpieces of the
twentieth century, but on the other hand, be delightfully surprised when you
encounter more than you ever knew about Messiaen’s “Cinq rechants.
74

In each of these ways, Sharp’s review represents a definitive break from the reception of older
choral literature textbooks, showing a new awareness of research standards, treatment of bias,
and changing American attitudes towards multiculturalism and the coverage of “non-Western”
music. In praising Strimple’s focus on the “underdogs” of choral literature, Sharp notes a
defining difference between Choral Music in the Twentieth Century and its predecessors, while
acknowledging an enduring expectation for choral literature scholarship to participate in the
canonization of choral “masterpieces.”

71
Sharp, 68.
72
Sharp, 69.
73
Sharp, 70.
74
Sharp, 70.
74
Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century by Nick Strimple, 2008
As with Choral Music in the Twentieth Century, Strimple’s approach to Choral Music in
the Nineteenth Century bucks the norms of canonic treatment of “masterworks” and major
composers established by other choral literature textbooks. Although there is no preface or
foreword, Strimple’s overview of the nineteenth century indicates an outsized emphasis on the
literature of western Europe, while acknowledging important developments in Jewish choral
music as well as music in Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia and New Zealand. As in
Choral Music in the Twentieth Century, Strimple’s discussion of American music includes
special treatment of “African American Choral Music and the Spiritual,” with a focus on the
influence of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. While the chapter on Austria and Germany is two or three
times as long as all the others, this imbalance is contextualized somewhat in a discussion of the
slower development of choral music in other world regions––for instance, due to revolution,
social upheaval, and nationalism in Latin America and the reliance on “European imports” in the
choral repertoire of the Pacific Rim.
75

Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century displays the same citation issues as Strimple’s
other volume. Although Strimple includes a long bibliography, infrequent acknowledgment of
sources in the text makes it difficult to identify the sources of his information. The same writing
style, which mixes facts about composers and works with Strimple’s personal assessment, shows
consistency with the tradition in academic choral literature of relying on teaching and
performance experience to generate or augment scholarly information.
In 2009, Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century was reviewed in two journals. Paul L.
Althouse, writing for American Record Guide, declared that the book “will have great value as a

75
Nick Strimple, Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Amadeus Press, 2008), 8–9.
75
reference for conductors and dedicated lovers of choral music” but also criticized Strimple for
spending “too much time on unknown music at the expense of more mainstream pieces.”
76
On
the other hand, William Weinert, in a review for American Choral Review, praised Strimple for
expanding readers’ knowledge of lesser-known repertoire, expressing special appreciation for his
“excellent coverage” of Czech and Jewish music and other information “not easily available
elsewhere.”
77
Comparing Strimple’s book favorably to its predecessors, Weinert wrote: “While
earlier books such as Percy Young's The Choral Tradition (1962) and Arthur Jacobs's Choral
Music: A Symposium (1963) focus on the mainstream nineteenth-century Western European
concert repertoire, Strimple broadens the view here to include Slavic countries, Southern Europe,
the Americas, and also, briefly, Australia and New Zealand.”
78
At the same time, Weinert
questions Strimple’s reasons for including certain “extremely minor composers” and comments
dryly, “For the Mexican composer whose music reaches ‘...an extreme of complete
colorlessness,’ and ‘lacks any contrapuntal vitality,’ we might wonder why we are reading about
him at all.”
79
Weinert does not consider the possibility that Strimple may have seen value in
showing that choral activity has existed in diverse cultures across the world even when he did not
personally feel that the results were of high quality. Nonetheless, Weinert strongly recommends
Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century, especially “to the increasing number of conductors who
are probing the back corners of 19th-century repertoire and performance practice.”
80
Both his
review and Althouse’s illuminate the expectations for choral literature scholarship at the time the
book was published. Althouse’s review indicates the continued expectations for the canonic

76
Paul L. Althouse, “Book Review: Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century,” American Record Guide 72, no. 3
(2009), https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A203177958/GPS?u=usocal_main&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=fba4a0fa.
77
William Weinert, “Book Review: Choral Music in the Nineteenth Century,” American Choral Review 51, no. 1
(2009): 8, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/choral-music-nineteenth-century/docview/219606715/se-2.
78
Weinert.
79
Weinert.
80
Weinert.
76
treatment of famous or “mainstream” choral works, while Weinert’s reflects an increasing
interest in choral literature beyond the official and critical canons.

Choral Repertoire by Dennis Shrock, first edition 2009, second edition 2023
Dennis Shrock (b. 1944) is an American conductor, scholar, and teacher who has taught
choral music at Boston University, Westminster Choir College, the University of Oklahoma, and
Texas Christian University. He is known for his prior work directing the Santa Fe Desert Chorale
and serving as the editor of The Choral Journal from 1989–1992.
81
In the preface to the 2009
edition of Choral Repertoire, Shrock states that the purpose of the book is “to present and
discuss the choral music of the most significant composers from the Western Hemisphere
throughout recorded history.”
82
Those composers, he states, were selected “on the basis of their
historical significance, and compositions have been identified on the basis of their being
acknowledged as artistically superior works of art, on their presence in programs of credited
ensembles, and on their existence in scholarly editions.”
83
The reason for selectivity is Shrock’s
hope “that masterpieces of Western choral music will be brought to light, comprehended, and
performed more frequently.”
84
The 2009 edition of Choral Repertoire therefore has a clear
canonic agenda, and the result could be called an “official canon” or “critical canon” of choral
music according to Komara’s terminology. In addition to applying “Western” canonical
limitations to the repertoire covered, Shrock also explicitly chooses to exclude composers who
are known more for “arrangements of preexisting material” as well as the works themselves,

81
Dennis Shrock, “Dennis Shrock, Biography,” accessed May 26, 2023, https://www.dennisshrock.com/biography;
Marvin E. Latimer, “A History and Analysis of the ‘Choral Journal’ Editorial Board (1959-2009),” Journal of
Historical Research in Music Education 33, no. 1 (2011): 35.
82
Dennis Shrock, Choral Repertoire, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
83
Shrock, v.
84
Shrock, v.
77
taking care to clarify that this definition of “arrangements” refers to folk songs and spirituals but
not to Renaissance masses based upon a cantus firmus or a preexisting motet.
85
Shrock’s
understanding of worthy choral literature in the 2009 edition is thus limited by geography,
musical subgenre, and compositional style, as well as by more abstract determinations of which
works count as sufficiently “significant” or “superior.”
The 2023 edition of Choral Repertoire makes significant revisions to some, but not all, of
these criteria. The intended scope of the second edition explicitly includes “substantive coverage
of women and composers of color,” as well as “lesser-known works” alongside “those works that
are considered standard.”
86
These efforts at greater inclusion, Shrock states, take into account
“current conversations about canonicity in the humanities and the arts” that interrogate “the past
exclusion of many composers from the choral music canon” due to “racism, sexism, and other
kinds of discrimination.”
87
Shrock also acknowledges that studies of canonicity require modern-
day scholars to reassess “attributes such as ‘significance’ and ‘impact’” in evaluating choral
literature.
88

In spite of these efforts, the 2023 edition still excludes composers who are mainly known
for arrangements, which unfortunately results in the omission of influential composers and
arrangers of the African American spiritual as well as significant arrangers of folk music
worldwide. Alice Parker is briefly discussed due to the large quantity of “original choral works”
she composed, but prominent spiritual arrangers like Moses Hogan and William Dawson are not
mentioned.
89
The 2023 edition expands coverage of Canadian and Latin American composers,

85
Shrock, v.
86
Dennis Shrock, Choral Repertoire (2nd Edition), online ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023),
https://doi-org/10.1093/oso/9780197622407.001.0001.
87
Shrock.
88
Shrock.
89
Shrock, Choral Repertoire, 715.
78
but unfortunately still claims that neither “country” made “a significant impact on the
development of choral music during the Modern era.”
90
Coverage of jazz is inconsistent: Dave
Brubeck’s music receives a substantial discussion, but Duke Ellington and his monumental
Sacred Concerts are not mentioned.
91
In addition, Shrock’s stated efforts to include composers of
color are undermined by the inconsistent acknowledgment of race in the text. For instance,
Nathaniel Dett is noted as “the first African American” to graduate from Oberlin College and
Conservatory and an important composer and arranger of spirituals, but Shrock’s profile of
Ulysses Kay makes no mention of his significance as a well-known Black composer of non-
idiomatic music.
92
With regard to sacred music, there are no subheadings or discussions devoted
to either Christian or non-Christian literature, which makes it challenging to assess religious
inclusivity. However, the omission of seminal Jewish composers like Louis Lewandowski and
David Nowakowsky, as well as cursory treatment of Salamone Rossi (who is merely listed as a
“lesser-known composer” who wrote in a “late madrigal” style), suggest that improving
representation of Jewish choral literature was not a priority in the second edition.
93

Both editions are divided according to chronological historical style periods from “The
Medieval Era” to “The Modern Era,” with each historical chapter then subdivided by country.
Under each country heading, Shrock then addresses composers one by one, in the order of their
birth year. Information about composers is thus assembled in individual entries, with brief
overviews included at the beginning of each country and historical style period. This format
makes Choral Repertoire very useful as a reference book but also makes it challenging for
readers to draw connections between composers or works according to stylistic trends or

90
Shrock, Choral Repertoire (2nd Edition).
91
Shrock, Choral Repertoire, 736.
92
Shrock, 716, 734.
93
Shrock, Choral Repertoire (2nd Edition).
79
innovations in compositional technique. Notably, neither the 2009 nor the 2023 edition of Choral
Repertoire includes any footnotes, citations, or bibliography––a stunning omission given
modern-day standards for academic scholarship. Choral Repertoire demonstrates that even in
2023, choral literature scholarship is susceptible to a long tradition of inconsistent or inadequate
source acknowledgment.
Shrock’s Choral Repertoire was widely hailed as an excellent choral literature resource
when the first edition was published in 2009. David DeVenney’s review praises Shrock’s Choral
Repertoire as “a very useful classroom tool” for graduate-level classes in choral literature, and
Ian Loeppky’s review goes further in welcoming the book as the new and long-awaited “one-
volume choral literature reference book.”
94
Loeppky also comments on Shrock’s almost
exclusive focus on the United States and Europe––Canada and South America receive a brief
acknowledgment, “but the choral music of the continents of Africa, Asia, India, Australia, and
the Far East receive no treatment at all.”
95
These omissions are not a serious problem for
Loeppky, who feels that non-Western music “is neither the scope nor the audience for this
volume,” but he still suggests that Shrock might consider revising the title to Choral Repertoire
in the West to acknowledge its geographical limitations.
96
Loeppky’s review indicates changing
expectations and improving awareness of choral repertoire outside “the West,” while
simultaneously illuminating the persistent belief that “non-Western” music is not relevant or
essential in advanced studies of choral literature.

94
David P. DeVenney, “Choral Repertoire,” American Choral Review 51, no. 2 (2009): 19,
https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/choral-repertoire/docview/219579095/se-2; Loeppky, “Review of
Choral Repertoire by Dennis Shrock.”
95
Loeppky, “Review of Choral Repertoire by Dennis Shrock.”
96
Loeppky.
80
A History of Western Choral Music, by Chester Alwes, Vol. 1, 2015; Vol. 2, 2016
Chester Alwes (b. 1947) is an American choral conductor, composer, and scholar.
97
His
monumental choral literature textbook, A History of Western Choral Music, is essentially a
single two-volume work, with the preface of the first volume including information on scope and
methods that applies to both volumes. Alwes acknowledges the debt that this textbook owes to
his teaching career, stating that the book “represents the content of courses on the history of
choral literature taught to hundreds of upper-level undergraduate and graduate students during
my tenure at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1982 to 2011).”
98
As with
Strimple, Alwes’s scholarship is influenced by decades of experience teaching choral literature at
the graduate level.
This relationship to graduate-level pedagogy is referenced repeatedly throughout the
preface. For instance, Alwes compares the goals of the textbook to his emphasis in the classroom
on “covering representative composers and genres to establish paradigms that would serve these
students throughout their careers.”
99
In explaining his process for writing both volumes, he also
describes foundational elements in his approach to teaching advanced choral literature:
developing an understanding of the composer’s compositional process and considering the
historical context that “shaped each artwork into a unique creation.”
100
Alwes also acknowledges
a disciplinary tension inherent in the study of choral literature: balancing musicological study
against the practical needs of the conductor. In his words, A History of Western Choral Music “is
not an attempt to provide students with pithy, quotable statements to use in papers but with a

97
Chester Alwes, “Chester Alwes, Biography,” accessed May 26, 2023,
http://www.chesteralwes.com/biography.html.
98
Chester Alwes, A History of Western Choral Music, Volume 1, online ed. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015).
99
Alwes.
100
Alwes.
81
wide range of approaches to understanding the scores that we, as conductors, deal with on a daily
basis.”
101

A History of Western Choral Music uses a flexible organization scheme determined by
the needs of each era. The book opens with a chapter on “Medieval Foundations,” then discusses
the music of the Renaissance in four chapters that divide sacred and secular repertoire. In the
category of sacred music, important stylistic trends and innovations are discussed through in-
depth treatment of representative composers and works: for instance, Josquin is used as the main
representative of compositional innovation in the period 1425–1525, and Palestrina, Lassus, and
Victoria are used as representatives of the “European High Renaissance.”
102
Regional trends and
innovations are discussed but not used as an organizational device in the text. In the Baroque,
Alwes organizes repertoire by country, with Italian, German, French, and English Baroque music
receiving individual chapters. By contrast, the Classical and Romantic periods are divided into
discussions of theme, form, and nationality that link trends across historical style periods: e.g.
“The Mass (1750–1900),” “Romanticism and the Requiems of Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, and
Brahms,” and “Sacred Choral Music from Mozart to Liszt.” Music of the late Romantic and the
twentieth century is organized into discussions of choral forms, national schools, and
compositional trends that similarly intermingle historical style periods and composers from
different countries: e.g. “The Oratorio from Haydn to Elgar,” “Choral Symphony from
Beethoven to Berio,” “Nationalism, Folk Song, and Identity,” and “Neoclassicism: The Revival
of Historical Models in the Works of Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Others.”
Alwes’s methods allow the book to trace trends, styles, and innovations across time and
place. On the other hand, emphasizing these narratives results in a disproportionate emphasis on

101
Alwes.
102
Alwes.
82
a small number of composers whom Alwes uses as representatives of bigger-picture changes in
compositional technique and evolutions in choral forms. Mendelssohn, for instance, is treated as
an important representative of innovations in the oratorio in a long discussion that includes
musical examples from multiple works.
103
Dvořák’s entire output, on the other hand, is covered
in a single paragraph as part of a chapter on “European Centrism.”
104
To his credit, Alwes’s
discussion of twentieth-century American music does include a section on the African American
spiritual, naming a large number of important composers and arrangers as well as some of their
scholarly contributions to the genre.
105
Still, Alwes’s focus on historical trends and narratives
results in the outright exclusion of many other marginalized or lesser-known composers and
works that receive attention from Strimple. In addition, neither volume of A History of Western
Choral Music includes a discussion of Jewish music, jazz, or popular music, and his coverage of
twentieth-century music omits any mention of Canada and Latin America. In the preface to the
second volume, Alwes provides the following reasons for leaving out Canadian and Latin
American music:

In the case of Canada, I found no logical place to put such a discussion; the
diverse and vibrant choral music of Latin America is such that we don’t yet know
whether it constitutes art music in the traditional Western sense or is merely a
novelty that gives our performances the appearance of being inclusive.
106

Yet surely finding a “logical place” for Canada could be as simple as creating a subsection titled
“Choral Music in Canada” or broadening the chapter on “The American Experience” to “The
North American Experience.” As for Latin America, if more time is needed to determine whether

103
Chester Alwes, A History of Western Choral Music, Volume 2, online ed. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press, 2016), 1–37.
104
Alwes, A History of Western Choral Music, Volume 2.
105
Alwes.
106
Alwes.
83
a hundred years of choral music across an entire continent counts as “art music,” surely the same
criteria should have been applied to music of “the avant-garde,” which is given an entire chapter
despite Alwes’s assessment that much of this repertoire “may never be performed by choirs other
than those whose sole function is the presentation of such music.”
107
The real reasons that
Canada and Latin America do not belong in a comprehensive study of “Western” choral music
have to do with latent understandings of “the West.” Alwes’s rationale for excluding Canada and
Latin America from A History of Western Choral Music speaks to the ways in which “Western”
choral music continues to be defined less by geography or musical form and style than by
historically contingent notions of shared cultural identity, thus powerfully recalling the Cold War
era mythology of a Judeo-Christian Western heritage.
In 2017, reviews of A History of Western Choral Music drew attention to Alwes’s
organizational scheme and methodology, emphasizing the textbook’s value to choral students
and conductors as a cohesive historical narrative and as a useful resource on “masterworks.”
Anne Shelley’s review in Notes (the journal of the Music Library Association) described the
book as “appropriate for use as a text in choral literature courses at the graduate level” and “an
essential reference tool for choral conductors.”
108
In comparison to Shrock’s Choral Repertoire,
“the most comparable recent publication,” Shelley noted that Alwes’s book “is much more free-
flowing in thought and concept, and more transparently acknowledges the ambiguity of
transitions between time periods and classification of works into certain genres.”
109
Melvin
Unger’s review in BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute praised Alwes’s focus
“on works that are considered masterful exemplars of a genre or a composer,” describing these

107
Alwes.
108
Anne Shelley, “A History of Western Choral Music by Chester L. Alwes (Review),” Notes for the Music Library
Association 74, no. 1 (2017): 76, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26781892.
109
Shelley, 74.
84
case studies as “the book’s greatest strength” and “especially valuable to conductors who wish to
perform these pieces or use the analyses as paradigms for approaching similar works.”
110

As an outgrowth of and an intended tool for advanced choral literature education, A
History of Western Choral Music is a unique example of the ways in which some of the most
acclaimed choral literature resources and repertoire guides available today are shaped by
understandings of choral heritage in academic choral institutions. In its use of “masterful
exemplars” to design cohesive historical narratives and in its explicit relationship to graduate
choral literature curricula, A History of Western Choral Music participates fully in canon
formation, solidifying what Komara would simultaneously classify as an official canon, a critical
canon, and a diachronic canon of Western choral music. In a refreshing departure from the other
resources surveyed in this chapter, A History of Western Choral Music is amply footnoted,
referencing both primary source material and historically contextualized secondary sources. This
documentation of sources plays a key role in lending credibility to Alwes’s narrative-based
version of choral music history.

Conclusion: Choral Literature in Comparison to Other Art Historical Disciplines
The resilience of canonicity in the choral field stands in contrast to changes in
disciplinary methods in musicology and art history, fields that also deal with the interpretation
and analysis of art objects from a mythological “Western” heritage. Decades ago, the advent of
postmodernism forced musicologists to accept that “the authority of the canon as a measurement
of quality in some absolute sense has proved increasingly difficult to sustain” and that “the
notion of a single culture, of which the canon might be regarded as the finest expression, is no

110
Melvin P. Unger, “A History of Western Choral Music by Chester L. Alwes (Review),” Bach 48, no. 1 (2017):
116, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.22513/bach.48.1.0115.
85
longer viable.”
111
In the words of Jim Samson, the democratization of art, the “blurring of
boundaries” with mass culture, and the decentering of “the ‘high status’ of classical music as art”
have all contributed to broad acceptance in musicology “that disparate musics” can “co-exist
without antinomies or forcefields,” and that “nothing need be peripheral.”
112
In the field of art
history, academics have similarly grappled with issues of canonicity for more than forty years.
Art historians have long discussed the notion that there is not “one single normative system” of
art history, but rather many “art histories.”
113
In the words of Larry Silver and Kevin Terraciano:

The canon of art historical values, based on a European, Vasarian model that had
long been promoted in academic courses and textbooks, must be recognized as
only one perspective. The canon of the Western tradition, for so long transmitted
to every student in academic education, should not dominate, and we must
welcome the study of a variety of canons representing different forms,
expressions, and traditions.
114

In both fields, canonical works continue to hold sway in university courses and other
institutionalized settings, such as museum exhibits in the visual art world.
115
Yet in academic
discourse, the Western art canon has arguably shifted from an unquestioned standard-bearer of
aestheticism and taste to an object of methodological and historiographical inquiry. For example,
standard art history methods textbooks teach students to understand art history as a “fabricated”
discipline with a history of its own, in which the notion of a canon has influenced nation-

111
Jim Samson, quoted in Kurkela and Mantere, Critical Music Historiography : Probing Canons, Ideologies and
Institutions, 229.
112
Samson, quoted in Kurkela and Mantere, 229.
113
Larry Silver and Kevin Terraciano, eds., Canons and Values: Ancient to Modern (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute, 2019), x.
114
Silver and Terraciano, x.
115
This assessment of canonical influence in the visual art world is according to a conversation with art historian
Alexis Bard Johnson, curator at the ONE Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries, June 2, 2023.
86
building, religion, politics, and the construction of the institutions and professional practices of
the art historical field itself.
116

In practice, many choral directors in the United States have abandoned Cold War era
views on the primacy of the Western choral canon, as evidenced by the popularity of diverse and
multicultural programming in the choral performances of educational and professional choirs
across the country. Similarly, the field of music education has acknowledged the reality of
multiculturalism since the 1990s, as discussed in Chapter 1. Yet, if the most recently published
texts surveyed in this chapter are any indication, academic choral literature shows few signs of
following suit.

116
As an example, see Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology.
87
Chapter 3: A Case Study in Jazz

Introduction: The Exclusion of Jazz from Choral Literature
Although many twentieth and twenty-first century composers have experimented with
using jazz harmonies and idioms in their choral works, jazz as a music genre has been almost
entirely excluded from the academic study of choral literature. As discussed in the previous
chapter, Robert L. Garretson’s 1993 volume, Choral Music: History, Style, and Performance
Practice, is the only major choral literature textbook published in the past sixty years that
discusses vocal jazz as a subgenre of choral music. Meanwhile, Nick Strimple’s 2002 volume,
Choral Music in the Twentieth Century, is the only major choral literature textbook that
discusses Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts, which are among the most monumental examples
of jazz written for choir in the twentieth century. Despite the popularity of vocal jazz in
educational and professional settings and despite its strong representation in performances,
conferences, and articles published by The Choral Journal of the American Choral Directors
Association (ACDA), jazz is not acknowledged as a valid subgenre of choral music in the
discipline of choral literature. This chapter takes jazz as a case study, exploring how and why a
music genre with more than sixty years of vocal ensemble activity has been omitted from choral
literature textbooks.
Historically, vocal forms of jazz have been excluded so thoroughly from the choral
establishment that even though this music has benefited from greater acceptance and inclusion in
recent years, most choir directors are still unwilling to call it choral music or to see jazz as
belonging within a “traditional” choral program. In 2015, The Choral Journal dedicated a special
focus issue to the topic of vocal jazz for the first time in ACDA’s history. In this issue, numerous
88
articles on vocal jazz repertoire, pedagogy, and history carefully distinguished vocal jazz from
“traditional” choral music. Diane Spradling, former chair of the national committee on vocal jazz
and show choir, co-authored an article titled, “Pedagogy for the Jazz Singer,” which begins by
stating that vocal jazz “really is not choral music as we in the American Choral Directors
Association define choral music traditionally or historically.”
1
Gregory Amerind discusses the
history of “the vocal jazz ensemble” as a completely separate entity from school choral
programs.
2
Roger Emerson reinforces this dichotomy in an article providing advice to the choral
director who is currently “considering creating a vocal jazz ensemble.”
3
Emerson suggests
introducing “one or two vocal jazz selections” to an established choral ensemble, then recruiting
singers who enjoy the idiom as “the nucleus of your new ensemble”.
4
The implication is clear:
choirs are not really meant to perform jazz. Vocal jazz ensembles––just like vocal jazz
pedagogy––must be built separately from the ground up.
The idea that vocal jazz must be segregated from “traditional” choral music due to the
unique demands of the repertoire and pedagogy raises some intractable questions. Since the
founding of ACDA in 1959, American choir directors have used this national platform to
celebrate and promote the extraordinary diversity of their art form. In 1964, ACDA President
Walter Imig stated in his national convention address, “Ours, in ACDA, is a heritage of many
hundreds of years.”
5
ACDA President Maurice Casey made almost exactly the same claim in his

1
Diana Spradling and Justin Binek, “Pedagogy for the Jazz Singer,” The Choral Journal 55, no. 11 (2015): 6–17,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24580541.
2
Gregory Amerind, “The Collegiate Vocal Jazz Ensemble: A Foundational History,” The Choral Journal 55, no. 11
(2015): 18–27, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24580543. Amerind.
3
Roger Emerson, “Starting a Vocal Jazz Ensemble,” The Choral Journal 55, no. 11 (2015): 53,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24580549.
4
Emerson, 53.
5
Warner Imig, “President Imig’s Convention Address,” The Choral Journal 4, no. 5 (1964): 11,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23542432.
89
own national convention address in 1985.
6
In honoring this heritage, countless articles in The
Choral Journal over the past sixty years have dealt with the challenges of training choirs to
perform repertoire ranging from Renaissance madrigals to Mahler symphonies to electronic tape
pieces, which unquestionably represent unique repertories with unique demands on the voice.
7

Yet The Choral Journal has never published a single article suggesting that choral directors
wishing to do justice to the Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem must first establish a vocal ensemble
dedicated exclusively to German Romantic music. On the contrary, American choir directors
have readily accepted for decades that hundreds of years of stylistically diverse repertoire can
rightfully belong to their ensembles, as long as that repertoire originated in or can claim
inheritance to the “art music” of Western culture. Furthermore, starting in the 1990s, the rise of
multiculturalism as a concept in choral education has prompted greater awareness and
acceptance of choral music from countries outside Europe and the United States. Jazz harmonies
and idioms pose barriers to choir directors without prior training in jazz; yet choir directors have
overcome similar challenges in programming music of diverse styles and cultures from around
the world.
The exclusion of jazz from choral music is especially notable given that it has happened
during a period when which American choral directors have made concerted efforts to promote
choral music by American composers. By the 1970s, many articles in The Choral Journal sought
to amplify modern or contemporary American choral music. ACDA members were especially
active in promoting American choral literature during the lead-up to the bicentennial anniversary
of the United States in 1976.
8
During these preparatory years, Gregg Smith contributed a review

6
Casey, “1985 ACDA National Convention.”
7
Carey, “Choral Music and the New Aesthetic”; “The Editor’s Notebook No. 6,” The Choral Journal 22, no. 6
(1982): 3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23545845.
8
Smith, “The Bi-Centennial Celebration: A Look Forward and Backward.”
90
of American choral literature from the 1620s to the present, covering an extensive list of
composers including William Billings, Stephen Foster, Charles Ives, Randall Thompson, and
Jacob Druckman, the winner of that year’s Pulitzer Prize, as well as shape-note music, spirituals,
and “electronic composers.”
9
Jazz, however, is not mentioned. In 1976, ACDA held a massive
Bicentennial Celebration at Interlochen featuring a choir of 184 singers recruited from all fifty
states.
10
The centerpiece of the celebration was the performance of a specially commissioned
work by Lukas Foss, American Cantata, which in Harold Decker’s words, combined
quintessentially American music “extending from folk song and rock idioms to the most esoteric
contemporary musical concepts”––but not jazz.
11
Jazz is also missing from academic scholarship
specifically dedicated to American choral music. David DeVenney, a noted author of several
books on American choral literature, mentions jazz influence on a variety of twentieth-century
American composers including John Alden Carpenter, Marc Blitzstein, Geoge Kleinsinger,
Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, and many others.
12
But he does not discuss important jazz
composers like Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, and Dave Brubeck, who are all known
specifically for writing choral jazz works.
In short, the segregation of jazz from American choral music is striking, especially given
that almost since the beginning of jazz history, the rest of the world has embraced jazz as “an
American national music.”
13
Why have American choir directors and choral literature authors

9
Smith.
10
Guy B. Webb, “'American Cantata’ and the Bicentennial Chorus,” The Choral Journal 17, no. 2 (1976): 22,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544397.
11
Harold Decker, “ACDA Bicentennial Celebration,” The Choral Journal 17, no. 2 (1976): 20,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544396.
12
David P. DeVenney, Varied Carols: A Survey of American Choral Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1999), 119, 176–77, 190–91, 210, 228–29, 231, 240, 257; David P. DeVenney, American Choral Music Since 1920
(Berkeley, CA: Fallen Leaf Press, 1993); David P. DeVenney, Source Readings in American Choral Music (The
College Music Society, 1995).
13
E. Taylor Atkins, ed., Jazz Planet (Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2003), xxv.
91
been so reluctant to do the same? In seeking an answer to this question, I examine the
development of vocal jazz and choral jazz as separate idioms, with particular attention to the
innovations of Pacific Northwest jazz educators and the pioneering sacred jazz works of Mary
Lou Williams and Duke Ellington. I investigate the ways in which the American choral
establishment sought to define and promote standards of choral excellence by distinguishing
choral music from “entertainment,” and I consider the effects of these tactics upon the
burgeoning vocal jazz and show choir movement. I also discuss the relationship between vocal
jazz and show choir as two distinct and marginalized choral subgenres vying for legitimacy. This
case study on jazz concludes by considering how the exclusion of jazz from twentieth-century
histories of choral music is intertwined with American choral directors’ efforts to define the
standards of their art.

Origins of Vocal Jazz
American vocal jazz has several points of origin. Lara Pellegrinelli identifies many forms
of vocal music that served as important precursors to jazz, including spirituals, ring shouts, field
hollers, blues, ragtime, and minstrelsy, focusing especially on female singers who performed in
brothels, saloons, and cabarets in the early years of jazz in New Orleans.
14
Jazz histories,
Pellegrinelli argues, rarely pay adequate tribute to these early singers because America’s “birth
of jazz” mythology has relied on “great man” histories to divorce jazz from entertainment and
legitimize jazz as serious art music.
15
Meanwhile, Gregory Amerind emphasizes the influence of
1950s and 1960s professional vocal jazz ensembles who were inspired by barbershop quartets

14
Lara Pellegrinelli, “Separated at ‘Birth’: Singing and the History of Jazz,” in Big Ears: Listening for Gender in
Jazz Studies, ed. Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008),
https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822389224-003.
15
Pellegrinelli, 42.
92
and other close-harmony groups from the big band era. Jessica Perea, Michael Worthy, and
Amerind all trace the beginnings of modern-day vocal jazz to the Pacific Northwest in the 1960s,
zeroing in on jazz educators who sought to create “a vocal counterpart” to instrumental jazz
ensembles.
16

Strong common themes emerge in these histories of vocal jazz: the influence of solo
singers; the importance of records and aural learning; the DIY mentality of pioneering artists
who experimented with technology, vocal production, and arranging techniques; and above all,
the alienation of vocal jazz from both instrumental jazz and choral music throughout its
development.
17
Regarding the influence of solo singers, Gene Aitken, a renowned musician and
jazz educator, authored an article in the National Association of Jazz Educators journal in 1980
advising would-be vocal jazz singers and directors on the importance of listening to great scat-
singers “like Joe Williams, Mel Tormé, Mark Murphy, and Ella Fitzgerald” and “copying their
style and scat-syllables.”
18
The historian Jessica Perea similarly highlights the historical
influence of “canonic jazz vocalists” like Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Billie Holiday, and
Mel Tormé, who have long served as models for vocal jazz directors seeking to preserve “the
stylistic interpretations established by canonical performers and recordings” while creating “a
unified group sound.”
19
Michael Worthy, associate professor of music at the University of
Mississippi, notes that jazz recordings have played a key role in jazz education (both vocal and

16
Michael D. Worthy, “Jazz Education,” Grove Music Online 1 (February 23, 2011),
https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2093226; Jessica Bissett Perea, “Voices from the Jazz
Wilderness,” in Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries, ed. David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel
Goldmark (University of California Press, 2012), 219–36,
https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520271036.003.0011; Amerind, “The Collegiate Vocal Jazz Ensemble: A
Foundational History.”
17
See Pellegrinelli’s accounting of the alienation of vocal forms of jazz from instrumental jazz and choral music.
Pellegrinelli, “Separated at ‘Birth’: Singing and the History of Jazz.”
18
Gene Aitken, “What Is Vocal Jazz?,” Jazz Educators Journal 12, no. 1 (1980): 10.
19
Perea, “Voices from the Jazz Wilderness,” 222–23.
93
instrumental) for over a century. In an article tracing the history of jazz education, Worthy states
that ever since the first jazz recordings were made in 1917, “recordings have facilitated the
dissemination of exemplary compositions, improvisations, and stylistic performances without
limits of distance or time... The educational role of listening to and imitating jazz recordings
cannot be overstated.”
20

Recording technology not only has facilitated jazz education; it has also enabled jazz
singers to experiment with vocal production, arranging, and recording techniques in ways that
have profoundly shaped modern-day aesthetics of vocal jazz. Perea, for instance, recounts the
1950s recording innovations of Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks, and Annie Ross, an iconic vocal
jazz trio that was unable to find enough seasoned jazz singers to create “the balance, blend,
timbre, and groove” that they needed in order to translate “an instrumental big band sound… into
a vocal ensemble format.”
21
Instead, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross decided to use overdubbing
technology to record all the tracks themselves, resulting in a “fleshed-out studio sound” that
Pacific Northwest jazz educators would later attempt to recreate live with their high school and
collegiate vocal jazz ensembles.
22
Amerind discusses how overdubbing technology also
influenced vocal jazz arranging techniques early on, noting that overdubbing enabled the
trailblazing jazz arranger Gene Puerling to create “more complex and harmonically rich
arrangements” that the four singers in his quartet, Singers Unlimited, could still record “with
almost no loss in fidelity.”
23

Worthy, Perea, and Amerind all describe the efforts of generations of vocal jazz pioneers
who experimented with arranging, teaching, and promoting vocal jazz as a new genre that

20
Worthy, “Jazz Education,” 1.
21
Perea, “Voices from the Jazz Wilderness,” 223.
22
Perea, 223.
23
Amerind, “The Collegiate Vocal Jazz Ensemble: A Foundational History,” 21.
94
melded the techniques and idioms of instrumental jazz and choral music. Most of these early
pioneers were instrumental jazz educators, not voice or choral music teachers––including Hal
Malcolm, Waldo King, and John Moawad, “the founding triumvirate of Pacific Northwest vocal-
instrumental jazz education.”
24
Malcolm’s first attempt in 1950 to create vocal jazz using singers
from his college choral program was, by his own account, a hilarious failure: “the resulting
sound resembled a ‘Wagnerian opera ensemble’ that bordered on anarchy.”
25
Thus, when he
formed the Mount Hood Swing Choir in 1967, the first ever vocal jazz ensemble officially
recognized and supported by a school music program, Malcolm recruited his singers not from the
choral program but from the school band.
26
For Malcolm and the other pathbreakers of his
generation, building a unified sound and learning to arrange for vocal jazz ensembles were trial-
and-error processes that happened largely outside the aegis of both instrumental jazz and choral
music programs.
This early alienation of vocal jazz from both instrumental jazz and choral music has
persisted to the present day. In 2013, Worthy observed that the early twentieth century
“perception of jazz as a threat to society” had given way to the “integration of jazz into
academia”––yet vocal jazz has not benefited from this now-widespread acceptance of
instrumental jazz as an authentic and intellectual form of art music.
27
In 2015, Amerind believed
that the choral field’s “initial mainstream resistance” to vocal jazz had largely been dispelled and
that early “misconceptions that singing jazz is harmful to the voice [were] melting away at

24
Perea, “Voices from the Jazz Wilderness,” 220.
25
Perea, 220.
26
Perea, 220.
27
Worthy, “Jazz Education,” 3–4.
95
last.”
28
Yet, contrary to his optimistic view, vocal jazz continues to lack recognition in the choral
field. In Perea’s words:

While vocal jazz ensembles draw from two well-established streams of influence–
–bop- and swing-based instrumental jazz and Western choral traditions––neither
of these musical and cultural parents wants much to do with their offspring, as
each tends to view vocal jazz as a transgression against their own aesthetic and
cultural values. Choral traditionalists view vocal jazz as fun at best, potentially
damaging at worst, while critics on the jazz side deride the vocal jazz subgenre as
inauthentic, disingenuous, or just plain cheesy.
29

As Perea suggests, the choral establishment’s criticism of vocal jazz has largely fixated on its
associations with entertainment and on the notion that jazz singing is antithetical to bel canto
voice pedagogy, thus labeling jazz as a style of music that interferes with choral aesthetics or
even damages the voice. These viewpoints are well-documented over decades of articles in The
Choral Journal, showing how generations of American choral directors and ACDA leaders
systematically defined choral standards in ways that excluded jazz. In this sense, jazz has served
as a useful foil for choral music: by identifying the attributes of jazz that made it unworthy of
choral music, American choral directors gained new vocabulary for defining and solidifying the
standards of their art.

Choral Music Is Not Entertainment
As established in the first chapter, the mission of ACDA’s early years was to establish a
nationwide concept of choral music as a fine art originating in a mythological Judeo-Christian
Western heritage with hundreds of years of history. Key to these efforts was the need to
distinguish the high art of choral music from lower forms of entertainment. In 1960, Warner

28
Amerind, “The Collegiate Vocal Jazz Ensemble: A Foundational History,” 26.
29
Perea, “Voices from the Jazz Wilderness,” 221.
96
Imig (who would assume the ACDA presidency in 1962) urged all ACDA members to “take a
definite stand to make music a living art, not merely entertainment.”
30
Numerous other choral
directors echoed Imig’s call to action throughout the 1960s, but usually in fairly general terms.
31

By the 1970s, those seeking to protect choral standards from the pollution of entertainment had
found a specific target: the vocal jazz movement.
Following the successful launch of Hal Malcolm’s Northwest Swing Choir Festival (later
renamed the Northwest Vocal Jazz Festival) in 1968, American choir directors slowly but surely
began to follow his example.
32
Kirby Shaw and Phil Mattson, who became influential vocal jazz
arrangers and educators in their own right, were among many choral directors who were first
introduced to vocal jazz at Malcolm’s festival.
33
In 1970, The Choral Journal published its first
article on vocal jazz, titled “The Jazz Choir,” by Anthony Cappadonia.
34
In 1975, ACDA voted
to form a new Standards and Repertoire committee dedicated to jazz and show choirs.
35
By 1976,
regular articles on jazz began to appear under a new column: “Get Down! The Jazz and Show
Choir Corner.” The following year, Kirby Shaw contributed an article titled “Arranging for the
Jazz Choir,” which noted that the previous ten years had seen the evolution of the jazz choir

30
Imig, “Choral Music in The College.”
31
Examples of general criticism of entertainment music include the following: “Have our choral groups gradually
become organizations devoted to entertainment of both singers and listeners?... Have our choirs been deliberately
used as media for public display and community relations rather than the vehicle of aesthetic experience which they
should be?” in Wilson, “Quality in Choral Groups,” 3. “This emphasis on quality has produced a striking trend in
our American choral music. This trend is the gradual change in the conception of the purpose of a choral group.
Stated simply, it conceives of our choral groups as artistic and cultural endeavors and not media primarily for
recreation and amusement. Their purpose is to educate the participants and listeners, not just entertain," in Harry
Robert Wilson, “Significant Trends in American Choral Music,” The Choral Journal 2, no. 5 (1962): 7,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23541915.
32
Amerind, “The Collegiate Vocal Jazz Ensemble: A Foundational History,” 23–24.
33
Amerind, 24.
34
Anthony C. Cappadonia, “The Jazz Choir,” The Choral Journal 11, no. 1 (1970): 9–10,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23543736.
35
Gene Grier, “Get Down! Jazz and Show Choir Corner,” The Choral Journal 17, no. 2 (1976): 24,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544398.
97
“into a significant force in music education.”
36
The same year, Gary McRoberts announced in a
separate article, “There is a new and exciting style of choral music deserving of all directors’
attention. The form? Choral Jazz!”
37
Gene Grier, the chair of the Jazz and Show Choir
committee, announced new adjudication guidelines for “vocal jazz, swing and show choir”
festivals, noting that more choral directors were “following the lead” of “Hal Malcolm of Mt.
Hood Community College,” who had founded “one of the finest” high school vocal jazz
competitions in the country.
38
Notably, these early articles freely use terms like “choir” and
“choral music” to describe this new genre, enthusiastically inviting more choir directors to
consider jazz repertoire as a stimulating addition to their choral programs.
By the 1980s, however, the burgeoning vocal jazz movement had become the target of a
heated backlash against so-called entertainment masquerading as choral music. In this climate,
some vocal jazz educators began to distance themselves from show choir, positioning vocal jazz
as “musically superior” owing to the use of harmonically complex arrangements and the
emphasis on music over choreography. In 1980, Gene Aitken, then the director of jazz studies at
the University of Northern Colorado, contributed an article for the National Association of Jazz
Educators journal stating the differences between vocal jazz and show choir:

First of all, vocal jazz implies that there is no choreography. Sure, there is some
movement, but only that which is natural. No time is spent away from the music
working on coordinated hand, foot and body movements. I have nothing against
the “Show Choir,” concept except every bit of time spent on choreography takes
away from the time an ensemble needs to spend on the music… and in vocal jazz,
emphasis must really be on the musical aspect.
39

36
Kirby Shaw, “Arranging for the Jazz Choir,” The Choral Journal 17, no. 5 (1977): 21,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23545330.
37
Gary K. McRoberts, “The Unheralded Choral Art — JAZZ,” The Choral Journal 17, no. 6 (1977): 23–24,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544219.
38
Grier, “Get Down! Jazz and Show Choir Corner,” 24.
39
Aitken, “What Is Vocal Jazz?,” 9.
98

Despite efforts within the vocal jazz movement to distance jazz from theater and
entertainment, many prominent choral educators still saw vocal jazz as counterproductive or
even dangerous to the reputation of choral music. Gordon Paine, assistant professor of choral
music at California State University Fullerton and a prominent leader in the American choral
scene, wrote an impassioned diatribe against jazz choirs in 1981. Paine argued that all forms of
vocal jazz were an insidious form of “commercial music” that posed an existential threat to true
choral music.
40
Not only did “commercial music” threaten to “grow unchecked and to drive out
more traditional choral programs,” it also undermined healthy vocal technique.
41
In Paine’s view,
singing “commercial music” invited students to imitate “what one hears on the radio and
television, and usually… such imitation is a negative influence on vocal development.”
42
To cap
it off, Paine claimed that all forms of jazz choir, including “vocal jazz,” “show choir,” and
“choral jazz,” were not even real jazz:

Jazz is a native-American art form that arose out of the southern-black
experience. Its essence lies in improvisation. Choral music which includes some
of the stylistic elements of jazz may bear some resemblance to that folk-art form,
but without improvisation, it is no more jazz than a modern piece written in
Renaissance style is Renaissance music.
43

Whereas “commercial music” was merely a pale imitation of an authentic art form, Paine argued
that choral music was defined by “appreciation for fine art and fine craftsmanship.”
44
Unlike
“commercial music,” whose only purpose was “instant gratification,” choral music wielded

40
Gordon Paine, “The Show-Choir Movement: Some Food For Thought,” The Choral Journal 21, no. 9 (1981): 5,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23545716.
41
Paine, 5.
42
Paine, 5.
43
Paine, 5.
44
Paine, 5.
99
“awesome power for the enrichment and improvement of those who sing it.”
45
In short, choral
music was the exact opposite of vocal jazz or “commercial music.” Paine concluded by echoing
Warner Imig’s charge to ACDA in 1960: “Let us not confuse education with entertainment.”
46

Paine’s article crystallized a new understanding of vocal jazz as the very epitome of music that
defied American choral standards.
Within a year of Paine’s tirade, which treated vocal jazz, show choir, and all forms of
jazz in a choral setting as interchangeably bad for choral music, proponents of vocal jazz
escalated their efforts to distance vocal jazz from show choir and to legitimize vocal jazz using
the language of “art music.” An advertisement for the Phil Mattson Jazz Workshops running in
the summer of 1982 called vocal jazz “the ‘art music’ of popular vocal literature.”
47
Vocal jazz,
the ad stated, was “serious music” comparable to “classical music” and “traditional jazz,” in that
its “primary concern is with the music” (as opposed to choreography).
48
Moreover, although
vocal jazz “entertains,” the ad clarified, “it is not primarily ‘entertainment’ music; i.e., a product
[sic].”
49
Other choir directors similarly defended vocal jazz in terms of its aesthetic and artistic
value, or advocated for the value of vocal jazz and popular music “as a supplement to the total
choral music program.”
50
Regarding the notion that imitating jazz singers would ruin students’
voices, Diana Spradling emphasized that good jazz singing was based upon some of the same
fundamentals of healthy vocal technique as bel canto singing and agreed that not all jazz singers

45
Paine, 5.
46
Paine, 6.
47
“Phil Mattson Vocal Jazz Workshops 1982,” The Choral Journal 22, no. 8 (1982): 22,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23545925.
48
“Phil Mattson Vocal Jazz Workshops 1982.”
49
“Phil Mattson Vocal Jazz Workshops 1982.”
50
Michael L. Masterson, “Response to Gordon Paine’s Essay on Show Choirs,” The Choral Journal 22, no. 9
(1982): 29, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23545817; Doug Anderson, “Popular Choral Corner: ACDA National
Committee On Jazz and Show Choirs Wants You To Get Involved,” The Choral Journal 23, no. 7 (1983): 9,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23546174.
100
should be emulated. While Ella Fitzgerald used healthy vocal technique throughout “her
unquestionably successful career,” other jazz singers like Billie Holiday “must be judged only by
their stylistic contributions and not by their vocal qualities.”
51
Other proponents of vocal jazz
went further in claiming that vocal technique in jazz and “classical” choral music were
completely identical. For instance, Kirby Shaw claimed in his 1987 Vocal Jazz Style handbook
that “it cannot be too strongly emphasized that the jazz choir bases its standards of tone
production, blend, and balance upon the same Western European-derived choral practices found
in the vast majority of American public school choral programs.”
52

Despite these efforts to rebrand vocal jazz as “serious music” based on bel canto vocal
technique, attacks on vocal jazz continued through the end of the decade, most notably in
Leonard Van Camp’s 1987 article, “The Choral Crisis and a Plan for Action (An Open Letter to
My Colleagues).”
53
Van Camp claimed that excessive interest in “commercial music” had led the
American choral profession into a state of crisis, resulting in lower performance standards,
decreasing music literacy, insufficient numbers of male students entering the music education
and conducting fields, and a host of other issues. Accusing American choral directors nationwide
of doing “too little to show that music is a vital part of our culture and of our life,” Van Camp
urged his colleagues “to get excited about music again, good music, music that has lasting
qualities!”
54
In Van Camp’s view, music “that has primarily an entertainment purpose” was
threatening to “crowd out really significant art music” like that of “Bach, Beethoven, and
Brahms.”
55
Choirs who spent too much time singing “vocal jazz, swing choir, and musical

51
Diana R. Spradling, “Pedagogy and Vocal Jazz,” The Choral Journal 27, no. 4 (1986): 27,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23547187.
52
Perea, “Voices from the Jazz Wilderness,” 228.
53
Leonard Van Camp, “The Choral Crisis and a Plan for Action (An Open Letter to My Colleagues),” The Choral
Journal 28, no. 5 (1987): 15–20, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23547358.
54
Van Camp, 20.
55
Van Camp, 20.
101
theater” were ruining themselves on an “unhealthy”–– if “momentarily satisfying”––diet.
56
The
time had come, Van Camp argued, for American choir directors to “be models of enlightened
professionals,” to remember “that beauty in life matters!” and to “keep the tradition of fine
music, which our pioneer conductors gave us, alive for those who will follow us in the future.”
57

Van Camp’s article represented far more than one man’s opinions. Subsequent issues of
The Choral Journal printed letters to the editor calling his article the most important, relevant,
and insightful article in recent memory.
58
One member requested ACDA to issue a public
statement defining the choral art according to the ideals stated in Van Camp’s article.
59
A few
copycat articles emerged as well, like Andrew Cottle’s 1988 “Choral Manifesto,” which claimed,
“Pop styles are not appropriate to art music even as school clothes are not appropriate at a
prom.”
60
Most significant, ACDA leadership awarded Van Camp a larger platform for his ideas,
promoting his subsequent articles in the ACDA President’s monthly letter to the membership and
even allocating a special interest session to “The Crisis in Choral Music” at the 1989 ACDA
National Convention.
61

Tyler Thomas, who has chronicled vocal jazz representation in The Choral Journal, notes
the decrease in vocal jazz articles published in the late 1980s and early 1990s in connection with
the backlash against vocal jazz in the choral community.
62
Thomas has also researched the

56
Van Camp, 20.
57
Van Camp, 16, 20.
58
E. Eugene Pierce, “Winnick & Van Camp Articles,” The Choral Journal 28, no. 10 (1988): 34,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23547722; Robert Perinchief and Mary Ellen Pinzino, “Letters to the Editor,” The
Choral Journal 29, no. 10 (1989): 35–36, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23547534.
59
Dennis C. Crabb, “Van Camp,” The Choral Journal 28, no. 10 (1988): 34–35,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23548450.
60
Andrew Cottle, “A Choral Manifesto,” The Choral Journal 29, no. 3 (1988): 14,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23547495.
61
“CELEBRATION! Convention Celebrates ACDA’s Thirty Years,” The Choral Journal 29, no. 3 (1988): 31–32,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23547498.
62
Tyler Thomas, “Jazz in the Choral Journal: An Historical Narrative of Vocal Jazz Representation in the ACDA’s
Flagship Publication” (2020), 11–13, https://www.tylerthomasmusic.com/s/Jazz_Choral_Journal_T_Thomas.pdf.
102
development of all-state vocal ensembles in the U.S. from 1978 to 2022, showing in detail how
vocal jazz educators across the country created an ecosystem of vocal jazz ensembles,
competitions, and festivals apart from the choral education community owing to tensions
“regarding the value of the vocal jazz idiom relative to traditional choirs, show choirs, and other
vocal ensembles.”
63
Thomas notes that the efforts of vocal jazz educators to distance their art
form from show choir eventually led to the establishment of separate national committees for
vocal jazz and show choir in 2003.
64

Since the 1970s, vocal jazz articles in The Choral Journal have repeatedly acknowledged
that American choir directors lacking training in jazz often feel ill-equipped for the challenges of
teaching jazz harmonies and idioms to their students.
65
This reluctance has likely reinforced
notions of jazz as fundamentally separate from choral music. At the same time, however, jazz
has been an essential part of American choir directors’ mission to define and uphold standards of
excellence in the choral art. Throughout the tumultuous decades at the end of the twentieth
century, vocal jazz and show choir music served as a powerful scapegoat for a rapidly growing
national community of choral educators seeking to articulate which repertoire, vocal techniques,
and performance practices did or did not belong in the choral sphere. Decades of efforts to define
and promote choral standards occurred in tandem with the systematic invalidation of vocal jazz
as an authentic form of American choral music. Although ACDA ran workshops and printed
regular columns on vocal jazz and show choir in order to address the needs and questions of
ACDA members who directed such ensembles, neither vocal jazz nor show choir ever achieved

63
Tyler Thomas, “The Emergence of All-State Vocal Jazz Ensembles in the United States from 1978 to 2022”
(DMA diss., University of North Texas, 2022), i.
64
Thomas, “Jazz in the Choral Journal: An Historical Narrative of Vocal Jazz Representation in the ACDA’s
Flagship Publication,” 16–17.
65
For example, in the first article on vocal jazz to appear in The Choral Journal in 1970, Anthony Cappadonia
acknowledges this barrier and notes, “Unfortunately, many choral conductors find the pop musical score a complete
mystery.” Cappadonia, “The Jazz Choir,” 9.
103
full recognition as serious choral music on par with the “standard” repertoire covered in
academic choral literature resources. This context provides a relevant backdrop for the choral
establishment’s alienation of choral jazz, which took shape concurrently as a separate idiom.

Origins of Choral Jazz
Unlike vocal jazz, which was hybridized from virtuosic solo jazz singing, professional
quartets and trios, and instrumental jazz, American choral jazz was created by composers who
always intended for their works to be performed by choirs. In particular, choral jazz grew out of
the pioneering efforts of composers like Mary Lou Williams and Duke Ellington, who were
among the first to write jazz for choral performances in a sacred Christian context. In spite of
receiving widespread attention and appreciation after their premieres, neither Williams’s nor
Ellington’s music has achieved much recognition in choral literature texts. As mentioned above,
Strimple’s Choral Music in the Twentieth Century is the only major choral literature textbook to
mention Ellington’s Sacred Concerts. Williams’s seminal sacred jazz work, Black Christ of the
Andes (Hymn in Honor of St. Martin de Porres), is not mentioned in any of the texts discussed in
the previous chapter; nor are any of her other choral works. Both St. Martin de Porres and the
Sacred Concerts pose significant musical or logistical challenges, but these issues cannot fully
account for their omission from textbooks that provide ample coverage of other large-scale or
complex choral repertoire.
One of the most influential jazz musicians of her generation, Mary Lou Williams (1910–
1981) wrote and arranged music for Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and
many other well-known bandleaders of the day.
66
Williams’s own musical style was rooted in the

66
Tammy L. Kernodle, “Williams, Mary Lou [Née Scruggs, Mary Elfrieda; Burley, Mary Lou],” Grove Music
Online, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2259377.
104
blues, yet she was one of relatively few older jazz musicians in her lifetime who embraced and
mentored the younger generation of bebop musicians, incorporating their innovations into her
own musical language. Following her conversion to Roman Catholicism in her forties,
Williams’s style underwent a pivotal shift as she worked to develop a new voice as a composer
of sacred and liturgical jazz. In 1962, Williams began writing Black Christ of the Andes (Hymn
in Honor of St. Martin de Porres), which would become one of the first sacred choral jazz works
written by an American composer. Two events of international consequence provided a direct
impetus for St. Martin de Porres. First, the Second Vatican Council substantially revised the
Catholic Church’s position on music in the liturgy, allowing for the use of indigenous musical
forms and styles to be used in services.
67
Second, Pope John XXIII canonized Martin de Porres
(1579–1639), a biracial Peruvian Dominican saint who had long been seen by Latin American
Catholics as the unofficial patron saint of social justice, as he was known during his lifetime for
ministering “to all, without regard to race, class or other social markers.”
68
These two events,
especially St. Martin de Porres’s canonization as only the third Black saint in the Catholic
Church, spurred Williams to begin working on a “hymn in modern jazz style,” which constituted
a wholly new form of music since jazz had never before been permitted in a Catholic liturgical
setting.
69
The result was a work of unprecedented stylistic fusion. St. Martin de Porres uses
whole tone, octatonic, and chromatic scales as structural devices that generate complex and
distinctive harmonies, highlighting the cross-pollination between midcentury American

67
The Second Vatican Council lasted from 1962-1965. The council’s first document was the “Constitution on the
Sacred Liturgy,” which opened the Catholic Church to the use of vernacular languages in service. For further
reading on the influence of these changes on Williams’s music, see Gayle Murchison, “Mary Lou Williams’s Hymn
‘Black Christ of the Andes (St. Martin de Porres)’: Vatican II, Civil Rights, and Jazz as Sacred Music,” The Musical
Quarterly 86, no. 4 (2002): 600–601, https://doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdg023.
68
Murchison, 603.
69
Murchison, 605.
105
beboppers and the post-tonal French symbolist and impressionist composers, especially Debussy
and Ravel, who drew inspiration from American jazz earlier in the 1900s.
At the same time, the style of St. Martin de Porres is resolutely choral in a very
traditional sense: the work is almost completely a cappella, and it is scored for an SATB choir
(with divisi) using a hymn tune as a cantus firmus. In addition, while the middle section features
a swing interlude during which the vocal parts act as backup singers, the vocal demands of the
rest of the piece––the extreme tessitura, difficult leaps, and dense chromatic writing––necessitate
the use of singers with classical vocal training. Williams herself described the work “as a
spiritual arranged like a classical piece.”
70
St. Martin de Porres was favorably reviewed after its
premiere on November 3, 1962 at the Church of Saint Francis Xavier in New York City, with
one critic notably recognizing the work as “a modern spiritual which managed to commingle
pride with something of the sadness that is in the blues.”
71
St. Martin de Porres was followed by
The Devil (1963), Anima Christi (1963), and a series of jazz masses: The Pittsburgh Mass
(1966), Mass for Lenten Season (1968), and Williams’s magnum opus, Mass for Peace and
Justice (1969), which was commissioned by the Vatican and later reworked as Mary Lou’s
Mass.
72
None of these works have received attention in standard choral literature texts published
since the 1960s, despite Williams’s stature as “the first lady of jazz” and the numerous ways that
her music has been celebrated and commemorated outside the choral field.
Duke Ellington (1899–1974), one of the most influential jazz artists and American
composers of the twentieth century, began writing his Sacred Concerts as Mary Lou Williams
was experimenting with sacred jazz in the early 1960s. These three full-evening jazz suites were

70
Murchison, 606.
71
Murchison, 618, 601.
72
Kernodle, “Williams, Mary Lou [Née Scruggs, Mary Elfrieda; Burley, Mary Lou].”
106
the focus of his creative output during the final decade of Ellington’s life.
73
He considered the
Sacred Concerts to be his greatest compositional legacy, an assessment that was supported by
their reception: the Sacred Concerts were performed for huge audiences during the 1960s and
1970s and achieved widespread acclaim after their premieres.
74
The first Sacred Concert was
premiered in 1963 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, then performed at least twenty-five times
in the United States and Europe due to popular demand.
75
The second Sacred Concert was
premiered in 1968 at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York to an audience
of more than seven thousand, followed by more than fifty performances across the U.S., France,
Spain, and Sweden.
76
The third Sacred Concert was commissioned for the 25
th
anniversary
celebration of the United Nations and premiered at Westminster Abbey in 1973. Owing to
Ellington’s declining health, the third Sacred Concert was completed at the last minute and only
received one additional performance before Ellington’s death in 1974.
77
All three Sacred
Concerts were recorded, with the second Sacred Concert achieving the most lasting recognition:
Ellington himself called it “the most important thing I have ever done.”
78

Ellington used relatively little polyphonic choral writing in comparison to Williams. In
contrast to St. Martin de Porres, a substantial portion of the choral writing in the first and second
Sacred Concerts is for unison voices, unpitched rhythmic chanting text, and backup vocals. But
like Williams, Ellington wrote these works specifically for choral performance. In the first

73
Wilbert Weldon Hill, “The Sacred Concerts of Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington” (PhD diss., The Catholic
University of America, 1995), 47.
74
Philip Clark, “Ellington: Sacred Concerts,” Gramophone 94, no. 1140 (2016),
https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A470367939/PPFA?u=usocal_main&sid=bookmark-PPFA&xid=ffe0f258; Hill, “The
Sacred Concerts of Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington,” 57.
75
Hill, “The Sacred Concerts of Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington”; Thomas Lloyd, “The Revival of an Early
‘Crossover’ Masterwork: Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts,” The Choral Journal 49, no. 11 (2009): 8–26,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23559485.
76
Lloyd, “The Revival of an Early ‘Crossover’ Masterwork: Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts,” 12.
77
Lloyd, 14.
78
Lloyd, 12.
107
Sacred Concert, the choral movements alternate between “idiomatically choral” writing, such as
in “Will You Be There?” and a more instrumental style, such as in “Ain’t But the One,” in which
Ellington composed for the choir “as if it were an instrumental section in his band” offering
rhythmic punctuation as a backup to the soloist.
79
Ellington learned from his experience
producing the first Sacred Concert that the chorus needed more time to rehearse his music in the
correct style and idiom. Thus, in preparation for the premiere of the second Sacred Concert, two
assistants––Tom Whaley and Roscoe Gill––were sent several weeks ahead in order to rehearse
the chorus, a volunteer community choir in New York, before putting the work together with
Ellington’s orchestra.
80
In movements featuring extensive spoken parts for the choir, such as
“Supreme Being,” Ellington made no note of the choir’s rhythmic patterns in the instrumental or
choral parts, suggesting that the rhythm was likely decided by his assistants during rehearsal.
81

For the third Sacred Concert, Ellington secured the John Alldis Choir, an experienced chorus
that needed much less preparation. In addition, much of the choral writing in the third Sacred
Concert is relegated to “sustained background parts,” due to the limitations in rehearsal time and
in order to minimize reverberation problems in the acoustic at Westminster Abbey.
82
Over the
course of many performances, especially of the first and second Sacred Concerts, Ellington
adapted his writing to accommodate the strengths and weaknesses of the choirs who performed
his music.
83

Both St. Martin de Porres and the Sacred Concerts pose significant logistical and musical
challenges. The high divisi, extreme vocal demands, and challenging harmonies in St. Martin de

79
Hill, “The Sacred Concerts of Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington,” 115.
80
Hill, 57–58.
81
Hill, 173.
82
Hill, 60.
83
Lloyd, “The Revival of an Early ‘Crossover’ Masterwork: Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts,” 16–17.
108
Porres require an advanced ensemble of powerful, highly trained singers to do justice to the
work. The performance score, which is owned by the Mary Lou Williams Foundation, is
extremely expensive and difficult to obtain. Meanwhile, a complete and authoritative score and
parts for the Sacred Concerts do not exist. In Ellington’s own performances, the order of
movements and the use of the choir varied from performance to performance. Consequently,
bandleaders and choir directors have had to make their own arrangements when performing these
works. In 1993, John Høybye and Peder Pederson published a version containing material from
all three works, titled Sacred Concert. The Høybye/Pederson version has been done by many
ensembles and was used at the 2019 ACDA National Conference in Kansas City, but it is by no
means the only way to perform the work.
84

These logistical and technical challenges do not account for the almost wholesale
omission of Ellington’s and Williams’s musical contributions from American choral literature
textbooks. Nor do they account for the omission of nearly every other significant American
choral jazz work of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Frank Tirro’s American Jazz
Mass, Billy Taylor’s Make a Joyful Noise and The Peaceful Warrior, Trudy Pitts’s jazz cantata A
Joyful Noise, Hannibal Lokumbe’s jazz cantatas, Jonathan Klein’s jazz setting of the Jewish
liturgy, and Wynton Marsalis’s The Abyssinian Mass. Choral jazz, like vocal jazz, is a
quintessentially American choral music genre with a significant history; yet it is all but invisible
in the archives of American choral literature.

84
John Høybye, “Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concert. The Høybye/Pedersen Version – for Soprano Solo, Mixed
Voices and Big Band,” accessed May 31, 2023, http://www.hoymusik.dk/english/works/sacred_concert_eng.htm;
“ACDA 2019 National Conference Kansas City Program,” The Choral Journal 59, no. 7 (2019): 126–27,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26600259.
109
Conclusion
Like vocal jazz, choral jazz became a major vehicle for compositional innovation in the
latter decades of the twentieth century, and performances of major works achieved significant
popular acclaim and recognition. Despite fundamental differences in style, repertoire, and
performance practices, vocal jazz and choral jazz share a common history as marginalized
subgenres of American vocal ensemble music. During the decades in which vocal jazz and
choral jazz emerged and gained popularity in the American music scene, both genres
simultaneously faced backlash or exclusion from the American choral establishment. While
vocal jazz was repeatedly denigrated as lightweight “commercial music” by influential choral
leaders, reactions to choral jazz often took the form of silence. Mary Lou Williams is mentioned
in The Choral Journal only once before the 2000s, in a 1972 article listing choral works by
Black composers.
85
While Duke Ellington appears many times in The Choral Journal from the
1960s to the present, his Sacred Concerts receive no mention until the 1999 ACDA National
Convention, at which Phil Mattson led an interest session featuring new choral arrangements of
excerpted songs from the Sacred Concerts.
86

Race is an unavoidable part of the story of jazz in the national choral community. While
most vocal jazz proponents during this period were white educators, choral jazz was pioneered in
large part by prominent professional Black jazz composers. The institutional silence on Mary
Lou Williams and Duke Ellington’s choral compositions stands in stark contrast to coverage of
choral works written by white jazz composers like Dave Brubeck, whose music was mentioned
in The Choral Journal more than sixty times before the year 2000. Nonetheless, even Brubeck
has received almost no coverage in prominent choral literature textbooks of the last half-century.

85
De Lerma, “A Selective List of Choral Music by Black Composers.”
86
“Interest Sessions,” The Choral Journal 39, no. 6 (1999): 85, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23552546.
110
In recent years, increased performances of iconic choral jazz works like Ellington’s Sacred
Concerts and Williams’s St. Martin de Porres and Mary Lou’s Mass indicate a shift towards
greater inclusion of choral jazz in the choral world.
87
At the same time, the almost wholesale
omission of vocal jazz, show choir, and choral jazz from choral literature histories reflects deeply
entrenched understandings of choral music as serious music, not entertainment, and as a form of
fine art originating in an ancient Western and European cultural heritage. The exclusion of jazz
from choral literature history is not an accident, but rather a vital part of the story of how
American choral directors defined, solidified, and policed the boundaries of choral music during
the formative final decades of the twentieth century.

87
Over the last ten to fifteen years, Ellington’s and Williams’s music has been presented by professional ensembles
and organizations like the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and
the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, as well as conservatories and music programs like the New England
Conservatory of Music and community choirs and choral societies like the New York Choral Society. “Ellington /
Williams,” Los Angeles Master Chorale, accessed June 12, 2023, https://lamasterchorale.org/show-details/ellington-
williams; “Symphonic Ellington: Sacred Concerts,” LA Philharmonic, accessed June 12, 2023,
https://www.laphil.com/events/performances/1494/2022-01-22/symphonic-ellington-sacred-concerts; “The Best of
Duke Ellington,” Jazz at Lincoln Center, accessed June 12, 2023, https://2023.jazz.org/the-best-of-duke-ellington;
“Mary Lou’s Mass,” Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, accessed June 12, 2023,
https://www.alvinailey.org/performances/repertory/mary-lous-mass; “NEC Chamber Singers & Symphonic Winds:
Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts + Françaix,” New England Conservatory of Music, accessed June 12, 2023,
https://necmusic.edu/events/nec-chamber-singers-symphonic-winds-duke-ellingtons-sacred-concerts-francaix;
“Ellington’s Sacred Concerts,” New York Choral Society, accessed June 12, 2023,
https://nychoral.org/event/ellingtons-sacred-concerts/#:~:text=Combining elements of jazz%2C classical,music he’d
ever written.
111
Chapter 4: Colonialism and the Canon in Choral Literature Curricula and Pedagogy

Introduction
Since 2020, American choral directors have undergone an unprecedented reckoning with
the Western canon of choral literature. For the first time, faced with widespread calls to improve
diversity and inclusion in the choral field, the leaders of the choral establishment have
acknowledged the existence of racial, ethnic, and gender marginalization in choral music and
have stated their commitment to changing this status quo. These calls for change are not limited
to the choral world; they are echoing throughout American academic and arts institutions. In
music history, music education, and art history—neighboring fields that are also grappling with a
hegemonic Western artistic canon—efforts to revise disciplinary practice over the past few years
have revolved around decanonization and decolonization. In the choral field, by contrast,
prominent conductors and choral leaders have reassured fellow choral directors that improving
representation and inclusion does not mean “rejection of the choral canon that many of us grew
up with” or “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”
1
Instead, the choral field has
recommitted to upholding the canon while improving the representation of marginalized
composers, thereby “broadening our view of repertoire and how to engage in it with the
musicians we affect.”
2

In the words of Hilary Apfelstadt, the Interim Executive Director of ACDA in 2021, this
approach seeks “balance” between the Western canon and minoritized music—echoing 1970s
advocacy for “a balanced outlook” between “new music” and “the great works of the past,”

1
Hilary Apfelstadt, “From the Interim Executive Director 61,” The Choral Journal 61, no. 11 (2021): 3,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/27089683; Armstrong, “20212 ACDA Virtual National Conference Recap:
Anton Armstrong Keynote Address.”
2
Apfelstadt, “From the Interim Executive Director 61,” 2.
112
1980s advocacy for “balance” between historical European “choral classics” and other music in
primary and secondary school curricula, and 1990s advocacy to balance the needs of “a variety
of choral literature, ranging from the classics to multicultural works to the very best of
contemporary popular music.”
3
As decades of history show, calls for “balance” are not new in
the choral field, and striving for “balance” has never involved seriously rethinking the centrality
of Western choral “classics” in American choral pedagogy, programming, and literature.
Increasing the representation of minoritized musics and musicians will therefore improve
diversity and inclusion in the choral field while maintaining a kind of status quo.
Over the past few years, a resounding interdisciplinary consensus has emerged that
teaching according to a canon defined by monocultural exceptionalism reinforces the power
structures of colonialism. These structures privilege those who are already privileged and cause
harm to those who are already marginalized by invalidating their identities, cultural knowledge,
and ways of learning and knowing. Scholars in music education, music history, and art history
have therefore acknowledged the need to go beyond diversity and tokenism and actively
decolonize their disciplines. Music educator Juliet Hess argues that improving diversity is far
from sufficient, if teachers merely supplement Western classical repertoire with musics “in a
range of styles with roots in places ‘Other than’ Western Europe,” thereby marking those musics

3
“We have debated about the role of the western art music canon. (Should we keep it? Should we reject it? How
about finding balance?)” Apfelstadt, “From the Interim Executive Director 62,” 2.
“Yes, we have extremists, but as leaders we have to keep a sane outlook and a balanced outlook. We must neither
close our minds to new music, nor must we eliminate the great works of the past so that we deprive these young
students of the B minor Mass, and that sort of thing.” Wagner and Moremen, “In Quest of Answers: An Interview
with Roger Wagner,” 11.
“What I have to say should not be construed as a diatribe against pop and novelty arrangements. What I’m for is a
proper balance, a fair sample of the entire choral spectrum: renaissance, baroque, classical, the madrigal types,
romantic, contemporary, etc.” Theron Kirk, “Hurrah! For Frightened Choral Directors,” The Choral Journal 15, no.
2 (1974): 15, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23544483.
See also: Doreen Rao, “Children and Choral Music in ACDA: The Past and the Present, The Challenge and the
Future,” The Choral Journal 29, no. 8 (1989): 12, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23547565; John Haberlen, “From the
President: Repertoire: The Keystone of a Choral Program,” The Choral Journal 35, no. 9 (1995): 3,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23551045.
113
as inferior and reinforcing Western classical music as the primary, default, or core part of the
curriculum.
4
Music historian Margaret Walker similarly notes that “the constant privileging of a
Euro-American narrative bundles all alternate musics and cultures into a single, seemingly
unimportant or ahistorical ‘other,’” which makes it fully possible to diversify a music history
curriculum while still “position[ing] white culture as a pinnacle of human achievement rather
than one of many various, equally valuable, and often entangled global artistic practices.”
5
Art
historians Anne Marie Butler and Christine Hahn argue that decolonizing art history requires
different methods and frameworks, not only different content, in order to “pry loose the grip of
Eurocentric notions of art as universal, timeless and unidirectional.”
6

These assessments are relevant to the task of reforming choral literature. If we do not
challenge ourselves to go beyond diversity and question the disciplinary practices that have led
to the minoritization and exclusion of certain musics and musicians in choral literature, our
efforts to improve inclusion will be limited and superficial (as exemplified by the 2023 revision
of Dennis Shrock’s Choral Literature, discussed in Chapter 2). This final chapter considers the
implications of canonicity in choral literature curricula and pedagogy, exploring possible
solutions in the reform efforts of neighboring disciplines. I discuss the concepts of hidden and
null curricula and the ways that European exceptionalism causes harm and perpetuates
colonialism in the choral literature classroom. I also investigate possible approaches to
decanonizing choral literature, including epistemic disobedience, social justice education
pedagogy, and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies, which value students’ cultural knowledge and

4
Juliet Hess, “Decolonizing Music Education: Moving Beyond Tokenism,” International Journal of Music
Education 33, no. 3 (2015): 337–38, https://doi.org/10.1177/0255761415581283.
5
Margaret E. Walker, “Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 10,
no. 1 (2020): 14, http://www.ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/.
6
Anne Butler and Christine Hahn, “Decolonize This Art History: Imagining a Decolonial Art History Programme at
Kalamazoo College,” London Review of Education 19, no. 1 (2021): 3, https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.19.1.22.
114
call on educators to resist deficit views of students.
7
Finally, I discuss areas of future research,
advocating for the study of choral literature pedagogy and curriculum development on a national
scale.

The Hidden and Null Curricula in Choral Literature
In a 2021 article on the hidden and null curricula, music educator Erika Knapp discusses
the impact of hidden and null curricula on music educators and students, ways to improve
awareness of these curricula, and possible steps for improving equity and inclusion in the music
education classroom. In this section, I apply her ideas to graduate-level study of choral literature,
arguing that deconstructing the hidden and null curricula is necessary in order to create equitable
change in the choral literature classroom.
The hidden curriculum is a term coined by Philip Jackson in his 1968 book, Life in
Classrooms, which describes the implicit messaging that reinforces dominant cultural narratives
in an educational context.
8
Knapp’s colloquial definition of the hidden curriculum is “the things
taught that are not directly written in the syllabus or educational materials.”
9
In music education,
examples of the hidden curriculum include only teaching music by Black artists during Black
History Month or “when music from around the world is only presented as the occasional piece
while most of the musical repertoire is from a Western Eurocentric tradition,” implicitly teaching
students that the general term “music” is actually synonymous with a specific, culturally

7
Erika J. Knapp, “Considering the Hidden and Null Curricula in Music Education: Becoming Vigilantly Aware,”
Music Educators Journal 108, no. 2 (2021): 19, https://doi.org/10.1177/00274321211060064.
8
Phillip W. Jackson, Life in Classrooms (New York: Holt, Reinhard, & Winston Press, 1968).
9
Knapp, “Considering the Hidden and Null Curricula in Music Education: Becoming Vigilantly Aware,” 17.
115
dominant understanding of music.
10
Often, teaching the hidden curriculum also involves
presenting knowledge or ways of learning that hew to the values of a dominant culture,
contradicting or devaluing the cultural values or knowledge that minoritized students learn at
home.
11
Knapp observes that in a music education context, the hidden curriculum therefore
signifies “who belongs in music, who is musical, what type of music is acceptable, how music
should be learned, appropriate standards of behavior, cultural norms, and gendered narratives, to
name a few.”
12
The null curriculum, by contrast, constitutes the content that is absent from a
curriculum—in Knapp’s words, it is “what is taught by what educators do not teach.”
13

In the context of graduate choral literature, the hidden curriculum is manifest in the
repertoire and composers that are covered in required courses, the amount of time accorded to
different composers or bodies of literature, which textbooks or other resources are used in the
class, how the class is taught, and the ways that student learning is measured and evaluated. The
null curriculum comprises the composers, repertoire, concepts, and performance practices that
are omitted from the course. To explore their application in choral literature, we can examine the
hidden and null curricula in choral literature courses studied in Andrew Minear’s 2017 doctoral
dissertation on graduate choral literature curricula and pedagogy.
14
Minear describes the course
design and teaching methods of six choral literature instructors at different institutions, four of
whom he observed teaching in person. Those four instructors teach a four-semester choral
literature course sequence emphasizing historical European literature, with either two or three

10
Knapp, 17. Framing “diverse” music as an optional or peripheral supplement to a “standard” curriculum is an
example of an additive approach to multicultural education, according to James Banks. See Banks and Banks,
Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives.
11
Knapp, “Considering the Hidden and Null Curricula in Music Education: Becoming Vigilantly Aware,” 17.
12
Knapp, 17.
13
Knapp, 18.
14
Andrew T. Minear, “Graduate Choral Literature Curricula and Pedagogy” (Doctoral document, Michigan State
University, 2017).
116
semesters spent on music from the Renaissance to 1900 and the remaining one or two semesters
covering twentieth-century music or special topics emphasizing “masterworks” like Mozart’s
Requiem, Handel’s Messiah, the Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem, or Bach’s St. Matthew
Passion.
15
Of these four instructors, two use Dennis Shrock’s Choral Repertoire as the required
textbook, one uses Chester Alwes’s A History of Western Choral Music, and one uses a variety
of source readings instead of a single choral literature textbook.
16

From this information, we can infer that at all four institutions, the hidden curriculum
teaches graduate students that historical European repertoire—not contemporary or multicultural
music, for instance—is the foundation of the discipline. In the case of the two institutions that
require a semester of special topics, the hidden curriculum also teaches students that historical
European “masterworks” constitute the highest-value repertoire in the field. These values and
assumptions are so entrenched in the discipline of choral literature that they are often not
“hidden” but stated explicitly in course syllabi or in class. Since both Shrock’s and Alwes’s
textbooks largely omit popular music, music from non-Christian faiths, and literature from
outside Europe and the United States, we can infer that at three out of four institutions, the null
curriculum includes jazz, gospel, barbershop, show choir, Jewish music, and choral music from
Asia, Africa, Canada, and most of Latin America. At these institutions, the null curriculum
implicitly teaches students that this omitted music is irrelevant to the advanced study of choral
repertoire––or perhaps even that this music is not really choral music at all.
17

15
Minear, “Graduate Choral Literature Curricula and Pedagogy,” 45, 86.
16
Minear, 86.
17
Today, some instructors of choral literature have revised their curricula to make room for minoritized composers
and music outside the historical European canon. This work has not yet been studied or publicized in academic
scholarship, but through conversations with colleagues in the field, I am aware of efforts at several different
institutions that variously involve compressing coverage of historical European repertoire to make room for
international or minority music, shifting more course time to 20
th
and 21
st
century music, or using music by women
and composers of color to illustrate important stylistic trends and innovations–e.g. using Barbara Strozzi’s music to
depict compositional style in 17th century Italy. There are isolated examples of non-canonical choral literature
117
Expanding minority representation will undoubtedly improve diversity in choral literature
content, but these efforts do not take the crucial step of investigating and challenging the
canonical and colonialist disciplinary practices that marginalized or erased the musics in the null
curriculum in the first place. As Walker states, applying the ideas of Tamara Levitz to the
academic study of music history: “To be a champion of diversity… without critically
investigating white and Eurocentric structures, may only serve to reinforce the legacy of settler
colonialism.”
18
Beyond improving diversity, challenging the canon means interrogating the
language we use to lift up or put down certain repertoire and the methods we use to contextualize
or justify the value of some musics over others. Decolonizing choral literature requires us to
examine colonialist structures that have contributed to the amplification or erasure of different
musics, and then to actively undo the influence of colonialism in the music we teach and the
ways we choose to teach it.

Decolonizing and Decanonizing Choral Literature
Minear’s research shows that the typical graduate choral literature course sequence is
organized chronologically, with the first course usually beginning in the late medieval or early
Renaissance period and progressing to the Baroque by the end of the semester. Walker notes that
this period almost exactly overlaps with what is known in literature, philosophy, and European
history as “early modernity”––a three-hundred-year period from 1450–1750 defined by “voyages

course design in the choral field. For instance, Minear identifies one graduate choral program offering a choral
literature course on music from Latin America and the Pacific Rim. More work is needed to publicize the efforts of
the few graduate choral literature instructors who are attempting to decanonize courses previously dedicated to
historical European repertoire or decolonize choral literature courses by examining, uprooting, and actively undoing
the ways in which choral literature content and methods perpetuate colonialism in the present. Minear, 84–85.
18
Walker, “Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum,” 7.
118
of ‘discovery,’ cartography, emergent trading companies and early colonies.”
19
Yet as Walker
observes, this context is excluded from the version of music history that we all learned: “The
nineteenth century scholars who wrote the history of Western music we still study did not
include the impact of the rise of European nations as conquerors and eventual world powers after
1500 and certainly never considered possible connections between trading companies, slavery,
and commercial exploitation on the one hand and Western art music on the other.”
20
Instead,
music historians and educators have focused on the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and the
recovery of classical principles originating in ancient Greece, which as historian Peter Frankopan
asserts in The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, “were not the result of an unseen chain
linking back to Athens in antiquity or a natural state of affairs in Europe; they were the fruits of
political military and economic success in faraway continents.”
21

To decolonize choral music does not mean “to ignore or forget empire,” as art historians
Charlene Villaseñor Black and Tim Barringer argue in their 2022 article, “Decolonizing Art and
Empire.”
22
On the contrary, to decolonize means to engage purposefully with the presence and
influence of colonialism within music history content, pedagogy, and curricula: “to name,
confront, critique, and strive to negate the effects of imperial thought and action.”
23
Colonialism
is a defining aspect of the early modern period, which has long been acknowledged by historians
even if music historians and music educators are only starting to become aware of it. Moreover,
the influence of colonialism is not limited to the Renaissance and Baroque; it is just as present, if
not more so, in the celebration of European genius during the Classical period, the pervasive

19
Walker, 8.
20
Walker, 10.
21
Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 197–98.
22
Charlene Villaseñor Black and Tim Barringer, “Decolonizing Art and Empire,” The Art Bulletin 104, no. 1
(2022): 11, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2021.1970479.
23
Black and Barringer, 11.
119
influence of exoticism in Romantic music, and the development of choral music in North
America, Latin America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and Africa throughout history.
Having awakened to the relevance of European colonialism, choral literature educators cannot
justify continuing to teach a version of history that excludes this context. As Walker says, can we
teach music history “and avoid addressing colonialism? I argue very strongly that this should
never be considered again.”
24

In her 2022 article, “Systems of Power, Privilege, and Oppression: Towards a Social
Justice Education Pedagogy for the Music History Curriculum,” music historian Kimary Fick
shares approaches to incorporating social justice education (SJE) pedagogy in a music history
survey course, demonstrating options that may be useful to graduate choral educators seeking to
decolonize the study of choral literature. Fick’s article uses colonial-era Mexico as a case study,
describing how students explore and analyze the role of music in systemic power and oppression
instead of “simply absorbing information about colonization in the ‘New World’”.
25
To begin,
Fick assigns students contrasting readings, juxtaposing J. Peter Burkholder’s writing on the
“Spanish New World” in A History of Western Music and Javier Marín López’s “The Musical
Inventory of Mexico Cathedral, 1589: A Lost Document Rediscovered,” which summarizes the
inventory in three categories: printed polyphonic music from Europe, locally-produced music by
Spanish-born composers, and nonnotated devotional vocal music representing regional practices
and styles.
26
In reading and discussing these sources, students see that printed music consists
primarily of music by Spanish composers from the Continent, the Spanish colonizers are

24
Walker, “Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum,” 17.
25
Kimary Fick, “Systems of Power, Privilege, and Oppression: Towards a Social Justice Education Pedagogy for
the Music History Curriculum,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 12, no. 1 (2022): 57, http://www.ams-
net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/article/view/329.
26
Fick, 53.
120
represented by local Spanish-born composers, and of the non-Spanish local population who are
represented only by devotional music, “no composers are listed and no music survives from this
third category.”
27
This exercise and others demonstrate to students “the loss of evidence of
nonnotated musical practices” as well as the presence of a local genre of devotional music that
represents “an alternative value system to one that privileges notated practices.”
28

Music historian Alice Clark offers a different approach in her 2021 article, “Uncovering a
Diverse Early Music,” which discusses how historians can decanonize and diversify music
history by writing “women, Jews, and people of color back into the narrative.”
29
Clark’s
approach shifts the focus of early music away from composers, paying more attention to
nonnotated music and painting a broad picture of medieval and early modern European music
communities that existed as part of a global network.
30
Clark open acknowledges that early
music is overwhelmingly dominated by white male composers. She therefore challenges her
students “to consider who and what is missing,” prompting them to realize that “this seeming
neutral material consists of specific types of texts written by and for men of a certain social and
intellectual class”.
31

In Clark’s view, our exclusive focus on composers and notated music “gives us an
incomplete picture of the musical world.”
32
She notes structural similarities between medieval
song texts in Arabic, Hebrew, and Iberian Romance languages, indicating that these songs likely
interacted with each other.
33
She points out the influence of Arabic and north African music on

27
Fick, 54.
28
Fick, 55–56.
29
Alice V. Clark, “Uncovering a Diverse Early Music,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 11, no. 1 (2021): 3,
http://www.ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/article/view/333.
30
Clark, 3.
31
Clark, 3.
32
Clark, 7.
33
Clark, 11.
121
modern performances of cantigas, framing the medieval Iberian world as a cross-Mediterranean
zone of contact between European, north African, and Middle Eastern cultures.
34
Clark describes
ample surviving evidence that women were active as musicians, entertainers, patrons, and scribes
during medieval and early modern Europe––including Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), who
patronized the frottola, and Maria Cavalli (birth year unknown; d. 1652) and Anna Magdalena
Bach (1701–1760), who both played an active role in copying their husbands’ music. Clark also
draws attention to the unnamed nuns who sang, transcribed, and likely participated in composing
thirteenth-century polyphony that survives in the Convent of Poor Clares of Stary Są cz in Poland
and early fourteenth century music in the Las Huelgas codex, which was copied and is still
housed at the convent of Santa María la Real de las Huelgas in Spain.
35
Clark frames the world
of early music as extending far beyond well-known composers of notated music. In the music
history classroom, she introduces the diverse musics of this world as equally valid and equally
valuable, assigning her students examples to study that range from Hebrew and Andalusian
songs, Latin conductus, Minnesänge, cantigas de amigo, laude, and troubadour and trouvère
songs.
36
By diversifying our view of early music, Clark’s approach deconstructs the hegemony
of the western European canon.
Both Fick and Clark offer perspectives and approaches that can be applied to a graduate
choral literature context. Like Fick, choral literature instructors can consider ways to present
musical content that acknowledge and draw attention to the influence of colonialism, the erasure
of indigenous and nonnotated musical practices, and the reinforcement of European polyphony
as a normative standard. This framework is not only applicable but essential in coverage of Latin

34
Clark, 11–12.
35
Clark, 8–9.
36
Clark, 9.
122
America, Asia, and all world regions where choral development was influenced by an imperial
presence. Clark, meanwhile, challenges instructors to decanonize their curricula by teaching
content that extends beyond composers and notated works. Experienced choral literature
instructors already incorporate information on performance practices, trends, styles, and
historical context in the way they introduce students to specific choral works, as Minear’s
dissertation shows. These methods can be adapted to frame the development of choral music
within diverse music communities in which composing was far from the only kind of musical
activity.
Jazz historian E. Taylor Atkins offers a contrasting and equally generative example in his
approach to jazz. Just as most of the choral literature authors reviewed in Chapter 2 regard choral
music through the lens of European exceptionalism, Atkins points out that “[p]ractically all jazz
discourse rests on the premise of American exceptionalism”–– the notion that jazz is
fundamentally defined by American ideals like democracy, individualism, freedom, ingenuity,
and inventiveness, and that this Americanness is recognizable in jazz no matter where it has
developed on the planet.
37
Atkins argues instead that jazz is not only a uniquely American
national music, it is also a uniquely postnational music; it is both an American cultural product
and an active agent of globalization.
38
Atkins asks us to “put to rest narratives depicting an ever-
resilient jazz absorbing or appropriating from other musics while retaining its essential core
untransformed by the process… Might we not alternately conceive of indigenous musics as
adaptive yet resilient enough to absorb jazz?”
39

37
Atkins, Jazz Planet, xiii.
38
Atkins, xiii.
39
Atkins, xxiii.
123
Taking Atkins’s cue, we might question received understandings of choral music as an
ever-resilient genre that remains quintessentially and recognizably European in form, structure,
and idiom no matter where it occurs in the world. Might we not alternately conceive of the
diverse cultural musics of the world as adaptive yet resilient enough to absorb choral styles and
idioms? This broadened view might in turn enable us to conceive of vocal ensemble music that is
insufficiently “classical” as still belonging to the same musical family as choral music and
therefore worthy of study in American choral education. At the same time, Atkins’s approach to
jazz history has limitations in its application to choral music. Unlike jazz, choral music has a
long history as an agent of religious conversion and has therefore actively participated in the
colonization and erasure of indigenous music cultures around the world in a way that jazz has
not.
40
Still, Atkins’s approach may prove fruitful in reframing studies of choral activity in parts
of the world where choral music was not widely used for religious conversion, such as Japan,
Indonesia, and Malaysia.
Beyond rethinking content, a commitment to decolonizing choral literature requires
revising pedagogical practices. Black and Barringer discuss the importance of epistemic
disobedience, which rejects “Eurocentric notions of objectivity, claims to transparency, and the
fantasy of writing from an all-knowing position.”
41
In art history, engaging in this form of
scholarly disobedience compels scholars “to recognize that we write from a particular
contemporary moment and that our positionality, formed in part by the many legacies of empire,

40
At the same time, jazz has been a vehicle for other forms of oppression and erasure. Over the course of the
twentieth century, jazz has evolved away from its early association with vice and immorality and has become a form
of “art music” fully integrated with American academia. The history of this transformation has depended in part on
whitewashing and the dissociation of jazz from its roots in idiomatic Black music. For further reading, see Scott
DeVeaux, “Jazz Historiography and the Problem of Louis Jordan,” in Jazz Cultures, ed. David Ake (University of
California Press, 2002), 42–61, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppshp.8; Pellegrinelli, “Separated at
‘Birth’: Singing and the History of Jazz”; Worthy, “Jazz Education.”
41
Black and Barringer, “Decolonizing Art and Empire,” 7.
124
conditions how we view the past.”
42
In the choral context, epistemic disobedience calls for choral
literature instructors to reject the fantasy that they can ever be all-knowing about the content they
teach, instead compelling them to recognize the ways in which their knowledge and approaches
to pedagogy are shaped by how they themselves were trained as choir directors and educators
within Eurocentric institutions with a colonialist past.
Both Knapp and Fick propose forms of epistemic disobedience. Knapp suggests that
music educators consider implementing Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP), which value
cultural knowledge and ways of learning that students themselves bring to the classroom. CSP
calls on instructors “to resist deficit views of students, to consider a student’s strengths instead of
weaknesses, and to acknowledge their cultural assets as fluid and ever changing.”
43
Instead of
taking on the role of an objective authority, choral literature instructors employing CSP
recognize their own positionality and biases as well as the assets that students bring to the study
of choral literature. In this framework, a choral literature instructor would not regard a non-
Christian student with little prior knowledge of mass settings as deficient and would instead treat
the student’s knowledge of other religious or cultural musical practices as an asset worth
incorporating in the course curriculum and in class discussion.
Similarly, Fick advocates for music historians to employ social justice education (SJE)
pedagogy, which enables students and instructors to learn from each other’s experiences and
participate actively in the collaborative creation of knowledge. SJE adopts the tenets of critical
pedagogy, which positions students “as participants in the production of knowledge rather than
as passive recipients.”
44
In Fick’s assessment, “an interactive, student-centered classroom that

42
Black and Barringer, 7.
43
Knapp, “Considering the Hidden and Null Curricula in Music Education: Becoming Vigilantly Aware,” 19.
44
Fick, “Systems of Power, Privilege, and Oppression: Towards a Social Justice Education Pedagogy for the Music
History Curriculum,” 48. Frank Abrahams discusses applications of critical pedagogy in the choral context in Frank
125
applies action, critical reflection, mindful listening, and discussion of personal experiences in
active dialogue” is more effective than a lecture format for achieving SJE or critical pedagogy
learning outcomes.
45
A choral literature instructor using SJE or critical pedagogy might therefore
use class time to engage students collaboratively in exploring, discussing, and creating
knowledge about the course content, instead of delivering all information through lectures and
assigned readings. For instance, instead of evaluating how thoroughly students are able to
memorize and rearticulate what the instructor views as the most important features of Osvaldo
Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos, one of the most significant Latin American choral-
orchestral compositions of the past century, the instructor might ask students to collaboratively
investigate the social, political, and cultural contexts that are relevant to understanding the
work’s form, structure, and stature. The central purpose of many traditionalist choral literature
courses is to cover as much historical European canonical repertoire as possible, and instructors
who subscribe to these course aims may be reluctant to dedicate class time to collaborative and
student-led learning. Critical pedagogy offers methods that can improve and deepen student
engagement even while maintaining focus on canonical musical content. That said, openness to
the educational benefits of studying context––and a willingness to consider the costs of a
traditionalist emphasis on canonical repertoire––will enable more substantive use of critical
pedagogy in the choral literature classroom.
J. Peter Burkholder provides another compelling methodology in his 2011 article,
“Decoding the Discipline of Music History for Our Students.” Burkholder takes a discipline-
centered learning method called “decoding the disciplines,” which was developed by David Pace

Abrahams, “Critical Pedagogy as Choral Pedagogy,” The Oxford Handbook of Choral Pedagogy, no. March (2017):
1–19, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199373369.013.1.
45
Fick, “Systems of Power, Privilege, and Oppression: Towards a Social Justice Education Pedagogy for the Music
History Curriculum,” 48.
126
and Joan Middendorf in the early 2000s, and applies it to the music history classroom.
46

Burkholder’s advocacy for the “decoding the disciplines” methodology stems from his interest in
fostering student motivation and promoting mastery of the course content, not advancing an anti-
colonialist curriculum. Nonetheless, his emphasis on collaborative and student-centered learning
is conducive to accomplishing the aims of CSP and SJE pedagogy. Within this framework, the
music history instructor makes explicit the goal of thinking like a music historian and giving
students practice in using these modes of thought “so that they learn how to participate in a
discipline by doing it.”
47
For instance, instead of teaching students the differences between music
genres, Burkholder focuses on teaching students “the way a music historian (or any musician)
learns to distinguish one style or genre from another.”
48
Key to this process is having the
students figure it out for themselves in a collaborative environment. Burkholder says:

I would guess that my students would not be very interested in telling genres of
chant apart if I simply lectured about them. But because the students figure out for
themselves how to do this, they have a stake in it. The information is much more
memorable, because they taught it to themselves. The class is more fun, because
they are engaged in active learning rather than passive listening.
49

Empowering students to figure out basic music history skills (like how to differentiate between
music genres) can pave the way for choral literature instructors to empower students to analyze
and construct knowledge about more complex content. More significant, the “decoding the
disciplines” methodology inverts traditional educational frameworks that treat instructors as
experts and memorization as the foundation of learning.

46
J. Peter Burkholder, “Decoding the Discipline of Music History for Our Students,” Journal of Music History
Pedagogy 1, no. 2 (2011): 93–111, http://www.ams-net.org/ojs/index.php/jmhp/article/view/22/46.
47
Burkholder, 94.
48
Burkholder, 104.
49
Burkholder, 106.
127
In their revision of art history curricula at Kalamzoo College, Butler and Hahn reference
Bloom’s taxonomy as a classic example of a traditional educational framework that is structured
in this way, with memorization as the broad foundation for higher-level learning processes like
analysis and creative work. In Burkholder’s music history classroom, analysis and creative work
instead become the foundation of learning, with memorization falling into place later as a natural
consequence of understanding. Butler and Hahn describe this inversion using Deleuze and
Guattari’s 1987 theory of knowledge, which disrupts notions of learning as a linear hierarchy,
instead characterizing knowledge “as rhizomatic, referring to a type of plant root in which there
is no defined beginning or end.”
50
Butler and Hahn describe art history as previously organizing
knowledge according to “the root-tree system, where artists beget artists in a long chain of
influence stretching from the mists of time into the future”––a description that also fits
traditional music history narratives, in which great composers influence the next generation of
great composers in a long progression from the Renaissance to the present.
51
In contrast to this
model, Butler and Hahn argue that the practice of decolonized art history is better characterized
by Deleuze and Guattari’s diffuse model of knowledge organization, which enables instructors
and students to recognize and resist dominant narratives and challenge the power structures
inherent in academic learning.
52

As a final example, Burke Stanton, a scholar of decolonizing musicking methodologies,
explores the implications of Deleuzian knowledge theory in his 2018 article, “Musicking in the
Borders Towards Decolonizing Methodologies.” Stanton borrows a term coined by Christopher
Small in the 1990s, “musicking,” which describes all forms of music-making:

50
Butler and Hahn, “Decolonize This Art History: Imagining a Decolonial Art History Programme at Kalamazoo
College,” 6.
51
Butler and Hahn, 6.
52
Butler and Hahn, 6.
128

To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by
performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for
performance (what is called composing), or by dancing.
53

In other words, musicking disrupts our focus on “music” as an aesthetic art-historical object.
Instead, musicking shifts our attention to all those who participate in making music,
transforming music history into a study of relationships, processes, and contexts and rendering
issues of aesthetic judgment irrelevant. Just as Deleuze and Guattari’s critical knowledge theory
“present[s] a radical challenge to the hegemonic epistemic framework of Eurocentric
modernity,” Stanton argues that decolonial musicking encourages us to view classical music as
“an ethnic music, just like any other type of music” that should not enjoy privileged status as a
“universal” art form.
54
Stanton’s vision of decolonial musicking recalls Fick’s students, who are
encouraged to analyze the role of music in systemic power and oppression, and Clark’s students,
who learn about early music through the lens of music communities instead of exclusively
focusing on composers and notated works. In the study of choral literature, decolonial musicking
prompts us to consider music not as a noun but as a verb––not as an object but as a web of
contexts, communities, and relationships that have been fundamentally influenced by colonial
power.

Areas of Further Research in Graduate Choral Literature Curricula and Pedagogy
Canonicity and colonialism are related but distinct issues in choral literature. This chapter
has explored approaches to both decanonization and decolonization undertaken by music

53
Christopher Small, Musicking : The Meanings of Performing and Listening, ed. Wesleyan University Press
(Middletown, CT, 1998), 9.
54
Burke Stanton, “Musicking in the Borders Toward Decolonizing Methodologies,” Philosophy of Music Education
Review 26, no. 1 (2018): 10, https://doi.org/10.2979/philmusieducrevi.26.1.02.
129
educators, music historians, and art historians, seeking to illustrate possible applications to the
choral literature classroom. Approaches to decanonization in these neighboring fields have direct
application in the study of graduate choral literature. However, with regard to decolonization,
Shahjahan, Estera, Surla, and Edwards observe in their 2022 review that the challenges of
undertaking substantive reform are particular to the context of each discipline and each
educational environment.
55
While choral music educators can begin the process of redesigning
choral literature curricula and pedagogy by borrowing from approaches in neighboring
disciplines, decolonizing choral literature will ultimately be specific to its own disciplinary
practices and the unique environments of each graduate program in choral music. In the words of
Mignolo and Walsh: “’What does it mean to decolonize?’ cannot be an abstract universal. It has
to be answered by looking at other W questions: Who is doing it, where, why, and how?”
56

Moreover, the specificities of each context are themselves continually in flux. Many of the
scholars mentioned above acknowledge that the work of decolonizing disciplines is never-
ending. As Butler and Hahn observe, “Decolonization of curricula, classes, behaviours and
minds is an ongoing process that is as much about individuals decolonizing themselves as it is
about classes that present some of the tools with which they might learn to do so.”
57
Choral
literature instructors who relinquish the role of the all-knowing expert and instead invest in
collaborative learning must teach content and methods that are continually in motion, created and
adjusted anew with each class. In other words, to embrace decolonization is to accept constant
change.

55
Riyad A. Shahjahan et al., “‘Decolonizing’ Curriculum and Pedagogy: A Comparative Review Across Disciplines
and Global Higher Education Contexts.,” Review of Educational Research 92, no. 1 (2022): 73–113, https://doi-
org/10.3102/00346543211042423.
56
Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Duke University
Press, 2018), 108.
57
Butler and Hahn, “Decolonize This Art History: Imagining a Decolonial Art History Programme at Kalamazoo
College,” 4.
130
Given this reality, this dissertation identifies several areas of further research that are
needed to improve both decanonization and decolonization efforts in graduate choral literature
curricula and pedagogy. First, a comprehensive study of graduate choral literature education is
needed to establish the current shape of curricula and pedagogy on a national scale. What is
being taught in graduate choral literature courses around the country? In what ways do current
graduate choral literature courses address the Western choral canon? What resources and
methods are instructors using, and how do those resources and methods affect learning
outcomes? Minear’s dissertation provides a snapshot of the resources, frameworks, and methods
used in graduate choral literature courses at six institutions, but his research does not investigate
the influence of canonicity or how instructors’ approaches to the canon may be changing over
time. In addition, Minear’s work is limited by his small sample size. A new study with a larger
sample size and an emphasis on canonicity is needed to answer the questions raised above.
Second, many choral literature instructors are currently revising their curricula and
methods in response to widespread calls to improve diversity and inclusion in choral education.
As mentioned above, there has yet to be widespread scholarly discourse on the nature of these
revisions and how they are affecting choral literature education. In what ways are choral
literature instructors changing their content and pedagogy? How do efforts to improve diversity
affect treatment of the canon? Are any instructors currently experimenting with decanonizing
their curriculum by shifting a majority of instructional content and time to non-canonical music,
or by teaching famous and well-known works without using the language and framework of
canonicity? Are any instructors decolonizing their curriculum by examining, uprooting, and
actively undoing the ways in which choral literature content and methods perpetuate colonialism
in the present? If so, what methods are they using? In the past, the clout of the choral canon and
131
the preponderance of historical repertoire have enabled choral literature instructors to teach
essentially the same content, using the same methods, year after year if they chose. However, the
methodologies explored in this chapter require instructors to face curricular and methodological
experimentation and change from semester to semester. Rather than undertake these changes in
isolation, choral literature educators will benefit from scholarly discourse on the challenges and
benefits of their work. Comparative studies of methods undertaken at different institutions, or at
the same institution over a period of several years, will benefit all those who teach choral
literature at the graduate level.
Third, there does not yet appear to be any study of how graduates of choral music
programs employ the skills and knowledge gained from studying choral literature. For decades,
the primacy of the choral canon in choral literature textbooks and graduate-level courses has
been partly driven by choral directors’ belief that advanced study of the choral “masterworks” is
essential preparation for a successful career in choral music. As the first chapter of this
dissertation showed, this belief was formulated in the 1950s and 1960s by the founding faculty of
the nation’s first doctoral programs––prominent choral directors who also played leading roles in
the new national American choral establishment. However, the landscape of American choral
music has changed substantially since that time. Today, the average doctoral student in choral
music today is likely to have a career balancing work with community choirs, secondary schools,
collegiate ensembles, and religious institutions. Notions of “standard repertoire” have
subsequently changed. The typical American choir director’s bread-and-butter repertoire does
not reflect the proportion of historical European repertoire emphasized in choral literature
textbooks and courses. On the contrary, familiarity with popular arrangements, new
132
compositions, and music from diverse cultures outside the Western canon is increasingly a
sought-after asset in the choral world.
Given these changes in the professional needs of the average American choral director,
what approaches to choral literature offer the best preparation to graduate students navigating
this modern-day landscape? To what extent has the choral canon maintained value, and to what
extent do instructors and students see value in decanonizing the study of choral literature? What
factors determine instructors’ and students’ interest in and support for decolonizing choral
literature? What criteria, in general, do instructors and students of choral literature use to assign
value to the music that is covered in required choral literature courses? Answering these
questions will require new, data-driven research.
Conversations on decanonizing and decolonizing choral literature curricula and pedagogy
are not currently part of widespread scholarly discourse. Yet a large and growing body of work
by researchers and educators in neighboring disciplines has established a pressing need to
deconstruct canonicity and colonialism and has generated a variety of approaches and methods
for undertaking this important work. Instructors of graduate choral literature can learn from this
existing literature while generating a new set of disciplinary practices that are specific to the
challenges of reforming graduate choral literature. Further research and scholarly discourse will
benefit not only other choral literature instructors but all who are invested in fostering inclusion
and equity in the choral world.

133
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Creator Sung, Emily May (author)

Core Title A history of choral literature: canons and peripheries in the development of an American discipline

School Thornton School of Music

Degree Doctor of Musical Arts

Degree Program Choral Music

Degree Conferral Date 2023-08

Publication Date 07/06/2023

Defense Date 06/30/2023

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Tag American choral culture,American Choral Directors Association,canonicity,choral canon,choral curriculum,choral jazz,choral literature,choral pedagogy,Cold War,Colonialism,culture wars,decanonization,graduate choral literature,Judeo-Christianity,music pedagogy,OAI-PMH Harvest,vocal jazz,western culture

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