Sixth World Symposium on Choral Music ... - NewMusicBox

NewMusicBox May 2003
participate, everyone to sing along. Everyone sings along in church, sings the hymns. That in a
way is an impediment because it does mean that choral music is regarded sometimes as a poor
person's art. It's cheap, very cheap to put together. Buy a bit of music and sing. It is a lot cheaper
than building an orchestra, which has various expenses, overhead and instruments, and yet, in
capitalistic countries such as this one, that seems to be the ideal in music education. I think that is
very tragic. Parents like to come and see a pile of gold and silver on stage, just the same as people
like to go to a big concert hall to see a similar pile of gold and silver on stage, and think that we
are a wealthy country, and we deserve this. And so, I guess all of us who are involved in choral
music in a sense are denying that it represents the ultimate achievement in music. The ultimate
achievement in music is cultivating the use of the original instrument God gave you, which is
your voice, and doing all the miraculous things with it that composers keep doing. All cultures,
for thousands of years, are still doing new things. We are still discovering new vocal techniques,
new vocal kinds of performance tricks, and composers are still writing new pieces of music. So,
although it remains a poor person's art, it is one of incredible invention and creativity.
Composers’ Dialogue #1, 08/06/2002