Information about Chorale

This article is about the musical composition. For a singing group, see choir.

A chorale was originally a hymn of the Lutheran church sung by the entire congregation. In casual modern usage, the term also includes classical settings of such hymns and works of a similar character.

Chorales tend to have simple and singable tunes, because they were originally intended to be sung by the congregation rather than a professional choir. They generally have rhyming words and are in a strophic form (with the same melody being used for different verses). Within a verse, most chorales follow the AAB pattern of melody that is known as the German Bar form.

Martin Luther argued that worship should be conducted in German rather than Latin. He thus saw an immediate need for a huge repertory of new chorales. He composed some chorale melodies himself, such as A Mighty Fortress. For other chorales he used Gregorian Chant melodies used in Catholic worship and fitted them with a new German text. A famous example is Christ lag in Todesbanden, which is based on the tune of the Catholic Easter Sequence Victimae Paschali Laudes.

Chorales were at first monophonic tunes (melody only). However, as early as 1524, Johann Walter published a book of these chorales arranged for four or five voice parts.

Today, many of the Lutheran chorales are familiar as hymns still used in Protestant churches, sung in four-voice harmony. Often the harmonisations are taken from the final sections of cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach. The melodies of the chorales were only in a few instances composed by Bach; the large majority of melodies were based on chorales that were already familiar to his congregation.

Chorale tunes also appear in chorale preludes, pieces generally for organ designed to be played immediately before the chorale in worship. A chorale prelude includes the melody of the chorale, and adds other contrapuntal lines. One of the first composers to write chorale preludes was Dieterich Buxtehude. Bach's many chorale preludes are the best-known examples of the form. Later composers of the chorale prelude include Johannes Brahms and Max Reger.

Derived from his understanding of musical settings of liturgy and Bach's chorale preludes, the symphonies, masses and motets of Anton Bruckner make frequent use of the chorale as a compositional device, often in contrast to and combination with the fugue.

Chorales have been the subject of many different musical treatments, most but not all from the German Baroque. See chorale setting for a description and a list of all the different types of musical setting and transformation that this important liturgical form has undergone.

"Chorale" is also casually (though not strictly correctly) used as a synonym for choir—a group of singing voices.

References and further reading

"Chorale", in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Randel. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1986. ISBN 0-674-61525-5

External links

Chorale at the Classical Music Pages
Chorale discussion by Bernard Greenberg in the J. S. Bach FAQ (archived copy)
Complete sets of all four-part Bach chorale settings in MIDI or QuickTime format

A choir, chorale, or chorus is a musical ensemble of singers.

A body of singers who perform together is called a choir or chorus. The former term is very often applied to groups affiliated with a church (whether or not they actually occupy the quire) and the
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For other meanings see hymn (disambiguation)

A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a god or other religiously significant figure.
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Lutheranism is a major branch of Protestant Christianity that identifies with the teachings of the sixteenth-century German reformer Martin Luther. Luther's efforts to reform the theology and practice of the Church launched the Protestant Reformation and, though it was not
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In music, strophic form (or chorus form) is a sectional and/or additive way of structuring a piece of music based on the repetition of one formal section or block played repeatedly.
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The Bar form is an old musical form in which each stanza follows the pattern AkAB. It is named after the medieval poetic form known as Bar in German. Such a poem contains three stanzas (or more), and each stanza is in AAB form, composed of two
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For other people named Martin Luther, see .

Martin Luther (November 10, 1483 – February 18, 1546) was a German monk,^[1] theologian, and church reformer. He is also considered to be the founder of Protestantism.
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melody, also tune, voice, or line, is a series of linear events or a succession, not a simultaneity as in a chord (see harmony). However, this succession must contain change of some kind and be perceived as a single entity (possibly Gestalt) to be called a
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Published 1531 (or 1529)
Language German
Translated by Myles Coverdale
Frederick H. Hedge
Catherine Winkworth

Meter 87 87 66 66 7
Melody name Ein Feste Burg (Martin Luther) "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" (German,
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æculorum, amen." The Latin is pronounced in the manner of Renaissance Germany, based on Åbo's German ecclesiastical connections.
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Christ lag in Todesbanden BWV 4 (Christ lay in death's bonds) is a cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach. It was written for Easter, probably in 1707, and it is probably related to Bach's move from Arnstadt to Mühlhausen.
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Victimae Paschali Laudes is a sequence prescribed for the Roman Catholic Mass of Easter Sunday. It is usually attributed to the 11th century Wipo of Burgundy, chaplain to the German Emperor Conrad II, but has also been attributed to Notker Balbulus, Robert II of France, and
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In music, monophony is the simplest of textures, consisting of melody without accompanying harmony. This may be realized as just one note at a time, or with the same note duplicated at the octave (such as often when men and women sing together).
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Johann Walter (Blanckenmüller) (1496 – 25 March, 1570) was a Lutheran composer and poet during the Reformation period. The asteroid 120481 Johannwalter is named in his honour.
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harmony is the use and study of pitch simultaneity, and therefore chords, actual or implied, in music. The study of harmony may often refer to the study of harmonic progressions, the movement from one pitch simultaneity to another, and the structural principles that govern such
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A cantata (Italian, 'sung') is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment and generally containing more than one movement.

Historical context

The term did not exist prior to the 16th century, when all "cultured" music was vocal, but with the rise of
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Johann Sebastian Bach (pronounced [ˈjoːhan zəˈbastjan bax]) (21 March 1685 O.S. – 28 July 1750 N.S.
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In music, a chorale prelude is a short liturgical composition for organ using a chorale tune as its basis. It was a predominant form of the German Baroque era and reached its culmination in the works of J.S.
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organ is a keyboard instrument played using one or more manuals and a pedalboard. It uses wind moving through metal or wood pipes and/or it uses sampled organ sounds or oscillators to produce sound, which remains constant while a key is depressed.
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In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm, and interdependent in harmony. It has most commonly been identified in Western music, developing strongly in the Renaissance, and also dominant in much of the common
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Dieterich Buxtehude (Dietrich, Diderich) (c. 1637 – 9 May 1707) was a German-Danish organist and a highly regarded composer of the Baroque period. His organ works comprise a central part of the standard organ repertoire and are frequently performed at
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Johannes Brahms (May 7, 1833 – April 3, 1897) was a German composer of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, he eventually settled in Vienna, Austria.

Life

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Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger (March 19 1873 – May 11 1916) was a German composer, organist, pianist and teacher.

Life

Born in Brand, Bavaria, Reger studied music in Munich and Wiesbaden with Hugo Riemann.
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A liturgy is the customary public worship done by a specific religious group, according to their particular traditions. In religion, it may refer to, or include, an elaborate formal ritual such as the Catholic Mass, or a daily activity such as the Muslim Salats (see
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Anton Bruckner (4 September 1824 – 11 October 1896) was an Austrian composer known primarily for his symphonies, masses, and motets. His symphonies are often considered emblematic of the final stage of Austro-German Romanticism because of their rich harmonic language, complex
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For the psychological term, see .

In music, a fugue (IPA: [fjuːg]) is a type of contrapuntal composition or technique of composition for a fixed number of parts, normally referred to as
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Anthem
"Das Lied der Deutschen" (third stanza)
also called "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit"
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Baroque music describes an era and a set of styles of European classical music which were in widespread use between approximately 1600 and 1750.^[1] This era is said to begin in music after the Renaissance and was followed by the Classical music era.
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A chorale setting is any of a very wide variety of musical compositions, almost entirely of Protestant origin, which use a chorale as their basis. They are vocal, instrumental, or both.
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