high school choir repertoire limit range bass

I also know from experience (being tall, I always get sent to the back!) that being at the back of several rows of bodies can be pretty unsatisfying for the singers.

It makes sense in terms of the sight lines of the choir as the men tend to be taller than the women, on average, but it's pretty terrible sound-wise as the lower parts have to travel over the top of the upper. Less favoured, but still quite common is SA at the front, TB at the back. I've seen this formation when choirs are singing in spaces that are deeper than they are wide. In most choirs I see, there are many more SAs than TBs and having the men over on one side looks unbalanced, even if it doesn't sound unbalanced. It's also useful to have the tenors and basses together if the choir is singing any SAB arrangements.Īnother common arrangement is SATB. Personally, I like this formation less than STBA. The men are in the centre which can be helpful for choirs with a greater number of women than men. One advantage of an STBA arrangement is that the higher (soprano & tenor) and lower (alto and bass) voices are next to each other. The most common arrangement of voice parts is, in my experience, STBA, which looks like this: In a traditional 'classical' SATB choir (for want of a better term) the singers usually stand in sections according to voice part. What choir formations are available to us and how should we select the best formation for a particular space? Let's break the decision down into two sections: position and spacing. However, there is some research on the subject, which we'll have a look at later. There are so many different variables involved that it's impossible to create reliable guidelines. There seems to be no right or wrong way to arrange your choir.

I've been experimenting lately with different formations for my chamber choir and I've discovered a few things. The formation of the choir in performance is going to affect not only what the audience hears, but what the singers and conductor see and here - in other words, the experience of everyone involved. And that leads us to the subject of choir formation - in what order should the singers in a choir stand to make the best sound?Īny decision on choir formation, whether for rehearsal or performance, is going to be based on several criteria: the size and position of the platform or room, the size of the audience, the acoustics in the venue, the number of singers, the position of the conductor. They make music and they want that music to be heard. Pretty much any choir you can imagine exists and they all have one thing in common. They could include a handful of voices or a hundred, comprise men, women, children.

High school choir repertoire limit range bass