Why Do Two Halves of a Choir Sing at Each Other? It Started With Psalms
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Splitting singers into two groups that alternate verses is one of the oldest performance practices in Western music, and it shaped how churches were built.
What the practice is
The method divides the singers into two bodies that perform alternate sections of a text, answering each other rather than singing together, and it is distinguished from the related practice in which a soloist sings and the whole group answers. A short refrain is frequently sung by both before and after the alternating verses, framing the whole. The practice belongs originally to the singing of psalms, whose verses fall naturally into two balanced halves, and that structure in the Hebrew poetry is generally taken to be why the alternating performance arose in the first place.
What alternating achieves
The advantages are practical as well as musical:
- •Each group rests while the other sings, so long texts are sustainable
- •The text is clearer, since fewer voices sing any given line
- •The alternation marks the structure of the poetry audibly
- •Sound arrives from different directions, which is striking in a large building
- •Untrained singers can follow a trained group verse by verse
- •The pace is set by the exchange rather than by any conductor
How it shaped buildings
The practice left permanent marks on church architecture that are visible in any cathedral. The area east of the crossing, where the singers sit, is furnished with stalls facing each other across the space rather than facing the altar, precisely so that the two bodies can sing to each other, and those two sides retain the names of the sides they sit on. That arrangement is universal in cathedrals and collegiate churches and is not an aesthetic choice. Organs are frequently divided to speak from both sides. The practice of placing separated groups around a building was extended dramatically in Venice, where composers wrote for groups in opposing galleries and exploited the delay and echo deliberately.
The other thing the word means
The term causes confusion because it names two related things, and keeping them apart is necessary when reading about liturgy. It describes the alternating practice discussed here, and it also names a specific short piece of text, usually a sentence of scripture, that is sung before and after a psalm and that frames it, giving the psalm a particular emphasis for the day. Collections of these short texts survive in large numbers from the Middle Ages and are important sources for the history of plainchant. Several of the best known, addressed to the Virgin and sung at the close of the day, became independent pieces set by composers repeatedly and are now performed as concert works.
Where it survives
The practice continues in daily use rather than only as history. Monastic communities sing the psalms this way at every office, which is several times a day, and it is the ordinary way the psalter is performed. Anglican cathedral choirs sing psalms in alternation as a matter of course. Jewish and Orthodox traditions have their own forms of responsive and alternating singing with separate histories. Outside worship, the pattern of a group answering another group appears in sea shanties, in military calls, in field hollers and in the call and response structures that run through blues, gospel and a great deal of popular music descended from them.
The takeaway
Two bodies of singers performing alternate verses suits psalm texts built from balanced halves, lets each group rest, clarifies the words and marks the structure audibly. Cathedral stalls face each other across the space specifically so this can happen, which is why they are arranged that way in every such building. The practice continues daily in monastic and cathedral use, and the same call and answer shape runs through blues and gospel.