Chorality’s Sonic-Social Relationships

Abstract

The sonic-social relationships of people singing together, chanting, or engaged in group vocality are underrepresented in voice, sound, and music studies. Work on the voice tends to focus on individual voices, despite the human commonplace of group singing, choric chanting, and joint speech. This article brings into conversation practice-based, ethnographic, and theoretical perspectives on chorality to mark a noteworthy constellation of interdisciplinary work on voice; decolonial, antiracist, and LGBTQ+ activism; crowds and masses; intimate publics; and democratic politics. Writing in 2021 at a moment when voices joined in chants and anthems of protest assume tragic urgency, and when chanting and singing together risk physical and social violence and the transmission of COVID-19, the authors fix their attention on sonic-social relationships in chorality in order to set down how the precarity of this moment can translate into new thinking about joint voicing. In the case studies at the heart of this article, the authors offer four frames for approaching sonic-social relationships in chorality—activist choirs, collegiate a cappella, call-response singing, and virtual choirs. They advocate for a both-and approach to the sonic-social relationship in chorality: Sound qualities matter, often urgently, as does chorality’s social power to include, capture, and exclude. Ultimately, the article stresses that chorality is ethically neutral—a key methodological consideration in encountering chorality. What emerges from chorality’s sonic-social relationships, then, is the presence or absence of care—care for the effects of chorality’s uplift or harm, carelessness with chorality’s difference-leveling potentials, and chorality as an upwelling of care.