chorale

My point is the chorale group is not representative of all church group demographics. If people can shop safely, they can go to church safely.

Entry-level chorale libraries sometimes only have bare vowels, and this thing just... works.

A Bach chorale with no parallel fifths, and a mid-20th-century experimental atonal piece, are both more expressive than banging on a piano.

In addition to what most people think of as baroque polyphony, the cantatas also have a more-or-less simple "chorale tune" flowing either on top of that, or possibly in the organ pedals. And Bach wrote out the organ part that I believe he would have been playing himself.

If you take it slow you can illuminate the beautiful chorale-like Back-inspired voicing that Chopin was so fond of, at the expense of the main theme. If you take it fast enough to let the main lyrical theme ring out, you go too fast for the listener to hear those same intricate inner voicings.

I just noticed there are actually full performances on Youtube of Erik Satie's Vexations-- a piece written in the 1890s in which the player is asked to repeat a dissonant chorale theme 860 times. That is a common, effective, and ethical rhetorical tactic people use every day in conversation.

That's sort of a glib answer, but the fact is that no one really knows exactly why certain things evoke certain emotions, even though most composers understand various building block ideas like "odd meters like 5/8 and 7/8 generally evoke intensity and tension" or "brass chorale in a major key sounds triumphant" or "gong crescendo roll is scary". And of course, even then, we could find counter-examples for every one of those things.

> like "odd meters like 5/8 and 7/8 generally evoke intensity and tension" or "brass chorale in a major key sounds triumphant" or "gong crescendo roll is scary" Can you recommend any books that teach these sorts of general rules, or the emotive feeling generally associated with different keys and modes?

When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened an above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives."