I disagree. It’s not necessary to financially compensate the choir or the schola. If the church can afford to then fine, but surely the vast majority of choirs and scholas are volunteers and have had no formal training in singing.
I always found it funny that many people don’t realize that the voice is just as much of an instrument as something that is man-made. There is a belief among some people that if the person can sing mostly on pitch, that’s good enough. Problem is if we are looking at singing “classical” repertoire, it isn’t “good enough” and you run the risk of turning people off to that music without some proper training and leadership. It’s like telling a pianist that since he can play on a piano, he can just plop himself right down on the organ bench and play the organ. Sure, a person might be able to fake hymns by only playing on one manual, but that is certainly not “good enough” and it certainly won’t inspire any other budding musician to take up the organ.
If people want to see unaccompanied vocal music at mass, especially polyphony and some of the more difficult chants, you need voices that have some training. The voice is a difficult instrument to master and to make it sound just as good as any decent instrumentalist.
Well, as we all know, many Catholic churches don’t pay their musicians - instrumentalists included - and thus we are in this pickle of not having even competent musicians, which includes singers and possibly turning people off to that kind of music in general. I agree that you could have a volunteer choir where most, if not all, have no formal training in singing, but the quality, especially for choir which would do mostly polyphonic music and chant, would be extremely lacking WITHOUT a VERY COMPETENT music director. It’s also the reason why some churches hire section leaders in order to help the non-musician singers out and to hold a piece together if it starts to fall apart due to the lack of training for many of the volunteer singers.
I’ve been part of volunteer choirs either as a volunteer or a paid section leader since I’m a singer who is also a musician
. If they had a good director who worked hard with them to learn and to give them vocal exercises, even lessons in order to refine their voices for this kind of music, they did a beautiful job. Sometimes they sounded very professional and sometimes you could tell when they were having some trouble for whatever reason - bad day, many voice parts not showing up, not having enough tenors or basses or altos (most choirs have more sopranos than they can handle). These choirs were able to pull it together because of an excellent director, who is the reason why those were successful in getting many people interested in that kind of music - myself included as I was a young, college-age musician/singer just looking to strengthen my sight-singing skills by singing alto.
Conversely, I’ve heard choirs which do make a good attempt to sing, but had no real leadership or a director who wanted to bring in this kind of music, but did not have the ability to pull it together. I’ve sometimes been hired for special masses to be a section leader because the director knew it couldn’t be pulled off. You could tell that the voices were not warmed up, the sopranos sounded shrill and detached, the altos flat, the tenors and sometimes the altos non-existent, or the tenors sounding like they were being strangled and the basses sounding like they were some huge foghorn. I give these choirs A LOT of credit for trying, but I will admit that if I were someone who had no experience with this music and heard that, I’d be turned off and would not be interested in learning it and hearing it at mass. To me it’s much similar to people I work with who are turned off by the organ or certain instruments/voices due to lack of competency.
So, ok, we don’t pay the singers, but if we are going to take a chance with that, you are still going to have to pay a music director who knows what he/she is doing, especially with this kind of choral music. And you are going to have to pay him/her well, since we don’t want to have competent singers. And sometimes, if the music is totally falling to bits, the choir director will have to use the organ or whatever instrument they have to help pull them together and back on track.
Singing lessons are usually not taken so that one can sing in the choir at church and if so, they are not a cost to the church but to the private individual.
I have to beg to differ. I know many professional choral singers whose main objective was to do choral work - mainly in high-church denominations. They do it because their voices are the natural, hardly-any-vibrato kind of voices and are “perfect” for early music. (I’m not a particular fan of no-vibrato singing for myself, but I see the beauty in it for certain music.) They get paid well and the music programs in those churches are pretty excellent. Then, I know that there are the typical choral singers who want to take lessons to improve their voices for their choir so that they can sing this kind of music competently. In my area, they might pay $50-$100 for an hour lesson.
You are right, though, as I have also mentioned in my previous post, this is is all at the cost of the individual and not the church. Fortunately, the parish where I work sees the value of having a trained musician/singer as they see the value of having a trained organist on staff and is willing to compensate us to at least cover some of our expenses. In a way they are spoiled because when it was brought up about perhaps bringing in a guitar once in a while, the congregation were up in arms. They absolutely DID NOT want it. They are fortunate that they have an organist who can play.
I think if I played it, someone might think I was making sounds from below. 