This chapter offers a thorough overview of choral composition from its historical foundations in the church to modern trends in choral music today. It outlines technical issues around text setting, writing for specific voice types, notation, and tips for writing for amateur or less experienced groups.

Debussy’s extensive vocal music spans his entire career. This chapter places it in the context of the work of Debussy’s contemporaries, focusing on the art of singing as it was practised both in art and popular music. Debussy’s strong predilection for song cycles conceived as triptychs is also discussed at length, and an important comparison drawn with the composer most often linked to Debussy, Maurice Ravel.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France a multiplatformed staging ground took shape for a wide variety of undertakings in music composed prior to 1750. Churches, schools, universities, private salons, select societies, major concert halls, and even opera houses became sites for performances of music dating from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. Sometimes, the repertoire of centuries past served as a point of focus for discussions about religion; at other times, it provided a vehicle for unabashedly secular, virtuosic performances. Choral performances in particular could as easily allow talented socialites to exert cultural influence as facilitate bonding among male workers. Through it all, the revival of early music provided the nation with a sense of artistic ancestry that could be summoned to shape notions of a collective musical identity, or even difference. This chapter shows how Debussy intersected with these powerful currents in his music, including his relationship to the music of the Ancien Régime in the form of Rameau.

At first glance, Franz Schubert’s Winterreise would hardly suggest itself for choral adaptation. The history of choral arrangements of songs from the cycle bears this out: The only song to have a major presence in choral music since the nineteenth century is “Der Lindenbaum,” which was first adapted by Friedrich Silcher in a way that emphasized its folklike, communal potential over its darker elements. Other songs of the cycle, such as “Der Leiermann,” seem to innately resist any similar treatment. This essay focuses on how the recalcitrance of “Der Leiermann” in relationship to choral arrangement colors the approaches of two recent arrangers to the song, Thomas Hanelt and Gregor Meyer; the chapter then takes into account a more improvisatory group performance of the song presented by student performers at the Universität der Künste in Berlin in December 2008. The possibility of choral or other non-solo approaches to “Der Leiermann” innately forces performers and audiences to approach the wanderer’s solitude, and the cycle’s ending, from new subjective perspectives, even as these arrangements also attractively offer nonprofessional singers a chance to grapple with Schubert’s masterwork.