Tetragrammaton

Tetracketam.

I have several reasons for being especially interested in choral music.

The first is I think a lot of it is much harder to comprehend.

So if you're there singing it or in a hall and nearby, it makes perfect sense.

You see and hear all the voices.

But when you listen to it on recordings,

I find it harder to decipher,

no matter how good the sound quality is,

and thus the gains to talking some of it through, maybe, are higher.

You listen to Beethoven's Fifth,

in the sense it's always hitting you over the head with what's going on.

Choral music very often doesn't do that.

But there's another deeper, more historical reason why I'm interested in it.

I think if you study choral music, and I mean now 20th century choral music,

you will understand the 20th century artistically and historically and historically in very different terms.

So we often think of the 20th century as a pretty secular century

or a secularizing century,

but so many of the top composers were deeply religious,

or they were into religious music and religious ideas,

and you hear that most clearly in their choral music.

So it changes how you view, I think, all music and our own history,

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