The Sound of Women : The characteristics of women's choir music

Sammanfattning: This essay examines women's choir music from a musical perspective, to give contrast to the several previous cultural and sociological studies. The method used was a combination of literature study, an interview with former women’s choir founder and conductor Robert Sund and a music analysis of five different women’s choir pieces. The analysis showed that the sound and compositional practices in the genre stems from the challenges of the genre historically, and the uniqueness of the woman’s voice and the woman itself. Examples of these are compositional techniques like close voicings, challenging the range of the singers, or music put to lyrical themes of, for example, feminism. The challenges to the genre are something that has evolved it in the last 40 years, and in some cases things that will possibly evolve both women’s choir music further and choir music in general in the future.