A History of Western Choral Music by Chester L. Alwes (review)

Abstract

[This work] represents the content of courses on the history of choral literature taught to hundreds of upper-level undergraduate and graduate students during my tenure at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . . . . The classes were always multisemester units . . . . The emphasis was on covering representative composers and genres to establish paradigms that would serve these students throughout their careers . . . . I am constantly, often painfully, aware of how much is left unsaid, despite the genuine desire to be as thorough as possible . . . . In my classes, such gaps were routinely filled by individual research projects, and I expect the same result to ensue here.1