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“SINGERS AND
MUSICIANS” AND WHY
OUR LANGUAGE
MATTERS

NOTUS, INDIANA UNIVERSITY’S CONTEMPORARY VOCAL ENSEMBLE, 2017-2018 (PHOTO BY JULIAN MORRIS)

“SINGERS AND
MUSICIANS” AND WHY
OUR LANGUAGE MATTERS
BY DOMINICK DIORIO
ON FEBRUARY 4, 2019

There it was yet again, this time in an article written

by a living composer in October 2018.  It stuck out
like a four-inch crease in a freshly ironed shirt. While
it may first appear—like so many other biases—to be
simply a polite substitution, it actually carries a
condescension that comes from a long history of
implied assumptions that communicate “separate
and certainly not equal.”

Not even The New York Times is immune from this

double standard. Quite to the contrary, you’ll come
across the phrase hundreds of times if you spend
just a few minutes scouring their archives. You’ll find
it in headlines and reviews, in news articles, letters,
and obituaries:

• An article on the Bayreuth Festival from 2015

includes the line: “Plaques just outside the
Festival Theater poignantly memorialize
Bayreuth singers and musicians who were
persecuted by the Third Reich.”

• The headline from a 2001 obituary reads: “Alix

Williamson, 85, Noted Publicist for Singers
and Musicians.”

• A news article on the Metropolitan Opera’s

union and management negotiations from
2014 includes this gem: “Outside the opera
house on Friday, the day began with about
150 singers and musicians from the Met’s
chorus and orchestra holding a
demonstration, with a melodious score, in
 Dante Park, a small park opposite Lincoln
Center.” (Aside: yes, I recognize that this is
complicated by the names of the unions
themselves—i.e. the American Federation of
Musicians, which represents the orchestra
players, and the American Guild of Musical
Artists, which represents the chorus and the
principal singers, as well as other
professionals including the stage managers—
but there is no good reason to use this
language when referring directly to the artists
themselves and not to their union
representation.)

• And there it was as recently as October 2018

when Nico Muhly was describing his new
dramatic work: “My role, as I understand it
now, is to be an editor and custodian of the
document Nick and I created, and to guide —
but not prescribe — the various options the
singers and musicians have in expounding it.”

To be absolutely certain that no one misses my

point: singers and musicians are not mutually
exclusive categories. All singers are musicians, but
not all musicians are singers (some are players,
some are composers, etc.).

Language matters. When we use the phrase “singers

and musicians” in one breath, we communicate—
even if inadvertently—that they are mutually
exclusive categories. In other words, singers are not
musicians.

That’s a problem.

This subtle but false dichotomy reinforces many of WHEN WE

USE THE
the assumptions that singers are forced to confront PHRASE
in their careers: that they are not as musically
“SINGERS
AND
literate, that they came to their career through a MUSICIANS”
IN ONE
path of sub-par training, that they lack the ability to BREATH, WE
hear and understand the underpinnings of a musical COMMUNICATE
THAT THEY
score, that they have to hire a vocal coach to teach ARE
them their part, etc., etc. MUTUALLY
EXCLUSIVE
CATEGORIES.
We hear it in the subtext beneath the “Eureka!”
stories about famous opera singers being
discovered, endowed with a beautiful voice but
lacking any formal training. (Woody Allen troped on
this quite famously in his 2012 movie, To Rome with
Love, where a mortician’s perfectly developed
operatic tenor is only revealed when he’s singing in
the shower.)

It is further reinforced by the history of choral-

orchestral music performance, where an important
tradition still flourishes: a professional (read: paid)
orchestra of players and a non-professional (read:
non-paid) chorus of singers combine to perform
some of the great warhorses of Western art music
(your Beethoven 9s, Mahler 2s, and the like). In this
reading, musicians are trained professionals, while
singers are those other people participating in the
performance who could not have learned their part if
it were not taught to them by a chorus master
(which, it should be noted, is another problematic
name for someone who can and should simply be
called “conductor”… but that’s an issue for another
article).

All stereotypes are grounded in some kernel of truth,

and you may indeed encounter singers who conform
to and confirm some of the worst stereotypes. But in
my experience as a conductor-composer who has
worked with literally thousands of singers, the vast
majority of them are individuals who have dedicated
years of their lives to studying the art of performance
and the craft of music: i.e. musicians.

As a conducting faculty member at the Indiana THE VAST

MAJORITY OF
University Jacobs School of Music, I lead NOTUS, a SINGERS ARE
select vocal ensemble that is unique among INDIVIDUALS
WHO HAVE
collegiate choirs, as we have a singular mission to DEDICATED
YEARS OF
perform, commission, and record the works of living THEIR LIVES
composers. As you might expect, we regularly TO STUDYING
THE ART OF
perform contemporary music that is exceedingly PERFORMANCE
challenging. We recently released our first AND THE
CRAFT OF
commercial album, NOTUS: Of Radiance & MUSIC.
Refraction, which features five world premiere
 recordings of works that we commissioned from IU
faculty members. Listen here to a movement of John
Gibson’s In Flight, for chorus and electronics,
featuring soprano soloist Kellie Motter:

In Flight: No. 4, Flying Inside Your Own Body

LAUNCH GALLERY

The thirty-or-so student singers that I work with each

year are musicians in every sense of the word. These
young people can sing pitches out of thin air from
tuning forks. They can tune (and express!) 10-part
chords. They can sing melodies with complex
polyrhythms and syncopations. And they can do all
of this while communicating a poetic text clearly and
distinctly. (You might surmise that I’m quite proud of
them. You’d be right.)

I prepare these students to be responsive to the

musical gesture. I ask them to come to rehearsal
already familiar with their musical part (no spoon-
feeding their pitches with the piano). In short: I
expect each one of them to be as professional a
musician as the first oboist in an orchestra is
expected to be.

I believe that we confront this bias head-on by

making sure that we do everything we can to hold
singers to the same musical expectations as our
players, especially in our training institutions. I take
comfort in knowing that I have many colleagues in
this profession who believe the same, and who are
also training their singers to be as responsive as the
best orchestral players.

Excitingly, the choral repertoire has been expanding

and transforming over the last fifty years as this
artistic shift in our professional expectations of
singers has led composers to imagine new choral
musics that were never possible before.

In Sweden, Eric Ericson and his Chamber Choir

redefined excellence in choral performance on an
international scale with their recordings. They
performed music more complex than any other
choral repertoire then-written and helped establish
careers for composers such as Sven-David
Sandström and Lars Edlund. (Here’s the Eric Ericson
Chamber Choir performing Sandström’s Agnus Dei
consisting of gnarly tonal-ish clusters that float in
and out of each other:
Agnus Dei

LAUNCH GALLERY

Today in the USA, Donald Nally and The Crossing are

exhibiting new levels of choral artistry and technical
mastery in the performances they give to works by
composers such as Ted Hearne, Anna
Thorvaldsdottir, David Lang, and Lansing McLoskey.
(Here’s The Crossing performing Ted Hearne’s
Animals:
Animals (Ted Hearne) - The Crossing

LAUNCH GALLERY

Roomful of Teeth and Brad Wells have embraced the

“choir as rock band” aesthetic, combining vocal
traditions from across the globe to create stunningly
otherworldly works by their singer-composers Eric
Dudley, Avery Griffin, and Caroline Shaw. Listen to
RoT sing Shaw’s “Allemande” from her Pulitzer-
winning Partita for 8 voices:
Partita for 8 Singers: No. 1. Allemande

LAUNCH GALLERY

And for inspiration beyond measure, look no further

than Francisco Núñez and the extraordinary Young
People’s Chorus of New York City. Through their
Transient Glory program, they have commissioned
some of the most interesting, diverse, and eclectic
contemporary music for youth chorus ever written,
from the likes of Paquito D’Rivera, Joan La Barbara,
Meredith Monk, and Michael Torke. And these young
people ages 9-18 sing as good as—and in some
cases better than—any professional choir. Here they
are singing Michael Gordon’s Every Stop on the F
Train:
Young People's Chorus of NYC: Every Stop On The F Train

LAUNCH GALLERY

Yes, these groups are made of ‘singers.’ They are THESE

‘SINGERS’ ARE
choirs, or vocal ensembles, or choruses, collections MAKING
of people who make noise together with their vocal SOME OF THE
MOST
cords or whatever else you want to call them. But ADVENTUROUS
NEW MUSIC
these ‘singers’ are making some of the most BEING
adventurous new music being written today, and you WRITTEN
TODAY.
can be damned-sure that they are also musicians of
the very highest caliber.

So enough. Let’s embrace some new language.

We could say “singers and players” or “vocalists and

instrumentalists.” Or maybe call them all
“performers” or “artists.”

Or how about just “musicians?”

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Dominick DiOrio is an innovative

young composer and conductor
who has won widespread acclaim
for his contributions to American
music. Whether leading an
ensemble or crafting a new score, DiOrio brings
equal passion and determination to his work in
vocal and instrumental music. As a composer,
DiOrio has been hailed for a keenly intelligent,
evocative style, which shows “a tour de force of
inventive thinking and unique colour”
(Gramophone). In 2014, DiOrio won the American
Prize in Composition with the judges praising “his
depth of vision, mastery of compositional
technique,... Read more »
YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY

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▶ 8 THOUGHTS ON ““SINGERS AND MUSICIANS” AND WHY OUR LANGUAGE MATTERS”

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