Talk:Men's chorus

Male choir or male chorus?

Following a discussion here User talk:LazyStarryNights/Lists of compositions by Johannes Brahms, I discovered various ways to refer to this topic:

• Men's chorus
• Male voice choir
• Male choir

What should be the official one? Some notes:

• The current article uses all 3 of these terms.
• I like Male choir the most, since
  • It is more in line with the related article name Choir.
  • Voice is an obsolete word, since that follow's from choir.

If nobody objects we should:

• Rename the article to Male choir
• Clean its contents so it uses terminology consistently
• Redirect from the other 2 LazyStarryNights (talk) 22:21, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

I agree that 'voice' in this context is redundant. I also agree that it should be 'Male' not 'Men's. On choir vs chorus, I have always understood 'choir' as used for church music, and chorus for secular music. The Oxford Dictionary of Music supports this to some extent "Chorus tends to be used for secular bodies, but there are exceptions". I am not sure to what extent this difference in usage is an American-British one, as my experience is that the opera world (including American companies) all use chorus. Anyway my preference for this article would be Male chorus. Any other opinions? I'll put a note on the CM project.--Kleinzach 23:17, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

I tend to think of "choir" is a Britishism, and chorus an Americanism. As a resident of the later, I'm much more comfortable with chorus (scores say "men's chorus" for example), than "choir" which always sounds amorphous to me. -- kosboot (talk) 00:55, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

That's interesting because I thought it was the reverse! I thought 'choir' was preferred in America. This makes me think the divide is actually secular/church rather than Brit/American. --Kleinzach 00:04, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm not a native English speaker so it is difficult for me to judge and Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#National_varieties_of_English did not give me that much.

Note that Male chorus, Female chorus, etc is the name used in the IMSLP categories. If we keep in doubt, I do in fact like alignment with IMSLP - unless IMSLP is "wrong" of course.

For what it's worth: even Google research doesn't help me:

Approximate number of hits by Google:

• "Men's chorus": 2,270,000
• "Men's choir": 1,630,000
• "Male chorus": 1,620,000
• "Male choir": 955,000
• "Male voice choir": 872,000

• "Women's chorus": 1,500,000
• "Women's choir": 1,780,000
• "Female chorus": 248,000
• "Female choir": 259,000
• "Female voice choir": 294,000

• "Mixed chorus": 1,210,000
• "Mixed choir": 1,180,000

• "Chorus (SATB)": 397,000
• "Choir (SATB)": 391,000

• "Church chorus": 138,000
• "Church choir": 4,840,000

• "Oratorio chorus": 34,300
• "Oratorio choir": 30,300

Conclusion based on Google: indeed Churches by far use "choir" more, but for the other searches, the results are less far apart. OK there is a slight balance towards chorus, but not significant enough I guess and for males and females even reversed. LazyStarryNights (talk) 19:15, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Men's chorus seems to be the big winner here, but that may just be influenced by the name of the WP article. My iVote would still be for 'Male chorus' if that helps. Kleinzach 00:10, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I tried to test your "influenced by the name of the WP article theory":

• "Men's chorus" -"Wikipedia": 2,680,000
• "Men's choir" -"Wikipedia": 2,770,000
• "Male chorus" -"Wikipedia": 1,980,000
• "Male choir" -"Wikipedia": 1,290,000
• "Male voice choir" -"Wikipedia": 1,190,000

But I lost faith in Google's numbers due to the fact that some return even more results than without -"Wikipedia".

With whatever we go, I do think it should be applied consistently accross WP. This could have the following consequences:

• Articles Choir and the various related/linked articles may need to change as well.
• Category:Choirs and its subcategories and pages idem. Interesting note here by the way is that in this category and its subcategories, it shows that the majority of the choruses/choirs are called ...Choir! Notable exception pertains to the American ones. Maybe choir is the more international English version? If that is the case it goes up in points for me. (no offence to Americans of course :) ).
• If either one of chorus/choir is in the name of a particular chorus/choir it should stay of course. For example, you would not rename Harvard University Choir and Pride of Baltimore Chorus
• And as for the secular/sacred split: if we would split this in article names or Composition list columns, we would be mixing genre with "instrument" type, which is not correct I think since any chorus/choir can sing both secular or sacred work, regardless whether they are American, British, other and regardless whether they are linked to a church or not. LazyStarryNights (talk) 17:18, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm not at work now, but instead of Google, you should try searching a bibliographic database like Worldcat.org. You'll see that chorus is the word used for the music, but that choir is sometimes used for names of performing groups. -- kosboot (talk) 17:45, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Articles like Choir and Men's chorus are already slanted either towards church or towards secular music, so I think we should be cautious about making changes. Wikipedia doesn't attempt to impose uniform usage. I think it would be easier for us to just look at the title of this article, at least to start with. --Kleinzach 14:48, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

No history?

As is currently stands, this article is a good example of Wikipedia's recentism. It does pretty well in describing the phenomenon in the 19th century through today, but doesn't touch on the fact that mens' choruses were mandated by the church due to forbidding women's voices. The British tradition stems from this, and without explaining it as well as British harmonic practice in medieval times, the article makes it seem random. - kosboot (talk) 15:48, 8 September 2019 (UTC)