A Choral Timeline: Introduction

"He who sings prays twice" said St Augustine, and this was the principle by which the early Christian church introduced vocal music into its liturgies - music which, over the years, grew in complexity and sophistication, formed the bedrock of the Western classical tradition, and led to the development of musical notation.
This Choral Timeline traces - selectively - a path from some of the earliest sacred music for unaccompanied voices to the choral repertoire of the present day. Specially recorded by the BBC Singers (the BBC's own full-time professional choir, and one of the world's great vocal ensembles) conducted by their Conductor Laureate Stephen Cleobury, the timeline gives a bird's eye view of some of the peaks of the choral repertoire, of the developments in choral writing over the centuries, and of the music of some of the modern-day composers who have been particularly associated with BBC Singers.
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