In western formal choral tradition, there's an aim for a blend so you cannot distinguish where the parts are coming from. With congregational singing, I could drive up to the church and they could be singing and I could tell you who was there, because the individual timbres of a voice never disappear. That congregational style is one of the things I think is important for democracy—the individual does not have to disappear, and it does not operate as an anticollective expression. Bernice Johnson Reagon
Posted by nightfall at March 15, 2005 08:23 PM