Tanglewood Festival Chorus - Performance Practice

Performance Practice

The full roster includes over 250 singers who volunteer their time and talents. Subsets of the group are selected by Mr. Oliver to meet the needs of the repertoire being performed.

The chorus performs the vast majority of its concerts from memory, without scores. Of performing from memory, Oliver says:

Memorization is not a trick. It internalizes the music for you; it makes the music, somehow, a part of your own physical being. And you can express so much more like that. If you don't see a singer's face and you don't see the posture of a singer, the address of a singer to the audience, you're really not getting what a singer can deliver in music and what composers expected the singers to deliver.

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