Content area
Full Text
Choral Repertoire Shrock, Dennis Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 787 pp. $59.95 ISBN: 978-0-19-532778-6 (hardcover)
For this reviewer, Shrock's Choral Repertoire has been a much-anticipated volume. The "industry standard" textbook for choral literature (until only recently) had been Ulrich's woefully out-of-date A Survey of Choral Music. While a fine introduction to choral music for its time, it suffered from (among other things) a final chapter on twentieth-century music organized primarily by sacred genre (a tactic that worked reasonably well for the chapter on Renaissance choral music but poorly for the modern era). Nick Strimple's volumes on twentieth-century and nineteenth-century choral music have begun to close this gap admirably (and we hope more volumes in reverse chronological order from him are forthcoming), but the one-volume choral literature reference book has taken until now to appear.
This is not to say that Shrock's contribution is meant to be exhaustive; rather, as he points out in his preface, his "composers have been chosen on the basis of their historical significance, and compositions have been identified on the basis of their being acknowledged as artistically superior works of art, on their presence in programs of credited ensembles, and on their existence in scholarly editions" (p. 1). Naturally, the book is divided into eras, and after...