‘Chorales’ (broadly speaking, ‘hymns’) have featured prominently in the musical life of Western cultures for hundreds of years, particularly in sacred, liturgical settings. They have also featured prominently in the training of musicians, both in their ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ training (in so far as a distinction between the two is warranted). This is partly as a convenient method to demonstrate core topics in harmony, counterpoint, 2–4 part writing, and more.
One strange quirk of that history is the domination of J.S. Bach’s chorales: for all the many fine qualities of that set, it is neither representative of wider practice, nor (many argue) the most convenient vehicle for pedagogy, particularly at a basic level.
This repo consitutes a multi-institution, multi-corpus effort to bring together wider sets of chorales, spanning many regions (mostly of Germany, but also France) and centuries (mostly 18th, but also earlier). We complement the scores with atypical forms of multimodality, notably the metadata associated with usage, particularly the re-use of certain themes, and the liturgical use (function) of these chorales.