The greatest choral composer of the 20th century is Veljo Tormis. I don't even know if it's a competition. But his music is set to texts in Estonian, a language nobody speaks, so no chorus sings it, and no audience knows about it. Its probable that his only true competition is Zoltan Kodaly, and Kodaly's music is in Hungarian. As such, there is a lot of choirs that demand modern composers to sing, and a lot of their music is shit.
Tormis is no soft-ass ersatz romantic in the style of John Rutter and Morton Lauridsen, nor is he a hard-bitten atonalist in the style of Schoenberg and Webern. Like Kodaly and Bartok, he was simultaneously a modernist and a primitivist, who took a scientific view of the untamed, untrained folk music around him, and like his predecessors, went on 'collecting trips' to hear the regional folk music of musicians from Estonia, Livonian Estonia, Setos Estonia, Setos Russia, Russia, Latvia, Livonian Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Finland, Ingrian Finland... Like not only the aforementioned two but so many other greats, Tormis used his explorations into folk music to ground his compositional idiom in a music of the earth. Composers like Bartok, Kodaly, and Tormis represent whole new ways of infusing classical music with new life, in which the composers of every emerging nation can graft modern musical forms onto the music of their storied pasts to create whole new systems of tonality and rhythm from those used in Western/Bachian hegemony, each of which listeners can listen to and love for generations before they begin to approach complete understanding.
His most famous piece is probably 'Curse Upon Iron.' It's practically a choral Rite of Spring, but his more than 500 other choral works transport us in so many different modes than this one piece. Much of his music has this kind of primitive folk energy, but within it, he finds every conceivable variety and hew. Here's a paragraph of mostly his own words from the ECM Records website:
'Many of Tormis’ works are written for choir and based on an ancient form of Estonian folk song called regilaul. He has written: “National musics can also convey religious feelings; they often represent pre-Christian forms of spirituality, which should also be important and meaningful in our integrating world. Old Estonian runo songs certainly communicate the nature worship and rituals of prehistoric times.”'
It's one of the ironies of vocal and choral music that the music produced directly from our bodies is the music which sounds the most disembodied. Dancing is done with our extremities, it is a manifestation of the physical. But singing comes directly from our core. We cannot see where which the music emanates, so in a trick of evolution, the most physical act in all music is a manifestation of aphysicality, the phenomenal, the spiritual, the divine. Choral composers from Machaut to Bach understood this seemingly direct connection between the voice and the transcendent, and created centuries of a cappella vocal music for direct transit to the soul. But the great insight of Tormis is that in our modern, urban age, so divorced from our natural origins, we clearly long for return to our physicality, and therefore vocal music is a direct conduit to pagan spirituality. Tormis is, in many ways, the next logical step from Le Sacre du Printemps, and the fact that he could do all this and still create music this subversive that Soviet authorities did not ban makes his achievement all the more miraculous.
I'm going to post quite a few of his works in the comment section to give a sense of his choral music's stunning diversity, excitement, and beauty. There is no achievement like it in 20th century music, and any list of the greatest composers of the 20th century, not the greatest choral composers but the greatest composers of any form, must include Veljo Tormis among its very elite.
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