ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the terms in which choral culture construes the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable choral behaviour. It focuses on the practitioner literature for its analyses, and also cross-references these with examples from rehearsal observations. The chapter looks at the four major themes that emerge from these discourses: those of bodily control, social identity, genre and moral character. It examines the relationship between these themes in the ways they are deployed to mark both the extremities of the territory they outline, and the internal divisions within it. The discourse of the natural becomes a means to regulate and rationalize the required forms of bodily control appropriate to the act of choral singing. The themes are inextricably intertwined in defining what constitutes choral singing, and ostensibly pragmatic statements of good practice, when placed in their broader intertextual web of reference, are rarely neutral with reference to the operations of power in wider culture.
