Choral singing as bodily regime

An exploration of the practice of choral singing draws on the Foucauldian critical tradition to analyse how singing in a choir structures the ways in which people inhabit, use and experience their bodies. Texts from the choral conducting literature are read as instruction manuals for the production and regulation of choral singers, and the technologies of disciplinary power that constitute and maintain the boundaries of this identity are examined. This reading shows how musical practices can be simultaneously independent from and constructed within the power structures of day-to-day social relations: while the mechanisms that regulate choral behavior index overtly political axes of identity such as class, education level and regionality, they do so with an agenda that is more focused on the transformation than on the exclusion of the individual. The study contributes to the ongoing theoretical discussions of music and social identity within musicology, but it also raises practical questions concerning the social and personal values associated with choral musicmaking.