Choral Voices: Ethnographic Imaginations of Sound and Sacrality is about sacred and secular choirs in Goa and Shillong across churches, seminaries, schools, auditoriums, classrooms, reality TV shows, and festivals. Voice and genre emerge as social objects annotated by tradition, nostalgia, and innovation. Piety literally and metaphorically shapes the Christian lifeworld, predominantly those belonging to the Presbyterian and Catholic denominations. Indigeneity structures the political and cultural motifs in the making of the Christian musical traditions. Located at the intersection of Sociology, Anthropology, and Ethnomusicology, the choral voices emplace 'affect' and the visual-aural dispatch. Thus, sonic spectrum holds space for indigenous and global musicality. This ethnographic work will be useful for scholars researching music and sound studies, religious studies, cultural anthropology, and sociology of India.

Coastal landscapes inspire their own genre of folk songs and musical instruments intrinsic to the traditions of the local boat people and fisherfolk, often coexisting with a strand of popular music embedded within the modalities of coastal tourism. In post-colonial coastal cities, these strands are part of a larger musical space carved out by the legacies of colonial cultural transmission and subsequent assimilation into aspirational European cosmopolitan tropes. I examine the shifting engagement of Western classical choirs in the context of two coastal cities: Goa in India and Colombo (with a focus on Negombo) in Sri Lanka. Combining in-depth interviews with two choral conductors alongside the predicament of musical production in the digital space, I argue that choral music impinges on a notion of personal intimacy that combines a collective sense of creativity and community, organically linked to Catholic landscapes animated by a ‘Catholic affect’.

This article attempts to explore the performativity that surrounds choral music in contemporary India. 1: Choral music was discovered in Western civilization and Christianity. As a starting point, it had the Gregorian reforms of the 6th century. Choir primarily refers to a vocal ensemble practising sacred music inside church settings as opposed to chorus which indicates vocal ensembles performing in secular environments. Multiple singers rendered sacred polyphony 1430 onwards. By the end of the century a standardized four-part range of three octaves or more became a feature. The vocal parts were called superius (later, soprano), altus, tenor (from its function of ‘holding’ the cantus-firmus) and bassus (Unger 2010, 2–3). Moving beyond its religious functions, the Shillong Chamber Choir locates itself within various sounds. Hailing from Meghalaya in the north- eastern part of India, the Shillong Chamber Choir has many folksy and original compositions in languages such as Khasi, Nagamese, Assamese and Malayalam. However, what brought them national fame was the Bollywoodisation 2: Bollywood refers to the South Asian film industry situated in Mumbai. The term also includes its film music and scores. of the choir. With its win in the reality TV Show, India’s Got Talent 3: India’s Got Talent is a reality TV series on Colors television network founded by Sakib Zakir Ahmed, part of Global British Got Talent franchise. in 2010, the Shillong Chamber Choir introduced two things to the Indian sound-scape—reproducing and inhabiting the Bollywood sound within a choral structure, and introducing to the Indian audience a medley of songs that could be termed ‘popular’, but which ultimately acquired a more eclectic framework. Medley is explored as a genre. The purpose of this article is to understand how ‘Bollywood Broadway’ is the mode through which choral renditions and more mainstream forms of entertainment are coming together.