1. No
2. No
3. No (nor is SSAA music)
4. Yes (also all-female choirs, and mixed choirs)
5. No if there are worthy settings of which the choir is capable. To begin with, consider that even plainsong can offer simple and solemn settings. A good choir, for example, should have many Magnificats in its repertoire.

Yes!
There will always be a place for boy's choirs, and choirs of men and boys.
The greater part of those who live on this side of the pond are not aware of this.
There is a Houston Boys Choir, and I think a few others around the country - but they are not church choirs.

I had a boys choir the Lutheran church which I served for some years.
On greater feast days they would sing with men as a choir of men and boys.
The boys always looked forward to this and were proud to sing with the men.

What an quaint notion, Gounod's Sicut cervus at the Easter Vigil! As to Ockeghem, the question has to be SA or TB promotion at whose expense? If we had space to rehearse two choirs at once I could have the men prepare Victoria's Vidi aquam instead of the mixed-voice-friendlier Cardoso.

We've done a lot of 8-part music but no 12/11-part, so I guess I've never expoited "maximum number of parts your choir will accommodate". I didn't actually burn my SAB library when leaving my first job, but Lassus' exquisite 3vv. Ave Regina last April has been a rare exception to my current SATB habit. At times it's been useful to sing unison/octaves, as in Ives' Serenity &c. This we did most recently last summer, with Dvorak's Op. 99 No. 4: West Edge Opera was about to do Kát'a Kabanová and I really wanted my Czech chorister to teach me the ř. It's unlikely that Schubert's very beautiful Gott ist mein Hirt will ever replace Virgil Thomson's My Shepherd will supply, though; the logistics of SATB a cappella simply trump SSAA + piano.

The largest issue with two- and three-part music is that it forces a portion of your choir to sing outside their comfortable range. Even SATB is a compromise, but as a true tenor I would be croaking through most of a baritone part if it were even possible in the first place.

As for traditionalist parishes and new music, this is what happens when a deliberately reactionary attitude to everything is promoted. I remember the discussion on Messiaen's L'Ascension last year, one of his tamest works by the most devoutly Catholic mainstream composer of the twentieth century—and it was attacked for "perpetuating the cult of the performer" and not conforming to the same harmonic language as Carlo Rossini.

Schoenbergian,

The problem you identify is the same as the one Francis identified, except with a different end point: Palestrina v. Rossini. It is not, organically, connected to the Traditional Latin Mass. It's a cancer which grows in all sorts of communities. You've encountered in in different clothing when Catholic catalogs market "Traditional Catholic hymns", such as "Amazing Grace, Here I am Lord, and Be Not Afraid". I encountered it, first hand, when the First Communion teacher insisted that Schubert's Ave Maria was inappropriate because the children couldn't sing it. That was in a vernacular Mass parish which used the Baltimore Catechism to teach the children.

Jackson,

I was younger and more stupid then than I am now, and I let myself be talked into using the Schubert.

Indeed. This same teacher insisted that the music be all kid-friendly in other ways, too, but (fortunately) more sensible heads prevailed.

Siriggle,

An alternative to not doing this too often is this: vary the choir members who get a rest. One could sing a 2-part Lassus piece, a three part Byrd and a four-part Koerber or Giffen in the same Mass, I suspect, and thus give some choir members a rest; on a future Sunday one could sing 2 DIFFERENT parts (SSA, instead of TBB, for example) and thus vary the textures?

Generally speaking, most women are mezzos, most men are baritones in a roughly normal distribution.

That untrained voices may prefer singing in these ranges in no way guarantees the above statement. Most women are much more comfortable singing in a choral soprano range once they have learned to avoid pushing the chest voice up too far; the difference between mezzo-soprano and soprano mostly relates to tessitura and maximum vocal weight. As for male voices, even true tenors will be hard-pressed to sing real tenor parts without proper training; since bass lines usually lie below the break, they are more universally accessible to all voices without the ability to knit the two registers together.

For evidence of the above, compare Bruckner's alto parts (written for female singers) to his English contemporary Stanford who assumed adult falsettists. One would be hard-pressed to hand both works to the same alto section and expect an equal result.

Lastly, I have never met a trained professional female singer who was unable to sing soprano, and essentially all of the "altos" with which I work are sopranos who cultivated singing in and below the break with proficiency. I have trained several singers who self-identified as contraltos to open up their upper register and access the soprano range without inhibiting the lower register which they had usually sufficiently developed.

An alternative to not doing this too often is this: vary the choir members who get a rest. One could sing a 2-part Lassus piece, a three part Byrd and a four-part Koerber or Giffen in the same Mass, I suspect, and thus give some choir members a rest; on a future Sunday one could sing 2 DIFFERENT parts (SSA, instead of TBB, for example) and thus vary the textures?

This is an excellent idea and prevents the appearance of exclusion.

better off with three-part voicings of SABar

In practice I find music so marketed unsuited in tessitura to almost everybody. What seems to be suggested is that the ideal 8vv piece would be scored SMMATRRB. This seems (overlooking the unison passages) the distribution in Mendelssohn's Op. 72 No. 2, more or less the case in Bruckner's Ave Maria, and less so in Brahms' pieces which tend to a double choir SATB.

Btw, the inimitable Ysaye Maria Barnwell (whose own vocal range is impressive....) in this video from 2015 eventually (about 6+ minutes in) focuses on something that I've noticed across the political divides of the last generation*: the near cessation of singing by American people in their mass gatherings (other than perhaps awful renditions of the national anthem at sporting events). She also is a great coach of ... congregational singing, as it were, and she comes up from that tradition. I think that is something many leaders of singing are having to confront within our churches, and it has connections to the texture issues Chris raised in his initial questions, even if the applications in this particular video are generally not sacred.

If you watch to the end from the beginning, you can see she's a pro at this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY6svYv39tI

* She identifies the Occupy movement as what caught her attention this regard, but it goes back further than that.


PS: One of the glories of some of Sweet Honey in The Rock's concerts was when they'd end them with the audience/congregation singing to them as they left the stage.

Felicia,

Picking up on your point, I have a question: should people sing outside their timbre-register, in order to make certain kinds of music possible for an ensemble which wouldn't otherwise be possible?

Jackson,

You would, therefore, assert, that 3-voice, 2-voice and other-combinations are preferable to forcing everything into an SATB mold?

Maybe it's the lack of numbers, but I have some problems with the mindset that we have to downsize from SATB to 2- or 3- voice combinations (eg. SABar or MzTB). With enough and varied singers, why not move up (at least sometimes) to 5- or 6- voice works, such as SMzATB (or SATBarB) or SMzATBarB. The latter 6-part voicing, for example, allows for the comfort of mezzos and baritones as well as the true sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses.

Why not give my 6-part Ave verum corpus or my 5-part "Bring us, O Lord God" a try. Performances in the USA seem to be virtually nonexistent, although Europe has proven much more receptive. The following are best viewed directly in YouTube (as they are scrolling scores):

Ave Maria a 6 - Charles H. Giffen


Bring us, O Lord God - Charles H. Giffen

Indeed!
I have always regretted that SATB became the default texture for western choral writing.
Six, eight, and more (sometimes many more) voices provide for a richness of expression that a mere four can't express.
Of course, as Chris is pleading, there are those places which do good to have the mere four voices or less. And there is no dearth of music for the less, starting with Lassus's twelve motets for two equal voices.

I would only move down to two or three voices if a specific work demanded it or if there was a genuine inability to sing four parts. The SATB compass is not set in stone and, with a sufficiently large ensemble, enables singers to compensate for each other's weaknesses (the baritones can take the lead in higher bass parts, while the true basses will shore up the lower notes)

Schoenbergian,

If a piece is written for four voices (SATB) but you don't have a reliable quartet, is it better to 1)Sing the piece badly; 2) eliminate one of the parts, even editing the score to do so; 3) abandon 4-part singing by choosing 3-part settings of the same texts; or 4) abandoning polyphony all together, choosing either recto tono singing or Missa de Angelis (or My Little Pony Mass) all the time ?

Schoenbergian,

Would you take as a friendly amendment "fewer than four independently capable parts"?

I'm not a fan of recto tono singing, but it gave a very stark version of Tenebrae this year and last. At some point, I hope, my pastor will encourage us to sing a fuller form of Tenebrae, but at least we're celebrating in in choro.

Bartlett, Weber and others provide antiphons for the OF. That's no help, here.

ok.

God didn’t give me the gift of composition merely for me to write stuff and put it in an archive in the hopes that someone else will take an interest three centuries from now.

Sometimes, it feels like it.

I also resent when people refuse to feature new music. I put my own music in front of my choir all the time. God didn’t give me the gift of composition merely for me to write stuff and put it in an archive in the hopes that someone else will take an interest three centuries from now.

Alas, I'm not able to put my own music in front of my choir, since I don't have the luxury of having a choir (and the group that passes for a choir at my parish is a praise & worship choir). So, I'm left the the option in the "God didn't give me the gift ... " sentence.

I rather doubt that, francis. Although I'm probably not aware of pieces that have been sung for which I don't have recordings or direct information.