Mr. Kaplan describes shared churches, where Protestants worshiped in the nave while Catholics used the choir space around the main altar, and what the Dutch called "schuilkerkerken," supposedly clandestine churches that maintained their facades as houses but were in reality well known to officials and neighbors.
We also used the choir singing an old show tune called "Tell My Father".
Each pianist played a series of reflective and rolling sections and used the "choir" (two sections of male voices on each side of the auditorium and three sections of female voices) as a pause point before dancing together again.
In the case of "Pass the Mic," the Beastie Boys got the first kind of permission — the rights to use the recording of "Choir" — but not the second.
On my twentieth or so listen, I began to suspect that the track might have used the same choir effect as that of "Stay with Me"; it's all too easy to imagine, when hearing the ostentatious chorus, a long line of digitally rendered Smiths, each mirroring the other's breakup anguish, in slightly graduated registers.
"They had a beautiful Steinway they used for the choir and the chorus, but I got caught using it to play the Temptations," he said.
Its creators used the John Burroughs choirs as inspiration for the show.
The real innovation is in the use of the choir itself, a different one each performance, which stands onstage, a community circled by a stranger.
Sam Smith, a twenty-five-year-old torch singer for the sub-tweet generation, has made particularly generous use of the choir effect; his hermetic interest in his own loneliness seems always to be accompanied by a rush of harmonized voices.
The Cathedral acquired sets of recorders, lutes and viols for the use of the choir boys and lay-clerks.
