Sistine Chapel Choir

The Sistine Chapel Choir is a choir based in Vatican City and is one of the oldest religious choirs in the world. At present, the choir comprises approximately twenty adult singers (eleven tenors and nine basses) and thirty unpaid boy choristers (sopranos and altos).

As early as in the pontificate of Sylvester I (314–35), a regularly constituted company of singers, under the name of schola cantorum, lived together in a building devoted to their exclusive use. The word "schola" was in those days the legal designation of an association of equals in any calling or profession and did not primarily denote, as in our time, a school. It had more the nature of a guild, a characteristic which clung to the papal choir for many centuries.

Hilarius (461–8) ordained that the pontifical singers live in community, while Gregory the Great (590–604) not only made permanent the existing institution attached to St. John Lateran and including at that time in its membership monks, secular clergy, and boys, but established a second and similar one in connection with the Basilica of St. Peter. The latter is supposed to have served as a sort of preparatory school for the former.

For several centuries the papal "schola cantorum" retained the same general character. Its head, the archicantor or primicerius, was always a clergyman of high rank and often a bishop. While it was his duty to intone the various chants to be followed by the rest of the singers, he was by no means their master in the modern technical sense.

During the residency of the popes in Avignon in the thirteenth century, marked changes took place in the institution. Innocent IV did not take his schola cantorum with him to his new abode, but provided for its continuance in Rome by turning over to it properties, tithes, and other revenues. Community life among the singers seems to have come to an end at this period. Clement V (1305–14) formed a new choir at Avignon, consisting for the most part of French singers, who showed a decided preference for the new developments in church music — the "déchant" and "fauxbourdons" ("falsibordoni"), which had in the meantime gained great vogue in France.

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