Vocal Focus (Song, Choral and Oratorio)

We are probably now fairly sure what a 'vocalist' is, but what is a Vocalise?

Yma Sumac (1922-2008) was a remarkable singer who produced, among much else, an album entitled Fuego del Ande ('Andean Fire'). Why were she, and this phrase, so significant?

About 100 years ago, astute and sensitive musicians were aware that modern life and technology were likely to drown out the old traditions of folksong: simple songs that people had sung for generations as they walked and worked etc.. The threats seemed to come from the rise of 'mechanical music on demand' (from the gramophone and radio), the pace of life, and that people were somehow less likely to sing, singly or severally, in moving motor vehicles.
All but one of the following were gathering, recording, notating, publishing and otherwise actively preserving and using folksong at around this time; who was the odd one out?

Which of these is the odd one out?

One of the most sublime pieces of choral music is Mozart's communion motet Ave verum corpus (K.618, written for the festival of Corpus Christi in 1791). How many bars of music does it contain?

How high does the soprano/treble soloist have to sing during the Allegri Miserere, as famously performed each Ash Wednesday at the Vatican and elsewhere?

Which of these vocal types is the odd one out?

During the cantata Belshazzar's Feast, besides writing such rich and intricate choral parts that their first professional singers allegedly threatened to go on strike, composer William Walton calls on the entire chorus to shout (deliberately loud but unpitched, rather than singing it) one particular word: what word is it?

Readers of all taste-levels and none will presumably be aware of the stage show and film The Sound of Music in which, fairly simply put, our Art wins the day in terms of personal relationships and international / political safety.
The governess Maria (a 'failed nun') quite early introduces the seven children of widowed Capt. von Trapp to the pleasures of singing in the clear Tyrolean air; her first combined practical and theory lesson centres on the song Doe: a deer.
But the tonic sol-fa names of the degrees of the scale go back a great deal further than that ... how far, and to what?

There was a healthy tradition of polyphony (singing in parts) and antiphony (singers, or sub-groups, singing 'against' one another across a large space such as the interior of a major church or cathedral) by the Tudors ~ say, four or even five centuries ago. Like any other technique (such as organ-building), there would always be the implicit challenge to 'go one bigger', even, than the vocal and brass choirs of that golden age in Venice.
Thomas Tallis (1505 - 85) famously made a setting of the liturgical text Spem in alium nunquam habui ... for how many voices?