Okay, so I'm faced with a movement of a piece for orchestra + chorus where only the men sing. The (highly unreliable) manuscript has the men divided three ways and calls them "tenor, baritone, and bass" -- but I'm not sure if that's the standard way of referring to that subdivision in a chorus. Wouldn't the standard nomenclature in this case be "tenor, bass 1, and bass 2"? Also, the abbreviated staff names look odd to me if we call the middle voice "baritone":
"Standard nomenclature" depends on what era you're talking about. In Italian opera during the Verdi-Puccini era, the most common way of labeling a three-way split in the men's chorus was tenor 1, tenor 2, and bass.
The bottom line is that the chorus director is going to see it as a three-way split regardless of whether you label it T1-T2-B, T-B1-B2, T-Bar-B, or H-M-L, and he's going to balance out the parts to match his voices no matter what.
That holds true from the top professional level down through about middle amateur level. At the really low amateur level, singers will tend to insist on singing whatever part label they're used to and you'll have trouble persuading a T to sing B or vice versa. In that case, you're better off splitting the B's, since at the low amateur level B's typically outnumber T's by about two to one.
In any case, we all agree that there's no problem with keeping the composer's labeling scheme of tenor, baritone, bass.
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On the question of altos singing unison with tenors, your essential problem is that if you ask altos to read 8vb treble clef, about half of them are going to complain, and if you ask tenors to read regular treble, about two-thirds of them are going to complain. (And even if they're polite enough not to complain, they'll still be less facile than they would in their normal writing and/or someone might forget and sing the wrong octave.)
Separate staves is the obvious answer. If saving space is important to you, my recommendation would be to use a single staff and notate it in both octaves -- ie, so middle C shows up as both the second space from the top AND the first ledger line below. Along with this, you'll want an explanatory note telling that the top notes are for tenors at 8vb and the bottom notes are for altos so that they are in fact singing in the same octave. The explanatory note gets anyone past the initial confusion, and after that each singer is happy reading the notes he or she is accustomed to.
A variation of this idea would be to write one of the octaves as cue notes. For instance, you could put it in an 8vb clef, write the big notes for tenors, then put cue notes an octave below for altos with a note saying altos sing with the tenors. Or vice versa, with the cue notes on top in a regular treble clef.
mdl tenor 1, tenor 2, baritone, occasional bass, and chorus director
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