MUSIC AS SACRAMENT
Burris, Keith C.
MUSIC AS SACRAMENT The mastery of Robert Shaw Keith C. Burris h am a Connecticut Yankee transplanted from the Midwest. I have never worshiped the sun, never sought the heat. But this past June...
...There were only the choir and Mr...
...What makes "the Shaw sound...
...Working with Alice Parker, he created the now-enshrined arrangements of American Negro spirituals and Appalachian folk songs...
...There is also a singular velvety quality...
...The piece itself is about the death of Howells's only son...
...He brought these to high school gyms in midsize towns throughout America, alternating them with programs of spirituals and glee-club repertoire...
...Precision plus spirit...
...This may constitute an even greater musical legacy than Shaw's arrangements and the folk canon of the Robert Shaw Chorale era...
...Shaw described as "a frighteningly brief" bout with cancer...
...Commonweal | 3 November6, 1998...
...and breaking down the music into separate tasks, so that the notes, rhythm, enunciation, dynamics, and color are all handled separately...
...Shaw builds an internal unity in the choir from its mutual cornCommonweal | 2 November6,1998 mitment, effort, and technical drill...
...The institute has had a number of sponsors over the years, including Emory, Ohio State, and Boston universities...
...He toured the B Minor Mass with the chorale, which many thought was insane, but sold out the bookings even before leaving New York...
...People who sing or play under him describe the process of "reaching for the music" or of "unfolding" it...
...Shaw's singers know that this man with sixty years of experience (ranging from work with Bruno Walter to Philip Glass), ornery wit, and magnificent humanity, can lead them to the very heart of Bach, or Brahms, or Mozart...
...He typically stands to the side, applauding the orchestra, soloists, and chorus, and sometimes singling out individuals for acclaim...
...No one gets basses to sound the way that Shaw's do...
...an almost dancing soprano sound, never screechy or shrill...
...Instead, three performances were virtual sellouts and the audiences roared...
...n ~ n November of last year, I scheduled a business trip around a Shaw concert with the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus...
...An intensely serious musician, he has always sought the most noble and difficult work...
...Another factor in creating the sound is Shaw's meticulous editing of the scores: he gives dynamic marking to virtually every note, for every voice and instrumental part...
...These are modern pieces, and all are choral, making them doubly hard sells...
...At eighty-two, Shaw is not only the grand old man of American classical music, he is also one of the most adventuresome conductors working anywhere...
...Shaw gave so utterly of himself that it was impossible not to be moved...
...After a two-and-a-half-hour program, the octogenarian was so exhausted that, accompanied by an aide, he simply left the hall while the audience stood waiting for him to return to take his bow...
...Shaw gives them a road map to the heart of the composer...
...Finally, at the First Baptist performance, Shaw annotated virtually every piece with his humorous, salty, deeply felt commentary, making the performance all the more personal...
...Shaw is now its music director emeritus and conductor laureate...
...When it sings of the Resurrection, it soars...
...Requiem, by Herbert Howells...
...When Shaw's choir sang the piece, it had been anguished, searching, and, finally, a fluid, confident prayer of consolation...
...Samuel Barber's "Prayers of Kierkegaard...
...performance that is said to have deeply affected the musical life of that country...
...He conducts the great sacred choral texts not as aural ornamentation, but as truth...
...He has the ability to imagine and then explicate the music for the musicians...
...In fact, Shaw tailored his chorale's tours around the Cleveland Orchestra's schedule...
...Shaw, no horns or strings...
...Millions of Americans remember the Robert Shaw Chorale of the 1950s and 1960s...
...In those years, Shaw was setting a new standard for vocal music in America--while popularizing it...
...Amazingly, in a week's rehearsal time, Shaw can get "the sound" with a choir he is guest conducting...
...He told Martin Goldsmith of National Public Radio that "music is a sacrament, when it's right...
...and four pieces by Benjamin Britten: Selections from "A.M.D.G.," from the opera Gloriana, and from "Sacred and Profane...
...The institute consists of two weeks of intensive score study and preparation with Shaw, culminating in two concerts...
...Since his retirement as music director of the Atlanta Symphony in 1988, Shaw has spent much of his time teaching in short residences at American universities, and conducting the two ambitious choral workshops that he established for teachers and conductors...
...For what is less well documented is Shaw's work since he disbanded the chorale thirty years ago and moved to Atlanta as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra...
...The maestro mounted an extraordinary program: B61a Bart6k's "Cantata Profana," which Shaw premiered in New York some forty years before...
...It was the most intimate and perhaps most deeply moving concert of classical music I have ever heard...
...Shaw knits together 160 singers to sound like 16...
...And because of the popularity of the chorale, Shaw was able to introduce middle America to something else--the monumental works of choral music: the Mozart Requiem, Handel's Messiah, Bach's Passions, etc...
...9 The goal of score study and performance is to get back to the composer's original intent...
...This was "the quiet music of the Holy Ghost" in a hypnotic performance...
...All this is accomplished according to Shaw's well-honed method: an emphasis on rhythm and on count-singing...
...Thus a whole cohort of music teachers and conductors has been schooled in Shaw's ideas, methods, and passion...
...9 continued to compile an incredible list of recordings (made up, in part, of near-definitive performances of great works, along with obscure choral works that otherwise might be lost to the recording world...
...Shaw will seldom come to the center of the stage to bow, and if pressed, will do so only once...
...and Ralph Vaughan Williams's "Dona Nobis Pacem...
...All this is an amazing legacy, but it constitutes only part of Shaw's life in music...
...But the Atlanta audience did not find the program obscure, high brow, or inaccessible...
...When he performs Bach, there is quickness yet all Bach's passion and fervor remain...
...He had a deep and widespread impact on two generations of community, highschool, and college choral direction...
...But it is not possible for me to convey how poignant and profoundly beautiful the second performance was...
...The second was at the First Baptist Church...
...One could sense the absolute unity of the choir in total sync with its conductor...
...The first concert was sublime...
...The first program consisted of the Bach motet "Singet dem Herrn" ("Sing to the Lord a New Song"), the Mozart Mass in C Major (or "Coronation Mass"), and the Haydn Mass in D Minor (or "Lord Nelson Mass...
...Thus, at the peak of his own chorale's popularity, he went to work with the Cleveland Orchestra, running its choral program so that he could learn from the legendary George Szell...
...But there still remains an X factor, something beyond the maestro's considerable bag of technical tricks...
...Through these workshops and recitals, Shaw continues to promulgate his well-honed musical principles: _9 Music should be made for love, not money...
...The other is the institute at Furman...
...and a rich, hooty bass tone that works as a sort of Verdi-like foundation...
...and "Rejoice in the Lamb...
...but simply to sit (or perhaps stand) in appreciative silence...
...Start with lightness and precision...
...Shaw was also the first in America to perform Benjamin Britten's War Requiem--a work he has continued to champion--and he commissioned Paul Hindemith's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed...
...I would not be surprised if this new recording brings him a fifteenth...
...If Furman sticks with Shaw, it will be known worldwide...
...One of these is the Robert Shaw Choral Workshop at Carnegie Hall...
...This year Shaw won his fourteenth Grammy...
...Afterward, Shaw recorded the pieces for Telarc (80479), causing more than one critic to admire the vocal product and the conductor's nerve...
...These became the canon of popular American choral music...
...9 A choir is a community, in fact a moral community whose activity is akin to what the discourse was for Socrates and his students...
...My June pilgrimage was to Greenville, South Carolina, where The Robert Shaw Choral Institute has relocated from Commonweal | | November 6, 1998 southwestern France...
...He does not simply hand them the music, but helps them to rediscover it...
...One senses they would follow him anywhere...
...There is always something to do (even if it can't easily be done...
...The singers never just "hang around...
...The listener did not want to leap out of the seat and yell "Bravo...
...It has to do with Shaw's teaching style...
...I believe the X factor in the Shaw technique/sound is derived from human awe...
...But even then Shaw was leading choruses for Toscanini, teaching at Juilliard, and founding the Collegiate Chorale...
...It was very fine, but the sound was English, boyish, and sweet...
...Both were followed by encores of Shaw/Parker spirituals...
...9 and in recent years, pursued a second--or third--career as a musical patriarch and rabbi...
...He was teaching the audience as well as the singers he had been instructing all week...
...The first program was held at Greenville's performing arts center...
...Still others remember his work on the radio and with Fred Waring...
...Not only was every eye on him when not on the music, but a sort of collective clock seemed to have the singers and conductor moving through the music as one unit, one spirit...
...And he took it to Russia for a historic n Keith C. Burris is editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut, and the editor of Eugene McCarthy's NoFault Politics (Times Books...
...With verbal finesse, he inspires them to rise to the very top of their abili t i e s - a n d maybe a little above them...
...Not only did he build a good regional symphony into a world-class orchestra, but he: _9 Championed modern classical music...
...The two programs I heard in Greenville were even more extraordinary than what I had heard in Atlanta...
...Rather than playing the dictatorial conductor, Shaw approaches musicians as collaborators who must fashion the product among themselves...
...This is one reason Shaw is so devoted to working with amateur groups...
...9 changed the musical geography of the South, lifting standards but also integrating his programming and his orchestra...
...When a Shaw chorus sings of the Crucifixion, it lays Christ in the tomb before you...
...Shaw was the first to lead a professional performance of the Bach B Minor Mass in New York, and he made the first American recordings of it and the Brahms German Requiem...
...hat is the famous "Shaw sound...
...The second program was English, modern, and without orchestra...
...As would those of us who envy them...
...Held each January, it culminates in a Carnegie recital...
...It is now sponsored by Furman University, a physically beautiful school in Greenville with an outstanding music program...
...Many younger conductors wouldn't dare attempt such a program, and no other conductor in America has the clout to get such pieces onto disc--and then to sell them...
...Voices, particularly, can be manipulated by the power of suggestion, and Shaw's suggestions are powerful...
...The composer wrote it, then tucked it away for almost fortyfive years...
...It consisted of the Mass in G Minor by Ralph Vaughan Williams...
...Shaw is not a churchy man, but to me he seems a deeply religious one...
...The Robert Shaw Chorale recorded these, along with Irish folk songs, sea chanteys, Stephen Foster tunes, and Christmas music...
...Performance is not show business but an act of faithfulness...
...The performance of the Howells Requiem was dedicated to a member of the choir who had died just two days before, after what Mr...
...Many factors converged...
...Shaw has been a household name for fifty years...
...They heard it on tour or bought the records...
...But this past June I headed due and deep south on a sort of personal pilgrimage, to hear and see the world's master of choral music, Robert Shaw...
...After Greenville, I bought a non-Shaw recording of the Howells Requiem...
...For Shaw, a choir achieves a unity generally not possible today in politics or religion: All members work for a greater good, but individuality may still flourish...
...It was in a smaller space---a church, not a concert hall...
Vol. 125 • November 1998 • No. 19
