Will the Voices Grow Ever Quieter? Conductors Ponder the State of Choral Music After Robert Shaw’s Death

Although the death of the American choral conductor Robert Shaw in January -- at 82, after a number of appearances were canceled in recent years because of illness -- could not have surprised anyone in itself, the shock waves have yet to subside. To call it the end of a generation is mild. Perhaps it is the end of an era.

“It sort of feels like the roof blew off,” James Conlon, the American orchestral and choral conductor, said recently. “As long as I’ve known choral music, he’s been there. He was a gigantic figure, and it feels like a different world without him.”

Edward Maclary, a professor of choral studies at Bowling Green University in Ohio who knew and worked with Shaw, offered another variation on the familiar theme: “We’re at a continental divide, looking down.”

By varying accounts, the world of choral music, especially in the United States, lost a founder, a model, a mentor, a friend, a father figure; even, in the words of Kurt Masur, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, a sort of “musical priest” when Shaw died on Jan. 25.

How do you replace such an institution? Although there are promising candidates to pick up some of those roles, there is no obvious heir to assume them all. One has to wonder whether any single figure could dominate the field in the same way, now that the musical scene has become so fragmented and diverse.

Shaw, who founded the Collegiate Chorale in 1941, the Robert Shaw Chorale in 1948 and the Atlanta Symphony Chamber Chorus in 1967, was the foremost figure in a generation that lifted the standard of choral performance in this country, if not the world, to a remarkable new height. Others were Margaret Hillis, who founded the Chicago Symphony Chorus and died last year at 76, and Roger Wagner, who founded the Roger Wagner Chorale and the Los Angeles Master Chorale and died in 1992 at 78.

When it comes to the landscape of American choral conducting after Shaw, all the unanimity that greets mention of his name evaporates. Indirectly, at least, Shaw wielded an influence on virtually everyone in the field today, and he had a direct impact on most, through the quality and impact of his performances if not through actual contact. His disciples range from the 71-year-old Robert Page, who was one of Shaw’s successors as director of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, from 1971 to 1989, to relative youngsters like Charles Bruffy, the 40-year-old director of the Kansas City Chorale.

Shaw did not teach conducting as such but worked mostly through example, presiding over institutes and workshops for specialists in the field. He might train and conduct an amateur chorus one week and an ad hoc group of choral directors the next.

It was just such an institute, in France, that turned Mr. Bruffy into a Shaw follower. “It changed my life,” Mr. Bruffy said. “My chorus at home had a whole new sonority after my first experience with Shaw.” Mr. Bruffy sang in Shaw choruses many times, and although he was never a part of Shaw’s wide circle of friends, he said, “I sponged from him as hard as I could.”

Dwindling Number Of Specialists

In addition to Mr. Page, who directs the Mendelssohn Choir in Pittsburgh, leaders of the generation or two after Shaw include Joseph Flummerfelt, the artistic director and principal conductor of the Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J.; Vance George, the director of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus; John Oliver, the director of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in Massachusetts, and Gregg Smith, the founder of the Gregg Smith Singers.

“There aren’t that many of us anymore with our feet above the ground,” said Mr. Page, still obviously trying on his new-found status as elder statesman for size.

Others of great promise were lost early to AIDS: Michael Korn, who founded the Philadelphia Singers and died in 1991 at 44, and Thomas Peck, who founded the St. Louis Symphony Chorus and died in 1994 at 56.

Of the younger generations, in addition to Mr. Bruffy, Robert Porco, who teaches at Indiana University and directs the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, and Dennis Keene, the director of Ascension Music in New York, are often mentioned as rising stars. Other obvious talents are Norman MacKenzie, Mr. Shaw’s longtime assistant at the Atlanta Symphony Chorus and elsewhere; Judith Clurman, who directs choruses in New York, including the Judith Clurman Chorale, and Amy Kaiser, who leads the St. Louis Symphony Chorus.

The 45-year-old Mr. Keene is the younger leader most widely touted to pick up Shaw’s mantle as not only conductor but also mentor. Mr. Keene started a summer festival last year in Kent, Conn., breaking the Shaw mold in offering specific instruction in conducting and singing as well as choral technique.

Even without Shaw, the field of choral conducting is rich. Perhaps never before has there been such a stock of fine chorus masters, largely because of Shaw’s eagerness to share his methods and expertise.

“He didn’t really have students,” said Mr. Keene, who is not particularly known for a Shaw connection. “But I did the Shaw bit. I tagged along, and I sat in on his rehearsals.”

Yet that richness has limits. A distinction must be made, several directors pointed out, between choral trainers and actual conductors. Conducting, especially when a full orchestra comes into play, is a whole other discipline, one that Shaw took pains to master as few others have.

“At a certain point, he decided to concentrate on orchestral conducting as well,” Mr. Flummerfelt said. “There isn’t anyone who can move back and forth as well as he did.”

The term “choral conductor,” in fact, always seemed too limiting, almost pejorative, in Shaw’s case, even when, as usual, it was couched in superlatives. Although he may not have been the most consistently inspired orchestral leader, he was the music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra for 21 fruitful years until 1988, no mean feat, although it is all but obliterated by the shadow of his towering choral achievement.

“Earlier on, you wouldn’t even have called choral directors conductors,” Mr. Keene said. “They were chorus masters. Shaw changed all that, along with Hillis and Wagner.”

The situation the finest choral conductors typically face, with a large amateur chorus in combination with a professional orchestra, is highly complex. Yet partly because of that very involvement with amateur musicians, choral conductors tend to get little respect, even -- or especially -- from the orchestral colleagues with whom they often collaborate.

Wondering What Will Happen Next

True, certain symphonic and operatic maestros take a lively interest in choral music. Mr. Conlon has directed the renowned Cincinnati May Festival for two decades, and Mr. Masur retains ties to a rich German choral tradition. But there are few others.

And although many skilled chorus masters have followed in Mr. Shaw’s wake, relatively few genuine conductors of great promise, demonstrated versatility or proven distinction have done so. The entire field has to some extent been raised, this side of the Continental Divide, but at the same time it may have leveled out.

It has also grown more fragmented and diverse. “World music is coming into choral music rapidly,” said Mr. Maclary of Bowling Green University. Similarly, Mr. Keene cites the influence of the early-music movement, and the proliferation of finely honed professional choirs of small, almost chamber, scale. “A whole other level of nuance and color has come into choral music that has nothing to do with training a big group of amateurs,” he said.

Such novel niches, with their varying goals and expectations, are judged by different yardsticks, making it increasingly unlikely that a single Shaw-like figure could come to tower over the field again.

Then, too, the times have changed in other ways, with similar fragmentations affecting other areas of the musical culture. “Recordings are what pushed Robert into prominence, just as they did Roger Wagner,” Mr. Flummerfelt said of Mr. Shaw, who won the last of his many Grammy Awards posthumously, in February. “The present economic situation wouldn’t allow something like that to happen again.”

So leaving aside the question of whether any Shaw-like figure looms, larger than life, in the wings, would there even be a place in this altered landscape for such a figure?

At least one choral professional with a long view suggests that there still is such a place, and that worthy candidates to occupy it are indeed at hand, if not widely active on the American scene. Weston Noble, a friend of Shaw’s who, at 76, teaches at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, proposes three such figures: David Willcocks, an English conductor who made his fame with the King’s College Choir, Cambridge; Helmuth Rilling, the German conductor of the Gachinger Kantorei and artistic director of the Oregon Bach Festival, and John Nelson, an American who was the music director of the Indianapolis Symphony from 1976 to 1987 and is now active chiefly in Europe.

Certainly these are all bona fide conductors as well as gifted chorus masters with excellent credentials. Yet it remains to be seen whether any of them is eager to carve out a bigger presence in the United States. What’s more, much of Shaw’s charm in this country was his down-home American-ness, his ability to connect with the populist strain that runs deep in the nation’s psyche and, for that matter, deep in the roots of choral singing as he perceived it. He was not, like so much of the musical culture, transplanted from Europe, but sprang, a rugged individualist, from American soil. It is tempting to think that if anything like another Shaw is to arise, it will do the same.

In the final variation, Mr. Bruffy may have it right: “We all kind of went along on his coattails. Now his absence places a new perspective and responsibility on us all.”

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