Shaw redeemed choral canon

and Atlanta, world the richer

Judith Green, 01-31-1999, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

Welcome to Atlanta. Robert Shaw has died.

I thought the world of Robert Shaw and looked forward to meeting him as part of my new job as classical music writer at the Journal-Constitution. Now I’ll never have that chance.

On the other hand, as I’ve talked to members of Atlanta’s cultural community about his passing, I’ve gotten a very good sense of who he was. My high school and college choirs --- like thousands of others in the middle decades of this century --- sang a slew of pieces arranged by Shaw and his longtime partner, Alice Parker. We didn’t know they were works that changed the course of American choral music, but we sure knew they made for good singing. Maybe that’s the tribute Shaw would have liked best.

The Shaw/Parker pieces were all folk music: black and white spirituals, sea chanteys and hymns, and Christmas carols. They were notable for clean arrangements and subversive harmonies --- just pointed enough to arrest the ear but not enough to trigger the “illegal dissonance!” alarm on one’s mental dashboard.

Tom Hall, music director of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society and president-elect of the national service agency Chorus America, says, “He brought to people’s attention a great chunk of indigenous music, recorded them with professional choirs and arranged them so that any high school, church or college choir could sing them.”

In this, Shaw was like the Hungarian composers Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly. They spent years traveling throughout the back country of Hungary and Central Europe, notating the songs and dances of villages and ethnic enclaves before industrialization passed over them like a wet sponge, neatening up their robust rhythms and sugaring all the tang out of their harmonies.

What Shaw is primarily known for in Atlanta is building the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra into a respected national entity. But don’t forget how he got here. In the 1950s, when Shaw formed the Robert Shaw Chorale and raised the Cleveland Orchestra’s chorus to the exacting standards of George Szell, the title “choral conductor” was synonymous with “second-rate.” Those who could, conducted orchestras; those who couldn’t, well, they stood up and waved their hands at choirs. High school music teachers were choral conductors. Musicians such as Shaw and Margaret Hillis, the dynamic director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, got no respect.

So when Shaw (who briefly had been music director of the San Diego Symphony in the 1950s) began to think again about an orchestral career, no reputable American orchestra would consider him. The combination of his blunt, plain American name and his blunt, plain American hands --- for choral conductors almost never use the baton, a European symbol of authority --- got him a blunt, plain American rejection slip.

Except in Atlanta, where an orchestra barely out of its community phase was looking for a music director. Knowing that he wasn’t the best podium technician but figuring that his name on all those choral records couldn’t do any harm, the ASO hired Shaw. I don’t know that the ASO board thought any further ahead than building an audience for the next season, but it soon realized what it had gotten.

Shaw believed in living composers as well as acknowledged masters, and more than once his programming of difficult contemporary works landed him in hot water. Long before Yoel Levi’s partisans bought billboards around town protesting his dismissal, ASO subscribers revolted over the board’s decision to terminate Shaw’s contract after his fourth season. He was saved by a write-in campaign that netted 3,500 subscribers --- keeping the faith, in ink, on their ticket-reservation forms by stating they wanted Shaw to continue. When Shaw retired from the ASO in 1988 after 21 years, it is probable that he had brought it the farthest the fastest of any American orchestra. That kind of accomplishment is its own testament. But when Tim Page, music critic of The Washington Post, said Shaw deserved to be on the list of the most influential American musicians, he wasn’t talking about the orchestral career. He meant the choral legacy.

More than any single figure in American music, Shaw turned around our expectations of what a choir should be, and what it should be able to do. For 75 years, choruses in big American cities had been congenial community sing-along organizations such as the Handel & Haydn Society in Boston, the Mendelssohn Club in Philadelphia and the May Festival Chorus in Cincinnati. Shaw led conductors, who in turn led their audiences, to expect professional ensembles that could perform, individually and collectively, on as high a plane as their symphony counterparts. And he turned those choruses from social organizations of European immigrants into American institutions of musical craftsmanship.

Another Shaw hallmark was his deep belief in musical responsibility. Even those who cannot forget the tongue-lashings he gave his singers recognize that his temper, his demands and his driven rehearsal manner all stemmed from his love for the music he led and for the composer who had created it.

“He put so much sweat into the study of the scores,” said Roswell choir director Michael O’Neal, who was in the ASO chorus for years as section tenor and soloist. “By the time he was ready to conduct the first rehearsal, he’d already put in so many hours. For those of us singing for him, how could we do any less? He didn’t want to let the composer down, but there’s no question that we didn’t want to let him down.”

O’Neal shared an unusual and humbling story about Shaw after a reviewer had criticized him for refusing a solo bow despite prolonged audience applause. (It showed a lack of respect for the audience and the performers, the critic said.) Shaw apologized to his choir before the next evening’s performance, telling them how much he respected and appreciated them. In private, he told O’Neal why he could not take a special bow: “I was ashamed,” he said. “I’m always ashamed after a concert, because of how I have failed.” Every note meant so much to him that if one went amiss, he believed the whole performance suffered. Maybe it did. But the ears of heaven, I suspect, pay no attention to those human imperfections. The most sublime works of Western music are the choral/orchestral masterpieces Shaw conducted so well: Mozart’s C minor Mass, Verdi’s “Requiem,” Handel’s “Messiah,” the major works of Berlioz and Elgar, Britten and Vaughan Williams, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand.” I doubt that God gives demerits because of a hissed final “S” or a chord that takes a moment to stabilize.

One of my favorite books as a kid was a young reader’s biography of Stephen Foster called “He Heard America Singing.” It strikes me that it might be a good title for a profile of Robert Shaw. He was a great man and a great musician who took nothing about his talent for granted. I’m sorry he left town the day I got here.