My Reach for Fame and Glory

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

 

Mrs. H. H. A.  Beach

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach, who lived from 1867 to 1944, was a composer of music and a concert pianist, now nearly forgotten after being well-known and popular for many years. She composed music of every sort, from little songs for children’s piano studies to symphonies and an opera, with lots of concert piano music, chamber music and church music. Her husband and the rules for good manners at the time caused her to become known only as Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.

Some folks could not resist the temptation to refer to her as Mrs. Ha Ha Beach, and it was not until fairly recently that writers called her Amy Beach.

I first knew of her because of a course in American music that I took at the University of Minnesota. I was not interested in her at first, but in the Bicentennial Year of 1976 there was more attention paid to earlier American composers. Old “Etude” magazines had some of her teaching pieces included along with some interesting written material about her. John Tasker Howard in his book, Our American Music had some favorable remarks about her, and the Seattle Public Library had a few of her more ambitious works in score, plus a number of her solo songs. I wound up writing an essay about her life and works that I thought could be of use to my music history students.

A formal “Request for Papers” appeared in the mail one day in January of 1983 or thereabouts. These “Requests” very rarely come to community college instructors, but I thought I should submit my Amy Beach paper. If accepted it would be read at a three-day convention of “Women in Music” to take place at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. To my amazement, the paper was accepted, and I was to have an all-expense trip to Ann Arbor the following spring, thus rubbing elbows with the terribly important University Professors from all over the country, who were probably invited to events like this every month or so.

The trip was fun, flying to Detroit from Seattle directly over Green Bay, my former home. Someone met me at the airport to drive me and a few others to the campus, and I was given a place to stay with a family near the campus. Not the Hilton Hotel, but OK, with a super-breakfast. The University of Michigan is huge, but I finally found the place to register, get a name card, a program of events, and the official welcome to the Women in Music convention.

It was then that I learned that I was the only male to present a paper. There were perhaps four or five other men listed on the program, but they were all performers of the music. I thought I must be important, considering my status as the only male presenter. True, my paper was listed on the late afternoon of the last day of the convention when many of the attendees would have already left. Still, the only male – that had to be worth something.

At the first session I was a bit shocked to find that of the first eight women composers who performed their own works, all for piano, that not one actually sat at the keyboard. They whacked at the open (or damped or “prepared”) strings of the grand piano with various objects. I remember one composition played by the woman lying on the floor under the piano, knocking on the sound-board and orking the pedals.

In the evening of the first day, one really big, but sexy woman was to play the big pipe organ in the main concert hall. She had two male assistants with her to pull and push the stop knobs, as two hands could not possibly handle all the quick and complicated changes in the setting. Wearing garish green satin skin-tight pants and tight yellow top, she came undulating in, big hips asway, climbed up on the bench, prepared to play by pulling out all the stops and couplers, suddenly leaned forward with both arms outspread, and landed on as many keys of the four keyboards as she could reach, forearms and fingers. It is hard to imagine the incredible loud, ugly sound that came from that great instrument. It is hard to make a pipe organ sound truly awful, but her success was astounding.

The big dress-up banquet was held in the evening of the second day. There was a bar, and I remember dimly that the drinks, limit of two, were free. There were perhaps fifteen tables for six set up for participants and guests. Yes, there were a few husbands there, but hardly noticeable in the crowd of women. So I came into the banquet room which was about three-quarters filled, not really knowing anyone, receiving rather cold looks, I thought, from the seated ladies. Finally I came to a table with a couple of empty chairs and I approached, saying, “You ladies look like you have kind faces, may I sit here?” They said, not very enthusiastically, that it would be OK. I had my glass of wine in hand; they had theirs at the table, and I hoped we could have a pleasant conversation. It must have been at a given signal, or some sign, they all decided they needed to go for another glass of wine. Since my glass was still full, and I was not invited to come along, I stayed at the table and waited for them to come back. Then I waited some more, and still more, but they never showed up at that table again. So I grew discouraged, got up and started looking for another table. Luckily I spotted a lady that I had known from the University of Washington where we had both been Teaching Assistants. Her name is Lorraine Sakata and she had made a name for herself in ethno-musicology in the years since I had last seen her. So I got a place to sit with one person who knew me. I sensed that the other women at the table wanted no part of me, and were acting a bit cool toward Lorraine because she had broken ranks and accepted me. I have a faint glimmering now, of what it is like to be a part of a despised and inferior minority.

Finally on the afternoon of the last day my turn came to read my Amy Beach paper. Getting a feeling of the attitude of the audience, what I said was, “I’ll read this paper as fast as I can so we can get to the good stuff, the music.” So I did that, and the neat flute quartet (two women, two men) that followed was super-Beech, so everyone was happy, and I even got a compliment on the paper. And the audience was not as small as I had anticipated.

The very last item on the convention program was a talk, actually a fiery speech, by a woman who urged the people in charge to make this Women in Music an annual event, this being the first. She thought that the convention should be limited to women, both presenters and performers. The one concession in her proposed plan was that the participants need not necessarily be Lesbian, but that preference would be extended to Lesbians.

*************

The “Women in Music” convention never became an annual event.

Photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Beach

 

 

HISTORY OF A TENOR

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

 

There are certain mildly humorous jokes about choral singers.  All altos are said to be disappointed sopranos, but they are sopranos who can read notes.  And there is the conductor who always addresses the men in the choir as "men and tenors".  Some people claim that tenors are as haughty and class-conscious as the sopranos, each of whom thinks she is the prima diva.  Basses are considered to be the most solid and reliable, the least temperamental, and are the foundation of the choir.  Altos believe themselves to be under-appreciated.  The tenors, because they are few in number, move to the top of the pecking order.
 

In the "Church Choir" essay, earlier in this series, I told how I became a tenor, converting from comfortable bass, in part because I got paid as a tenor.  After this "conversion" I sang tenor in the Winona Civic Chorus and landed a leading tenor role in two Gilbert and Sullivan operas presented there.  It was nice to sing opposite the pretty girls, and I hardly gave a thought to the rest of the men in the opera chorus.  Later still, in Green Bay, I sang with the Chorale there, and was selected for solo parts now and then in the major works performed there.  So I learned that it is great to be a tenor; one is always in demand, and it is possible to build up an ego of noticeable size.

The composers of early Christian chant (plain-song, Gregorian chant) were aware that the average man's voice is a medium-range baritone.  Not high enough to be a tenor, and not low enough to be a genuine bass.  Since this early chant is sung by unison men's voices, there was no need to have the men strain for a high note, nor growl for a low one; everyone could sing in a relaxed pleasant voice, with the sound greatly enhanced by the size and resonance of the building.  My guess is that from this pool of baritones there are many men who could, by using just a bit more energy, sing in the choral tenor range.  Operatic tenor is a different thing.  The easy way to go, would be to relax and sing bass, at least on the medium notes, and let the really low notes fade out.  Choral tenors do not usually have to sing any note higher than G above middle C.  These baritones should be reminded that there are advantages to being a tenor.  In opera, at least, the tenor nearly always gets the girl.

In my choral music teaching in the public schools I never had much trouble finding tenors; among these young boys true basses are scarce.  I never taught in a small public school, so there were plenty of young guys to work with.  But ultimately, I got into directing community choirs myself; and of course I had been directing church choirs since I was a senior in college, and that meant a relentless search for tenors.  Community choirs are not often found as a completely formed and organized group.  Chances are that there will be a number of sopranos and altos on hand, who truly enjoy singing major works that are not usually done by church choirs.  With luck, the director/organizer of the choir will be able to snare some of the husbands of these ladies, some of whom will be very good.  But chances are also, that they will be the usual baritone not-quite-bass, and hardly anyone will be willing to admit to being a tenor.  This may be because they think, "I might be the only one."  So every possible means, including money if you have it, may have to be employed to balance the choir.  Of course you ask the ones who are already in the fold for help.  A brother-in-law, a cousin, a friend, a friend of a friend, all of these personal connections worked better for me than newspaper or radio advertisements.  If the prospective tenor can actually read notes and has a decent ear, what bliss!

A maneuver that I have used more than once is to sing the Handel "Messiah" at Christmas time, starting rehearsals early enough so that there is time to sneak in a short rehearsal of the major work planned for the spring.  Nearly everyone wants to sing "Messiah", even tenors, and so you get hold of a few in the fall.  If your spring piece is an absolute winner and you hook the choir on it, including the tenors, you are on your way.  The tenors themselves might exert themselves to find others of similar voice range.

On one occasion, working with the Stanwood-Camano Community Choir, we were rehearsing with a group of perhaps thirty-five or forty people, sopranos, altos and basses.  Not one tenor.  I believe the piece we were working on was the D major Vivaldi "Gloria".  The tenor part is extremely important, especially in the "Et in terra pax" movement, and it was becoming more and more painful to rehearse without tenors.  We worked for a while, until I announced to the group that we would work for ten more minutes, and if  a tenor did not walk in the door by that time, I would cancel the performance.  Unbelievably, in the next few seconds, a tenor walked in.  This boost to the morale of all led to a few more tenors being found (or drafted) and the performance was saved.  This sort of happening can result in tenors getting an "attitude".

   All this fussing and worrying about finding tenors for amateur choirs irked me.  I could not imagine why more baritones such as I had been all through college, did not convert to tenor, thus becoming the darlings of all such choirs.  I used to think that one day I would walk into a community choir rehearsal, unannounced, and reveal that I was a tenor who could read notes and had a decent ear.  I would be gracious and modest, asking the choristers not to genuflect or kiss the hem of my garments.  In point of fact, it did not happen that way.

One day I had been whining to Margaret about a lost opportunity back in 1953 when I had spent a year in Minneapolis as a grad student.  I had looked forward to singing in the Westminster Presbyterian Church choir, one of the best in town.  But my newly-acquired father-in-law pressured me into taking on a church choir of my own, one that would pay me.  Westminster would not have paid me, of course, but the experience of singing with this superior group would have been of considerable value to me.  Any small church choir that would hire me, a mere grad student and temporarily in town at that, would have the usual tenor problems.  I wound up at a small Lutheran church with, yes, the usual tenor shortage.  Margaret listened to my whining sympathetically, and suggested that I try out for the Seattle Chorale, which was soon to become an arm of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.  She had seen a notice of auditions in the newspaper.

This struck me as a wonderful notion, and I went to the auditions thinking it would be easy.  I joined a number of people waiting outside the studio of Dr. Scandrett, the director, and when my turn came I was surprised that Scandrett remembered me from years ago when I had been a grad student at the University of Washington.  This gave me more confidence.  But the audition went on, and it was a tough one.  There was simple sight-reading, there were tests of identifying and singing various odd intervals, but the hardest was to repeat, vocally, a strange, meandering, a-tonal tune that Scandrett played on the piano.  That was scary.  But I passed the audition, and was relieved when Scandrett said I was "in".

Walking into the first rehearsal, I was beginning to get the feeling that I would not be anywhere near the hero I had anticipated being.  The first shock was in sheer numbers.  There were some 170 singers there, and approximately a quarter of them were tenors.   Mein Gott!  That would be nearly 40 tenors and probably all of them had the same inflated feeling of self-importance that I had.  But they all turned out to be nice guys and I quickly became friends with many of them.  Presumably all of them had passed the same audition I did, so that meant they were rather good sight-readers and had good ears.  Many had great voices to go along with tat.

Then followed eight glorious years rehearsing and performing with the Chorale, at least twice a year singing a major work with the Seattle Symphony.  Some of the highlights of those performances, at least for me, were singing Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloe" suite, Brahms' "A German Requiem", Ernest Bloch's "Sacred Service", Howard Hanson's "Lament for Beowulf", Penderecki's "Agnus Dei" and making a Christmas CD of fine but unfamiliar music.  The Chorale was expected to be able to sing in English, French, German, Latin, and Italian.  We had special help singing a short piece in Chinese, and much more help singing a long work in Russian.

So, come on, all you passive baritones, choose tenor!  It's an exciting life!

 

Eastern Europe 1976

Touring with the

American Choral Directors Association

 

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

 

A 1976 invitation to join a People to People tour of Eastern Europe organized by the American Choral Directors Association was a big surprise to me. First, because as a choral director at a small community college, I could not pretend to be a key figure in American choral singing. Second, because I had not paid my dues in some time, and was sure I had been dropped from the membership roles. I was pleased, of course, to have received the invitation even though the trip to Eastern Europe would be at my own expense. As it turned out, Skagit Valley College picked up part of the tab.

Krystof Penderecki

The notion of touring with some of the fine choral directors in the nation made me think that this just might be an opportunity to realize a dream. To do some great singing with people who could sing at sight and who would have well-nigh perfect ears. I prepared for this by packing along all the extra weight of sign copies of a book of madrigals.

The itinerary for the tour was this: to Stockholm, Warsaw, Krakow, Prague, Belgrade, Dubrovnik, and finally, London. We were to visit school music classes, attend rehearsals and concerts of leading choral groups, and meet some of the fine conductors and composers of those countries. The most well-known of these was the great Polish composer Krystof Penderecki. They were all extremely friendly and hospitable to us; we had a great buffet lunch at the home of Penderecki and his wife, all twenty-two of us.

But the Polish travel was fun for another reason. We flew in Russian-made planes from Warsaw to Karkow, back to Warsaw, then on to Prague, Belgrade and Dubrovnik. At that time they did not have the enclosed, motorized boarding ramps that we have grown accustomed to. Instead, we were taken to the end of the runway on a small bus, and then were to wait there until the plane came so we could board by ladders. The flights seemed to be scheduled mostly in the early morning, and caused some grumbling during these longish waits.

But I saw this as an opportunity. My colleagues were startled when I called for madrigal singers, the set of madrigal books in my hand. Not many wanted to take part in this venture, but with the help of a lady from Salem, Oregon, perhaps six or seven people were persuaded to become madrigalistes. And thus was born the Early Morning Polish Airport Madrigal Society: EMPAMS.

This reticence to sing (making a public spectacle of themselves) was again demonstrated at the end of the trip when we were in London. We were to sit in on a rehearsal of one of London’s really fine choirs. We sat near the back of the hall while the choir was up in front. They were impressive, in part because they were singing some material they had recently performed in concert. I was quite taken with the effect of the alto section, half male and half female, but was a bit disappointed in the rather delicate, polite, careful overall sound of the choir as compared to the robust Slavic choirs we had heard recently.

At the end of the two and one half hour session (broken for a brew or two at the pub across the street), the conductor asked if we would like to join his choir and sing a Bach motet, one that every good choir director should know, “Singt dem Herrn.”

I expected that all twenty-two of us would leap up and clamor for a place to sit. How many actually made their way to the front? Two, and I was one of them. I had been watching the tenor section and had picked out a guy on the end who struck me as being the weakest, and could use the help of an (a-hem) experienced singer like me. Hah! He was fine, he had all the notes, sang them dead center on pitch with perfect rhythm and a truly good voice. He was a nice man, and had no conceited airs about him.

Back to traveling in Russian-made planes on Polish airlines, we found these prop-driven turbo-jet planes quite drab, noisy, and threadbare in the upholstery. The planes had narrow seats with minimal fore-and-aft space. One of our group, a frankly fat lady a couple of axe-handles wide, could not totally wedge herself into the seat. Getting out must have required super-human strength. I could not watch. One of these trips was livened up a bit by four or five Russian men who said in a heavy accent, that they had just received a contract to supply inflatable rafts to some Scandinavian country. They were celebrating pretty hard with a couple of open bottles being passed around. I was sitting right next to one of these noisy fellows who insisted that I needed a turn on the bottle as well. What could I do? Refuse? No! I upheld the honor of the United States and the American Choral Directors by a swig from the bottle every time it was passed around. Good thing it was a short trip.

Another episode from the ACDA tour took place during the time we were to fly from Dubrovnik back to Belgrade and then on to London. The wife of one of the choral directors must have had a lot of money of her own. When we first hit Belgrade she shopped and shopped for jewelry and other luxury stuff. Nothing new in that because she always shopped. She and her husband had to ship home several boxes of stuff from places we had visited. The worst was a strange multi-colored framework that rather resembled a lacrosse racquet confused with a bird-cage. It had to be more than six feet long, easy enough to carry, but taking up way too much space. She insisted that this be carried into the passenger compartment of this crowded plane, much to the discomfort and disgust of all. This same awkward object again appeared on the plane from London to New York, but fortunately nowhere near me. You wonder what her house must look like, with all these bargain “treasures.”

Some comments on communist conditions: This incident did not happen to me, but to three others of our party. They had gone sight-seeing in Krakow one afternoon, and having walked a goodly distance, plus being unsure of how to get back to the hotel, they decided to take a taxi. They found one, the driver wanted to know where they wanted to go; they gave him the hotel name. His broken English response, “I don’t want to go there.” My friends eventually got back, afoot.

I went into a Warsaw store expecting to buy a souvenir of Poland. I thought a necktie would be nice, so I asked the clerk to show me some ties. This was not a store where you wander about, selecting items from the floor and paying at a check-out stand. The clerk strolled back into the store, returning the one necktie. The implication was that this was the only tie he would show me. That tie or nothing.

In Prague, we had just come out of a meeting in a downtown building, and one of our guys asked our omnipresent tour guide (In Communist countries you always were supposed to have a guide) why there was old, falling-apart scaffolding on an adjoining building. The guide said he didn’t know, but it had been there for years. No one had ever given the order to take it down, so it had to remain, I suppose, until it fell down.

 

Warsaw, Poland
Stalin's Tower

 In Warsaw, a tall, towering building stood, probably still stands, a perfect example of clumsy, blocky, Stalinist kind of architecture. Since it was the tallest building in town, my friend and I decided to go in, and have a look at the town from the observation deck. We found that the building was said to be a “gift” from the Russians as a “culture center.” The Warsaw people hated the sight of it, we were told later. So up the elevator we went some twenty stories to the walk around the perimeter of the building. There were tables of literature (propaganda) on hand, and of course, a good view of the city, rebuilt from World War II. There were virtually no individual houses, all of them having been flattened in the war, but now replaced by the hideous brick four or five story apartment blocks. There was some lawn space, not many trees, and the scene was Communist drab and grey.

There was some background music playing, a kind of “elevator music” I thought, until I recognized the tune, “Georgia on My Mind.” One of our American songs playing in Stalin’s tower? Could this be a sly joke on the Communists, some Polish wise guy playing with the fact that Josef Stalin was born in Soviet Georgia?

 

Thanks to "Google Search" for these pictures of Poland.

Thanks to "Microsoft Word" for Clipart

Krystof Penderecki is still alive and you can find out more about him on his web page:

http://www.krzysztofpenderecki.eu/en/1/0/1/Main-Page

 

 

The Minnesota Musical Show

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

 

Classroom teachers have to be truly outstanding in either a positive or negative way to attract much public attention, but those teachers whose work is on prominent display may become well-known in a relatively short time.  Athletic coaches probably get the most attention, followed by the music, art, shop, and speech teachers.  I had taught junior high school music in Winona, Minnesota for several years and had been the choir director at one of the city's larger churches.  I had also sung in the Winona Civic Chorus, and people began to know who I was.  Nevertheless, I was surprised to receive a phone call from a local lady "organizer" one day.      

Minnesota was celebrating its one hundredth year of statehood that year, and one of the local events was the presentation of a new musical show depicting the state's history.  So this "organizer" lady called and went into rhapsodies about what a wonderful show this would be, and how local citizens were practically clamoring to work on the show, on stage or off.  She emphasized over and over again the generosity of all these people who were volunteering their time to work on the show, all the donated help they were getting from various people and businesses.  This entire pitch was to get me softened up to recruit and rehearse a chorus, plus work with the soloists for the show.

I had seen a bit of the music score, and a bit of the spoken dialogue and I was not particularly impressed.  It was obvious that it was nowhere near the show that "Oklahoma" was.  But the enthusiasm of this lady, and her continued repetitions that all of this was to be done by unpaid volunteer workers began to pay off for her.  I knew she was unaware of the difficulties and time it would take to recruit, train, and rehearse a balanced and disciplined group of men and women so that they would not sound as if they were just a collection of passers-by on the street.  Still, if all these others were willing to do all this work, I supposed that I should too, and was on the point of agreeing to at least try to get the job done.  It was only much later that I began to wonder why me?  There were seven music teachers in the public school system alone, and I was the newest guy on the block.  How many of them had already refused the job?

She went on to explain that the head of the Winona State Teachers College music department was going to lead the orchestra, and presumably conduct the musical parts of the show.  "Of course," said she brightly, "we will pay the musicians."   I was shocked.  "Wait," said I, "am I not a musician?"  But she must not have heard me, I guess, and went on happily chattering about all the wonderful unpaid work people were doing.

Here I was, a choral director with several years of experience in church choir work, director of the choir of one of be biggest churches in town, at least four years of experience in public school music, and with a newly awarded Master of Arts in music literature from the University of Minnesota.  This woman did not consider me to be a musician.  I felt insulted and refused to have anything further to do with the project, even though the current Miss Minnesota was to be the leading lady in the show.

 

Church Choirs

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

 

            Nine churches have paid me to direct choirs for them; I suppose this makes me a professional church choir director. I first became a pro when I was a senior at South Dakota State College. Professor Theman, the choral music director, had been asked by a choir member of the Volga Lutheran Church to recommend a college student to take over their choir, and Prof Theman gave me the opportunity to try for the job. It paid a rather good salary, for l949, and though I was reluctant to stop singing with the Brookings Presbyterian choir, you can't be in two places at once, and the money won. Professor Theman's friend at Volga Lutheran was a fine soprano and one of the Powers of the choir and of the church. We got on very well, fortunately.

            Volga is a very small town about ten miles west of Brookings, and it is just possible that Prof Theman recommended me because he knew I had a car and could get there for Thursday night rehearsals, and Sunday morning services. All this worked out quite well as the choir people seemed to like me, and I actually got to sing at the weddings of two of the young ladies in the choir. I graduated from State that spring and went to work in the Morrell meat packing plant in Sioux Falls. I had not much self-confidence in those days and was glad the church year had come to an end before the choir found out how inadequate I was. The next year I found myself in Korea.

            After Korea I took up my teaching career at Jefferson Junior High School in Winona, Minnesota. After a very brief time singing at the Methodist church, I was hired away as tenor soloist by the First Congregational Church. This was at a time when there were still a few large churches that routinely hired a quartet of soloists whose duties were to sing solos from time to time, but primarily to act as section leaders in the choir. They wanted a tenor. I told them I was a baritone. They said they would pay $6.50 per Sunday if I sang tenor. Again the money won, and I said I would try it. And that is how I became a tenor.

            This was a good experience for a while, until I took a year of unpaid leave to get married and to work on an MA degree at the University of Minnesota. When I returned to my teaching job at Winona, the organist who had been playing and directing the choir at the same time decided that I should take the choir so that she could concentrate on the organ. This went reasonably well as long as I did things to please her; she and the minister's wife personified the Old Guard in that church, and you didn't really want to cross them.

            My most important transgression, in their eyes, was when I wanted to join our choir with the Episcopal Church choir to do a major work, Brahms', A German Requiem. Their excellent new organist was a ball of fire, energy, planning and organization, and we could have had a fine amateur performance of this great work. But no, the Old Guard considered the Episcopalians to be dangerous rivals, and the choir should have nothing to do with them, even a harmless thing like singing. If our Congregational singers couldn't do it by themselves, it was not worth doing. After some painfully polite argument I gave up, and told the choir people that if they wanted to sing the Brahms, they would have to do so on an individual basis, that we would not join the Episcopalians as a group. In the end, I was the only one to sing with them. The performance happened to be scheduled for the first half-way nice Sunday afternoon Winona had had after a long, cold and windy spring. The choir, small as it was, outnumbered the audience, as they were probably all out working in their gardens and lawns.

            But not all was strife in that choir. There was the year when all the women in the choir who were eligible to be pregnant, were pregnant, including my wife. My wife, Barbara, was truly gung ho in those days. When our oldest daughter, Virginia, was born in l956, Barbara never missed a Sunday. She did miss the previous Thursday evening rehearsal, if I remember correctly, but she took pride in not having missed a Sunday. In l958 when daughter Dorothy was born she did miss a Sunday, but that was likely because Dot was born on that Sunday afternoon. In that day and place, fathers were regarded as nuisances by the hospital staffs, and the idea of actually being present to support the wife in any way was unthinkable.

            Christmas Eve service was always a pleasure until its conclusion. There was a custom of having a late service, turning off all the lights at the end, giving every one an unlit candle, and singing Silent Night over and over until the light was passed from candle to candle to include the large congregation that always showed up for Christmas Eve. The choir would be in the choir loft with their candles, singing, but I would soon notice a dropping out of women's voices and a kind of sniffling sound. Nearly all my sopranos and altos were crying. I would hiss at them, "Stop crying! Sing!", but it was of little avail. I think men, at least this man, do not understand crying when it is the singing that is supposed to make the service beautiful.

            During the year that I was in Minneapolis at the University, I had hoped to sing in the Westminster Presbyterian choir, as it was one of the best in town, they had a fine director, they did major works, and was an auditioned group. This was not to happen, as my father-in-law who lived in Minneapolis, thought that I should scrounge up some sort of a job. Barbara was teaching full time, and I was getting money from the Korean GI bill, but this was not enough for him. So to keep everybody happy, I found there were a couple of choir jobs listed on the School of Music bulletin board. One position that was to open up in a month was at a large fundamentalist church in north Minneapolis. They said they were a large church with a big choir and paid probably two times the going rate for big-city choir-leaders. Barbara and I decided to attend a Sunday service there to look the place over before I went to a lot of trouble trying for the job.

            "Oh, if I could only show you God's plan!" wailed the minister several times in his long sermon. He made it sound as if God had told him what the Plan was, but had sworn him to secrecy. My thought was that probably even Moses was not that close to God and his Plan, and this guy was an imposter of the first magnitude. I did not interview nor audition for the job.

            Next on the list was Victory Lutheran Church in north Minneapolis. I was just a bit wary of this place at first, because although I had had experience with Lutherans and got on very well with them, my father-in-law had a dim view of north Minneapolis in general. He and my mother-in-law lived in south Minneapolis, and that is where all the good people lived, in his opinion. But the place rather appealed to me, and I applied for the job. I don't know if there were any other applicants, but I got it, and enjoyed it for a year. There was the usual shortage of men, especially men who could sing tenor. The organist was an accomplished musician. One of the altos, whom Barbara and I especially liked, was named Virginia. She was the one who used to refer to the prima donna (primo huomo) tenor who came to rehearsal only when he felt like it, but was always there on Sundays, as "that creature." But that Virginia, along with a couple of other Virginias that we knew and liked, was a reason for our naming our oldest daughter Virginia.

            One incident that caused dismay at the time was a spring choir concert that I had scheduled for the 6th of May. Surely this would be late enough in the year so I wouldn't have to worry about weather conditions interfering with attendance. So on the 6th of May we got some six to eight inches of snow. Quite a number of intrepid Minneapolitans showed up for the performance, no choir people were missing, so all was not lost.

            So from Victory Lutheran back to Winona to resume my teaching job, I now found myself promoted to director of the Congregational choir as mentioned before. I didn't know until after I had left town for a teaching job in Green Bay that if I had stayed in Winona, I would surely have been fired. The Old Guard didn't like the notion of joining forces with anyone else, and I probably would have continued to advocate doing just that.

            On to Green Bay. I joined the choir at the Congregational church as a tenor singer and had my mind made up that I would not direct a church choir again. Too much striving amongst the Christians. This lasted until the end of December when Green Bay's First Methodist Church approached me about directing their choir. I was always short of money in those days (so what else is new?) and the salary looked very good to me. I took the choir job. It was a large church, the largest I had ever regularly attended up to that time, and it should have been a real plum. In spite of the size of the congregation I had more trouble getting people recruited into the choir than at any church I have served.

            My eighty-year-old tenor was easy to please, but I got a lot of flack from some of the 40-50 age group. These people had sung in the choir for a long time, and they kept wanting to do the "old songs". Some of these "old songs" were OK but some were outright bad, both text and music. They weren't old either. To me, old means l600s to the time of J.S. Bach. They were thinking more of l895 to l920 or so. It may be that the real reason they wanted to do this "old" stuff was because they could skip Thursday night rehearsal, show up on Sunday morning to sing, and not be completely befuddled by all the strange words and notes. I bought as much new music as the budget would allow, partly in the hope that some of these singers could be brought to see the importance of coming to rehearsal. Not much success.

            The organist was an instructor at University of Wisconsin, Green Bay Extension. Some of the local people called it "The Stench". Bill was a great sight-reader, but he had a couple of quirks. Giving the pitch for an a capella piece was Bill sometimes leaning over the keyboard and with his forearms pressing as many keys as he could. "Choose something out of this!" he would say. Sometimes when he had to be absent I was given plenty of time to find a substitute for him. Once I had virtually no warning and phoned him, complaining about having no one at the keyboard for Sunday morning. "They'll have to find somebody" says he. I was the "somebody" who was left holding the bag. Finally he quit and was replaced by a gentleman who was not quite so talented a musician, but was totally dependable.

            The organ itself was from the l920s or so, and needed a lot of work. The church authorities replaced it with an expensive electric organ with a million speakers. I was glad I had left town before that happened.

            Some local entrepreneur came to the church after I had been there a couple of years and talked me and the choir into making an LP record. I would cost us some money, but we could sell the records and come up with a huge profit, he said. This was the theory. So we went back and rehearsed some of the best anthems we had done over the years, and sang some hymns, until I thought that if everything went well, we would sound good enough so that people might be interested in buying. On the Saturday morning when the master tape was to be recorded, there were some key absences (Oh, was that TODAY when they were going to be there to record?) which were bad enough, but one lady who out of sheer loyalty to the choir showed up and did more harm than good. She should have stayed home to mourn, because her mother had died just the day before, but she came, bless her, and was the cause of a lot of flatness in the soprano parts. We heard later that some person had bought up, or had been given our unsold records, and they were now being given away with oil changes at a Methodist gas station in town.

            Then came the urge to try for a doctorate in music, and Barbara and the two daughters and I wound up in Seattle. Ginny and Dot were at Sandpoint School, Barbara was in the School or Library, and I was in the School of Music at University of Washington. We sang in the University Methodist Temple choir for a while; then I got pressured to take a church choir again by one of my professors who thought I ought to "keep my hand in." Haller Lake Methodist church of north Seattle had a position for me. This job lasted only a year, as we moved to Everett, but it was a "learning experience" as every church choir is.

            Their organ was an instrument that had been rescued from an old theater and installed by amateurs. Theater organs do not work well as church organs in my opinion, and this one was constantly dying, ciphering, or just plain sounding bad. The organist was a sullen lady who finally moved to Homer, Alaska. I tried to interest the church leaders in buying a new pipe organ while I was there, but failed to light a fire. My successor, Wally, was more skilful and they wound up with a fine organ that was actually a bit too powerful for the size of the room. They were also able to attract a fine organist, now that they had a fine instrument.

            The choir was small, but reasonably well-balanced. Up to that time it was the only church choir I had ever worked with, that on at least two occasions actually had more men singing than women. One difficulty there was that the church expected the choir to sing both the two morning services. There was fall-out from the first service that was rarely matched by the few who came in to sing second service only.

            After moving to Everett, halfway between my new job at Mount Vernon and Barbara's at Bothell, we started to attend the First Methodist Church of Everett, and to sing in the choir. I thought that I would be safe from having to direct the choir, as the church had an assistant pastor who had a degree in music from Westminster Choir College in New Jersey. I thought he would be a fine organist as well as conductor of the choir. Degrees don't mean a whole lot sometimes; this gentleman was soon eased out of his position at First Methodist and went to some other church where I hope he became a much better pastor than he was an organist/choir director. So the job fell to me and it was not all that bad until the senior minister was transferred as well. The Methodists do this as a matter of course. The man who took his place was a nice man, but his "announcements" which could have been read in the bulletin, were so long and involved that they actually took half the time he should have spent on the sermon. But the sermon was not shortened either, and the entire service became a kind of endurance contest.

            We left that church and went over to the First Congregational Church of Everett. Our first time there we noticed a plea in the bulletin for a new choir director, the old one was retiring, and his son who had taken his place for a while was also quitting. So they sounded desperate, and like a fool, I jumped into the fray once more. I applied for the positions and got it. I was a bit apprehensive when I found that the organist and her husband had been the Music Department of the church. But it didn't take long for me to find that Wilma, the organist, was a terrific musician and maybe the best accompanist I ever worked with. With her playing, and the fine voice of her husband the former director, we were able to perform some major works. With the help of my community choir members from Mount Vernon, we were able to perform the Brahms German Requiem (remember Winona and the Episcopalians?), the Poulenc Gloria, the Haydn Creation and works of that caliber.

            But then the church, and the church choir fell upon evil times. There was a cabal of young hippie type people who succeeded in driving out the minister whom we had liked so well, and his replacement was a disaster. His sermons sounded to me as models of insincerity, that he didn't believe any of the Christian doctrine. He also had this irritating habit of treating the choir as his servants, and ordering just exactly how he wanted things to be done. Choir members, except for a loyal core, had worse and worse attendance as a result. In the spring, one of the altos hosted a picnic for the choir. I told the choir at that time that I didn't want to beat my head against a wall any longer, and that I was quitting. There were cries of dismay, and much protest that I should stay and tough it out. They promised if I would stay another year, they would be there for me. So I gave in, and the next fall when rehearsals resumed, perhaps half to a third of the came back, the rest having vanished to different other churches. It was hard to blame them, but I felt betrayed and it was an unhappy year.

            This period of time at First Congregational was a difficult emotional time for me regardless of choir. Barbara decided that she didn't want the big house in Everett any longer. We sold it and moved to a condo in north Seattle, a 55 mile commute for me. I thought I would at least take on a closer church and applied at Haller Lake again, where I was known, and where Wally had quit not so long before. Besides, they had the new organ and organist. So then Virginia got married in Minneapolis and Barbara left me for good after we got back from the wedding. I thought it better to stick with what I had, and asked the Everett Congregational people to take me back. This was when the Everett church had an interim minister, before the disastrous "permanent" minister. Then there was the divorce, the move to the trailer on Camano Island, the new boat Echappee II, the attempts to get Barbara to return, and finally the beginning of my courtship and marriage to Margaret.  Strange, that I never thought of all these life-changing happenings as being so close together, until I wrote this paragraph. As nearly as I can remember, the time at the Everett church was between l972 and l978. This was a lot of turmoil in a short while.

            The morning after my last choir appearance in Everett, the pastor of Our Saviour's Lutheran Church at Stanwood came to the house where Margaret, daughter Holly and I were living, making the necessary adjustments to early married life. How this pastor knew that I was finished in Everett I do not know, but he asked me to take over the choir at Our Saviour's. I told him that I was not happy with church choirs and didn't want to take on another. After all, I had been telling myself that I would never again take a church choir since I almost go fired from First Congregational in Winona. But I foolishly told him that by fall, if he had not found someone, to come back and we would at least talk about it.

            Pastor Paul was no fool. He enlisted the help of Roy, who had been singing in my community choir at the college for several years. Roy was a good friend of mine, and since he was a fine bass and I knew a few of the other choir people, I took on the choir. Things went quite well most of the time; there are always ups and downs in the choir of a small church, but these people were loyal and took pride in their considerable accomplishments. Their choir library showed that they had performed some very fine music in the past, and had had some expert leadership. They had the only pipe organ in town with a capable organist, but a much better flutist. There was a time when I could brag that this Lutheran choir could probably sing just about any of the standard a capella choral literature. But people come and go, and you wish you could assemble all the really good singers who have ever worked with you, put them in a choir and experience a little heaven on earth.

            People come and go, so do choir directors. Margaret and I moved to LaConner. While there Margaret and I helped the Catholic choir at Christmas time a couple of times, singing in the choir. The lady choir director there urged me to talk to a priest friend of hers who was the pastor at St. Mary Catholic church of Anacortes. This priest, Fr. Harris, had recently "fired" his choir and gotten paid soloists to sing at the two morning masses. There was a "contemporary" choir singing at the Saturday night mass. Fr. Harries wanted traditional Catholic music at the formal masses, even plain chant. The congregation was happier with the "contemporary" music, and this tension deserves an essay all by itself.

            After several weeks of frustration and disappointment with my failure to get a decent traditional choir built up, I decided to quit, after Easter. Too bad I didn't quit sooner, as that Easter was one of the worst days of my musical life. Fr. Harris wanted both Sunday morning masses to be musically rich, and I was to hire a trumpet player for the first mass, plus a concert organist to play the seldom used organ. For the second mass a string quartet was to be added. I had to fire the trumpet player because although she had the reputation of being the best high school trumpet player around, I found she couldn't blow her own nose. The string quartet was a group from Western Washington University, and they were excellent. So was the organist.

            Easter Sunday was the mother of all debacles. It happened that Easter that year, fell on the same day as the first day of daylight savings time. The terrific organist failed to show up for the first mass. The trumpet was long gone, of course, and what music there was, I had to handle myself. With my poor keyboard skills it was a miracle that any hymn-singing got done, but I have to admit that even at their best the St. Mary congregation did not do well with hymns.

            The second mass was better, as the organist had finally drifted in, the string quartet played magnificently, and I had my paid soloists from Western Washington to lead the singing. I know I did not please Fr. Harris much, with my lack of experience with the Catholic liturgy; not only were there places to fill with music, the music had to be exquisitely timed, not too much, not too little, shorten or lengthen as necessary. So parts of this second mass were a failure as well.

            I'm sure that my resignation came as no surprise to Fr. Harris, but it was a dreadful disappointment for me. I had hoped to build up a great music program with the enthusiastic support of the priest and the congregation, but the truth was that the congregation did not want that. They gave me the impression that music was not important to their worship, and as bad as it had been up to that time, they might as well dispense with all of it. Moreover, I have a suspicion that the people had a justified resentment against hiring me and the paid soloists, all of us non-Catholics, to take a central part in their worship service. The excuse that I gave Fr. Harris for quitting was that Margaret and I were moving to Alaska. We did so, of course, but it was not until nearly a year later.

            So my service to churches goes in this order: Lutheran, Congregational, Lutheran, Methodist, Methodist, Methodist, Congregational, Lutheran, and Catholic (if you can call what I did a service). Since moving to Alaska, the chances of becoming another paid choir director are slim indeed, and my so-often broken promises to myself to never take another church choir may now be kept.

Changing from History to Music as a Teaching Career

By Dr. Robert E. Plucker

     

     When I was a little kid of maybe five or six, living on the farm in southeastern South Dakota, there was a family named Johnson somehow mixed in with all the Pluckers, DeVries's, Rippentrops, Tellinghuisens, Hoogestraats and others with German or Dutch names.  This Johnson family was related to us Pluckers by virtue of a Plucker woman having married a Johnson. 

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     As it happened, three of their sons were interested in singing in a quartet.  What they lacked was a low bass, so my dad was recruited into singing with them, and thus became an honorary Johnson, a member of the "Johnson Quartet".  After all he was a first cousin.   These four formed a rather good amateur group; they had good voices, good ears, and all had a smattering of music note reading.  When they rehearsed at each other's houses the wives came along, but my sister and I were the only children.  So we came along too, and had a marvelous time with the Johnson wives who were childless, but they always had goodies for us and fussed over us while the men were busy singing.

     The singing could be heard all over the house, and I was enraptured by it, even as young as I was.  This quartet was a most unusual group, as South Dakota farmers as a rule did not sing, other than a bit of growling through the church hymns.  So not only was the music live, spirited, and quite good, it was totally different from any other kind of music we might hear.  Any music at all was hard to come by, as not many people had a battery powered radio; there were a few old-fashioned wind-up phonographs, but nothing that sounded at all life-like.  Music sung in church could not compete with the tunes the quartet sang, "Juanita", "I been Working on the Railroad", "Old MacDonald", "Standin' in the Need of Prayer".  I loved the sound of these men and my idea of heaven at that time was to sing in a similar quartet of men.

     The instrumental music program at Lennox High School had been dropped because of World War II, and so the music consisted of boys, girls, and mixed singing groups.  Our wonderful young lady English-and-music teacher picked four of us guys out of the choir, and we were to be a quartet.  She was able to get us to sing together well enough to be "in demand", and we sang out of town several times.  Once we sang at the State Hospital for the Insane at Yankton and once at the State Penitentiary at Sioux Falls where I lagged too far behind, missed the timing on the time lock at the main gate and spent about ten minutes locked up in the South Dakota State Penitentiary. 

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     But people graduate, and scatter as did our high school quartet.  The next quartet was an improvising quartet in the ASTRP at Brookings (mentioned before in one of these papers)where we had fun singing both respectable and bawdy songs.  Following that, in the Korean war, I luckily landed in a Special Service troop entertainment company, spending some of my time singing in a barbershop quartet.  The troops that we sang for were polite and gave us applause, but I know they wished we had been girls.

     So all these quartet experiences were great fun and I hoped to be able to dabble in music like that for the rest of my life.  But the quartet experience that was to change me from a mere dabbler in music was caused by a seating arrangement.  Virtually every student at South Dakota State College (now University) was required to take "Development of Civilization", History 1a and 1b, taught by Dr. Parker.  These classes were large and Dr. Parker had an elaborate system of taking roll that was dependent on each student being seated alphabetically and occupying that seat for the entire quarter.  It turned out that for both Dev Civ 1a and 1b, Palmer was seated next to Plucker.  Dwight Palmer was the best first tenor on the campus.  Yes, he was interested in quartet singing, and he was a competent pianist.  He knew a fine bass singer, Vernyl Pederson, and Vernyl knew a good second tenor, Don Eng.  We did a good bit of singing both on and off campus at banquets and other gatherings, and ultimately got the title of The Statesmen quartet.  After graduation we got together several times through the years until the deaths of Dwight and Vernyl.

     The insignificant event was the alphabetical seating in Dr. Parker's class, which had the effect of putting the Statesmen together.  My major, which had been history, eventually changed to music and a life devoted to teaching music.  The event of overwhelming significance was that there were no Johnson low basses, and my dad was able complete the Johnson Quartet.