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.