Reprinted from the Summer 1996 issue of Pomona College Magazine.

A Legendary Performance

Paying Tribute to Robert Shaw on his 80th Birthday

I well remember the first time I encountered Robert Shaw, an experience that would shape much of my own music-making and teaching for years to come. While in college during the early 1960s, I attended a concert of the Robert Shaw Chorale at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, where I experienced a new kind of music: a performance full of rhythmic vitality, impeccable intonation and diction, and something else which, at the time, I couldn't identify. The ensemble of men and women singers seemed totally connected to the musical process, a manifestation, perhaps, of something deeply human and profoundly spiritual. As a young, impressionable college student who up to that point had merely "played music," I learned there was more, much more, to the process of "making music" than I had ever imagined. An entirely new world of sound was revealed, and I knew that this was what I wanted to do.

Since then, I have had numerous encounters with Robert Shaw--at summer workshops in Princeton, and in preparing choruses for him at Yale and Pomona. (He returned to his alma mater in 1988 during Pomona's centennial to conduct the College Choir and Symphony Orchestra in music by Maurice Duruflé and Vladimir Ussachevsky.) It was therefore with a sense of excitement and nostalgia that I headed for New York City this spring to attend the concluding concert in a series of three 80th-birthday celebrations for Robert Shaw sponsored by Carnegie Hall. How shocked I was to enter the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on a balmy May evening with 2,500 others and to learn that Shaw had been hospitalized and would not be conducting that evening. I feared that my trip had been in vain. But such was certainly not the case!

How could one be disappointed in a concert lovingly prepared by Shaw, which he had described the night before at the dress rehearsal as "absolutely perfect!"? Not only was the concert well sung, not only did it contain all of those musical qualities I had experienced 35 years before, but it also possessed that profound sense of our humanity reaching to touch the spirit, the finest within each of us. Robert Shaw's absence provided an even more poignant reminder of the large shadow he has cast as the primary force in American choral music during the second half of this century.

Sitting in the cathedral as Rachmaninoff's Vespers (All-Night Vigil) began and the last rays of daylight faded, I reflected on Shaw's gifts to those who make music. While his career has taken many turns since his undergraduate years at Pomona, he has always remained true to a vision of music as ennobler of the human spirit.

From his early days with Fred Waring and then the Collegiate Chorale in New York to his touring and recording years with the Robert Shaw Chorale, and from serving as associate conductor with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra to his work as conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Shaw has managed to maintain a delicate balance between the two kinds of musicians who populate this country--the amateur and the professional. He has a deep appreciation of the amateur's "love" of music. He understands that choral art has a unique advantage over instrumental music, in that singers can begin their music-making at a very high level. He also knows that music must arise from a sense of community, otherwise there is nothing to "communicate." From the time of the Collegiate Chorale, he wrote letters to his singers, exhorting them to listen to one another, to hear one another, to create a musical sound that grows out of a shared, not a soloist, sound.

Shaw's rehearsal techniques are legendary: his insistence on rhythmic accuracy, perfect intonation, enunciation of the smallest phoneme. I remember once during a particularly arduous rehearsal of the Brahms Requiem, he looked over his glasses and said: "In a rehearsal my job is to get dumber and dumber, and yours is to get smarter and smarter!" His sole goal has always been for the musician to communicate with the listener.

There are many imitators of Robert Shaw's techniques--musicians who attempt to create what he creates through his "musical recipes." But what they often lack is a commitment to a deeper understanding of art as conservator of the best and the noblest in human history. It's no accident that most of Shaw's energy over a lifetime of performance and recording has been directed to the sacred choral literature. Works by Stravinsky, Bach, Verdi, Duruflé, Berlioz, Brahms, Beethoven, and Mozart come to mind. Nor is it an accident that he has insistently championed, commissioned, and performed music of our time (Hindemith, Rorem, Bernstein, Poulenc, Philip Glass, John Adams, Janacek, Szymanowski). At the same time, Shaw is a conductor who, with Alice Parker, plumbed the depths of our own American folk and hymn traditions. His music, though centered in the human spirit, is neither affected nor contrived. His music-making, though powerful and dramatic, is never theatrical for the sake of drama, but rather emanates from a heartfelt longing to communicate the power of spirit and soul through the highest artistic standards of music-making.

This was an 80th birthday celebration for a man who has changed the face of choral music by changing the lives of his choristers and audiences alike. May many more phrases soar from the human spirit in the years to come. Happy Birthday, Robert!

Jon Bailey, emeritus professor of music, conducted the Pomona College Glee Club
and choir from 1982-1998.