Reprinted from the July 1966 issue of Pomona Today.

Conductor Robert Shaw

From Fred Waring to the Atlanta Symphony, via the San Diego and Cleveland Orchestras and, of course, the world-famous Robert Shaw Chorale

Being "discovered" on the campus of Pomona College by a visiting impresario is undoubtedly the dream of many music and drama students as they strut and fret their hour upon the stage in undergraduate productions, though very rarely does the dream come true. But Robert Shaw '38 began his distinguished career in just that way, although he hadn't exactly dreamed about it--and in fact came close to rejecting the opportunity altogether.

Shaw came from a family both religious (his father, Shirley R. Shaw, was a minister of the Church of Christ) and enthusiastically musical (his mother, a fine soloist, was a mainstay of the choirs in her busband's churches). Shaw and his brother and sisters--John '51, Mrs. Harrison A. Price (Anne '43), and Mrs. Frederick C. Schlumberger (Hollace Mae '35)--each took their turn singing in and conducting a variety of church choir groups as they grew up. Shaw entered Pomona to prepare for the ministry, but his early musical background naturally made the Glee Club his major extracurricular interest. His practical experience in leading choral groups had already made him an unusually well-seasoned director for his age, and he was encouraged to take over Professor Ralph Lyman's conducting duties on occasion. In his sophomore year, he substituted for Professor Lyman during the latter's illness, and the next year was given sole responsibility for the Glee Club during Lyman's sabbatical leave (by this time, he had had only one music theory course, squeezed in among the heavy schedule of religion, philosophy and literature courses he was taking for his major).

That year Fred Waring came to the Pomona campus for the filming of the musical "Variety Show." He watched Shaw conduct the Glee Club, and was so impressed that he immediately offered him a job involving full charge of the Waring Glee Club. Shaw was reluctant to give up his divinity studies and declined Waring's offer, but he was interested enough to write the bandleader later asking for a summer job. Waring sent him $150 for the trip to New York, and Shaw set off (candidly returning most of the trip allowance to Waring upon his arrival). The work with Waring proved so interesting that Shaw decided not to return to Pomona in the fall, and he was soon busily engaged preparing five radio shows a week.

To all outward appearances, Shaw at this time was merely a novice (and a particularly untrained novice at that, with one musical theory course under his belt). His looks and manner astonished the sophisticated New York professional musical world; one critic observed that Shaw looked "a little like Mickey Rooney trying to be serious," and others noted that his conducting techniques made him resemble a "revivalist preacher" or "an overwrought college cheerleader." But it soon became apparent that Shaw was also a young man of exceptionally far-ranging vision who could look beyond the immediate problems of his own developing technical knowledge of music to the greater problems of the development of musical expression in the country as a whole.

Shaw was profoundly disappointed with the state of choral music in America at the time. On the one hand, there were the professional choral groups like Waring's, which performed popular music almost exclusively, each striving to cultivate a distinctive (and invariable) tone color in their arrangements. On the other, there were the amateur choral groups, mostly church-affiliated, whose main interest in life was performing oratorios like Elijah or The Messiah at Christmas and Easter. In Shaw's mind, neither the slick polish of the professionals nor the pious awkwardness of the amateurs constituted a fully-developed musical expression worthy of America. He wanted something else, and went about getting it with characteristic directness. As he explained, "I wanted very much to try to extend professional techniques to large groups of interested amateurs, and to build for amateur singing a sounder, more artistic repertory. So I put an advertisement in the New York Times and went to work." This advertisement brought a response from more than five hundred interested singers, 175 of whom were finally chosen as the original Collegiate Chorale (the group had been formed around a nucleus of singers from the choir of the Marble Collegiate Church).

Perhaps because at this time Shaw was closer to being an amateur than a professional himself, be decided to prove that amateur groups could be made to sing as well (or better) than professional ones. As he said a few years later (when he had already made his point), "You don't need to be a great singer to do great singing. Give me a bunch of people who are sensitive to one another and to music, and you'll get something bigger than any artist." To the boundlessly enthusiastic Shaw, interest and enthusiasm were the bases for the success of any choral group; "the best choirs," he remarked, "are those that really want to sing." And the Collegiate Chorale did want to sing; as Shaw remembers it, the group's intense devotion was such that to its members and director it became "very damn near a religion."

In addition, Shaw saw in his amateur choral experiment further lessons for American music. He once called the Chorale "democracy set to music," and found that a large part of the joy of the enterprise was in its communal character: "we were convinced that the meaning of music--though we weren't sure what that was--was linked more than casually with the fact of its being made in the company of other people. It was a group art, to which each contributed his intelligence, skill and love, grateful for the contribution of his fellow-musicians." From the beginning the Chorale had been interested in performing the work of contemporary composers. As Shaw commented, "we wish to assume our share in bringing the American public and the American composer into closer relationship. I may say, incidentally, that this is one of the finest services that any choral director can render American music, by performing existing new works and by commissioning new ones."

Recognition for Shaw's new group came swiftly. Soon they had a full concert schedule and were in constant demand by the major radio networks. On one occasion Toscanini heard Shaw conduct the chorus in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and exclaimed, "At last I have found the maestro I have been looking for." (This was the beginning of a long and fruitful association between Toscanini and Shaw, recording for RCA Victor such masterpieces as the Beethoven Ninth, the Missa Solemnis, Verdi's Requiem, and innumerable operas.) The success of the Collegiate Chorale enabled Shaw in 1948 to realize another long-standing dream: the establishment on a permanent basis of a small professional group, The Robert Shaw Chorale, whose members could actually make a living out of their dedication to performing the great works of choral literature.

Meanwhile, Shaw's career was also rising meteorically. Critical comment about him was uniformly enthusiastic; Winthrop Sargeant was representative of general opinion when he said that Shaw possessed "qualities closer to true genius than have been exhibited by any other American maestro of his generation." In 1944 (at the age of 28) Shaw had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the year before that had received the annual award of the National Association of Composers and Conductors as the "outstanding American-born conductor of the year." (He has since received six honorary doctorates, including one from Pomona in 1953.) In 1949 a magazine article reported that he had refused an offer of $100,000 to endorse some arrangements of popular songs. But making a fortune had never been Shaw's primary concern; in fact, he seemed interested in the large salaries he was commanding only insofar as they could help him realize his visionary projects. One of these projects was a seven-concert Choral Masterworks series begun in 1952, which combined both great choral classics and new or seldom-heard works by modern composers. In 1953, Howard Taubman of the New York Times reported with considerable amazement that Shaw had not only subsidized the previous season's Masterworks series with a personal contribution of almost $40,000, but also seemed likely to repeat the gesture for the 1953 season.

Meanwhile, another obstacle Shaw deliberately placed in the way of making a fortune was his obstinate dedication to learning his craft. Although he had become America's outstanding choral conductor before the age of 30, Shaw was determined not to rest there, but to become an equally competent orchestral conductor as well. (In 1949, at the height of his choral fame, he had suddenly announced that he was taking a two-year leave of absence to study orchestral conducting, explaining simply, "I don't handle the orchestra as well as the singers and I want to find out why.")

In 1953 he accepted the post of conductor of the San Diego Symphony summer season (his first extended opportunity for orchestral conducting), beginning the job in a characteristically energetic way that took San Diego by storm. In addition to the customary six concerts of the season, Shaw instituted a series of Friday evening chamber music concerts as well, and also taught a Workshop in Choral Art (which attracted musicians from 38 states) at San Diego State College. What he wanted to accomplish in San Diego were the same ends he had been striving for since the beginning of his career: the creation of a community amateur chorus which would enjoy performing together; the continual encouragement of new composers, particularly local talent; and the presentation of new and challenging programs instead of insipidly conventional ones (San Diego audiences could sense that something new was in the air when they found Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 sharing a program with "Four Dialogues for jazz Combo and Symphony Orchestra," performed by Dave Brubeck and his group).

In the chamber music series Shaw made equally novel departures. A highlight of the series was a staging (rarely done) of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat in which Shaw, garbed in rehearsal clothes and white apron, doubled as an obsequious waiter as well as conductor. This highly entertaining jeu d'esprit demonstrated in a frivolous way one of Shaw's highly serious concerns: that of going beyond the rigidities of musical "performance" (which separates audience and performer) in a search for musical experiences uniting performer and audience more closely. A particularly moving example of this attempt was Shaw's 1954 presentation of Bach's Passion According to St. John, at which the audience was given music and urged to unite with the chorus in singing the chorales, as Bach's congregation would have done.

Clearly, it is this insistence upon the communal musical experience which sets Shaw apart from many of today's musicians and theorists. For one thing, he does not think that music is an esoteric experience which should be available only to the initiated cultist, but rather he believes emphatically that the purpose of music is to communicate to the largest possible audience. He especially values choral music because it communicates on two levels--in words as well as in sound--and he has always been acutely sensitive to the unique demands of the dramatic element in choral works. (He is renowned for rigorous attention to articulation in his choruses--a concern which he pursues not solely for technical perfection, but from the ultimate desire to make the meaning of a song perfectly intelligible to the audience.) Shaw's "literary" interest in the words that accompany music has continued throughout his career; in his earlier years, for example, he wrote, "If I were organizing a school of singing and conducting, a primary part of the curriculum would be reading in poetry, drama, the novel and essay forms.... Literature as well as music is a Ôlanguage of the spirit'.... All these things are basic to our singing together." Subsequently he became actively dissatisfied with the existing translations of various choral masterworks, and undertook the arduous task of re-translating the texts of the St. John Passion, the St. Matthew Passion and Haydn's The Creation (characteristically, he has refused to copyright his translations, offering them to anyone who might wish to make use of them).

The combination of Shaw's phenomenal energy and his zeal for communication among people have helped make his national and international tours enormously successful. In addition to his grueling concert schedule (a typical U.S. tour consists of six or seven concerts a week for fourteen weeks), Shaw also miraculously finds time on his tours to talk with amateur choral groups and hold choral "chnics" in the small towns and cities on his itinerary--a service which he performs out of his continuing desire to nurture amateur enthusiasm for good choral singing in all parts of the country.

In 1956, he and his Chorale toured Europe and the Middle East under the auspices of the U.S. International Exchange, giving sixty concerts in twenty-one countries in seventy days. In 1962 the State Department sent the Chorale to Russia for seven weeks as part of a cultural exchange program. Newsweek later reported that the Chorale hael been given much less publicity than the more spectacular "name" artists, and that consequently no one was prepared for the tumultuous reception the group received. Newsweek quoted an American Embassy official as saying, "We are stunned. We knew we were giving the Russians something good, but we never expected this reaction." The Russians, who themselves possess a long-standing and vital tradition of choral music, were overwhelmingly eager to hear the Chorale, especially in religious works (the group performed Bach's Mass in B Minor, an especial favorite, ten times). A member of the American consulate reported that he was offered sixty rubles (about $66) for a concert ticket that originally sold for 3 1/2 rubles. Perhaps Shaw himself was less surprised than anyone at the Russians' approval, since he had always insisted that there was "something naively communicative in chorale" which would be uniquely able to transcend national differences and reveal the qualities of emotion and "heart" invested in the work by the performers.

Since 1956, Shaw's duties with the Cleveland Symphony as associate conductor under George Szell (carried on in addition to periodic stints of recording and touring with the Chorale) have kept him occupied in learning the subtleties of orchestral conducting. This January he will take over the post of Musical Director and Conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, thereby initiating a new era in the musical life of that enlightened Southern city. Shaw once remarked that "Music is a community enterprise, an effort to unite the minds of men." One hopes that the opportunities he will provide for such communal experience will have just such an effect, and that Atlanta can ultimately demonstrate that truth to other communities where men's minds are desperately in need of such a union.

--Nancy McNally