Singing the Praises of Robert Shaw

In the concert hall, Robert Shaw keeps company with the loftiest creations of Western culture. The Brahms Requiem, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Handel’s “Messiah,” to name a few. But, off the podium, the dean of American choral conductors and principal guest conductor of the San Diego Symphony sports a sense of humor that would have the raised the eyebrows of his Protestant minister father and grandfather.

“I’ve often thought it was as difficult to be a professional about music as it would be to be professional about sex,” Shaw said with a hearty laugh. He was praising the spirit of

the volunteer singers who populate the many symphonic choruses he conducts when performing the great choral-orchestral works that have become his specialty.

“It’s terribly important to retain that amateur spirit, because the root of ‘amateur’ means to love what you are doing. The great men like (pianist Rudolf) Serkin were amateur right to the moment of their death, the fact that they made significant money and attracted high prices notwithstanding. It only gave them more money to pour into things such as the Marlboro Music Festival and to help other people. Casals was the same way,” he said, referring to cellist Pablo Casals.

Shaw’s love of music and conducting prowess will be saluted Sunday when he is celebrated at the 1991 Kennedy Center Honors, a ceremony hosted by Walter Cronkite at the Washington music center. Before the awards ceremony, which will be broadcast Dec. 26 on CBS television, Shaw and the other honorees--singer Roy Acuff, musical comedy writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green, dancers Fayard and Harold Nicholas, and actor Gregory Peck--will be feted at a White House reception.

“I have been on the Kennedy Center Honors nominating panel several times,” Shaw said. “For several years I put up (American composer) William Schuman’s name. Finally, he was given an award two years ago.”

Although honorees traditionally are not told who proposed their names, their families collaborate with the Kennedy Center to provide career memorabilia to use in the award ceremony.

“The Kennedy Center Awards has been in touch with my wife to find early film clips of me with Toscanini, when we did some of those operas together. They were very early telecasts. I know the clips are still around, because I saw some in Paris a few months back.”

For the last 50 years, Shaw has defined choral directing in this country. In 1941 he founded his first choral organization, the Collegiate Chorale, in New York. Two years later the National Assn. of Composers and Conductors cited him as America’s greatest choral conductor.

The Robert Shaw Chorale, which he organized in 1948 and directed for 20 years, set the standard for choral excellence here and abroad in the 1950s, which arguably was the golden age of the professional touring choir. Shaw fondly recalled those heady days before he turned his efforts to symphony conducting, first in Cleveland and then in Atlanta, where he was music director for 21 years until his retirement in 1989.

“We certainly don’t have those high-profile professional choral groups any more. When I listen to some of my earlier records--which I do when Telarc wants me to re-record some of the things we used to do then--I’m astounded at the quality of the vocal sound, which seems to me to be remarkable. I know that we don’t have in Atlanta that kind of vocal bloom.

“In the Chorale’s early days, New York was a hungry town. People were coming to New York to seek their fortune. They would rather starve and sing in the Robert Shaw Chorale than sweat and take a job in a laundry someplace. So we got a wonderful young talent then.”

But Shaw has no time to wallow in reveries about the good old days of choral music. Noting the high level of musical accomplishment today’s choirs display, Shaw praised a Texas all-state choir that he recently conducted.

“They were singing Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and the Poulenc a cappella Mass in G Major, pieces that we thought were almost impossible for professionals when I first hit New York in 1939. And the Texas singers were singing this music with uncanny natural ease.”

However, two trends in education worry the 75-year-old conductor when he contemplates the future of choral music in America.

“First of all, the arts have certainly been punished in the public schools; that is, they have been pushed aside from the general curriculum. The other thing that has happened, notably in California, is this (interpretation of) the separation of church from state that says nobody is allowed to sing anything that has a Latin text or that has any religious connotation. No matter what you think of Christianity, it has been the custodian for over 1,000 years of most of the fine ideas of our civilization. If you isolate yourself from (the motet) ‘O Vos Omnes’ and all of the great choral music of Palestrina, you’re just not educated any more.”

Shaw sees the plethora of volunteer choirs, the ubiquitous church choir as well as civic choral ensembles, as a significant cultural barometer.

“I’m not sure that the history of a culture is going to be established by two or three supreme professional organizations that thrive in the major population centers. It exists in the hands of the people who sing in church choirs and in the schools. The cultural mettle of a people depends not upon the isolated professional examples, but on what the common people do with their time, what books they read, what music they sing.