She’s Got the Whole World in Her Hands

When Carolyn Wilkinson conducts Mozart’s “Requiem” on Good Friday, she will be drawing on both religious faith and musical scholarship to make the performance a transcendent experience for her audience.

“Bach said that nothing reaches the heart of God as much as music. When music does that, it becomes a much bigger experience than just a performance, than just entertainment,” said Wilkinson, 44, minister of worship and music at Lake Hills Community Church in Laguna Hills.

“That’s where a lot of churches have dropped the ball a little bit. We’ve gotten a little too much into the realm of entertainment.”

It was nearly a decade ago that Wilkinson decided she could not take her music to a higher spiritual level without additional university studies. She had played piano and sung professionally for about 15 years, in public performances and recording sessions. She had also worked as a choir and music director at several churches, witnessing the power of music to inspire and deepen religious faith.

As a single mom with three children, it took a leap of faith for her to enroll in graduate school. Along with the responsibility of parenting, there was the practical necessity of earning a living and keeping up with the bills. But music had been a large part of Wilkinson’s faith since age 11, when she played piano for Calvary Baptist Church in Los Gatos, the Northern California city where she was raised.

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After a rigorous audition in 1988, she was accepted into UCI’s master of fine arts program in conducting, even though her previous academic degrees were not in music.

“It was just brutal and I didn’t have all the academic background that everybody else had,” she said. “It was a step of faith. I felt like this was a door that God was opening and if he wanted me to finish this, he’d help me do it. Twelve people started in my class and only two of us finished.”

Backed by scholarship funds, she went on to earn a doctorate in conducting from Claremont Graduate School while working as director of music at Capistrano Valley Christian Schools. She graduated in 1994 and her doctoral dissertation was on Handel’s “Messiah.”

“I can’t tell you the amount of hours I spent just studying Handel’s own handwriting to determine what he really put in his original score. With Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ the edition that most people are familiar with is just jammed full of mistakes because it’s so old. But people are used to it.

“There are so many different copies of it floating around. Handel used different versions of it and other people would also copy it so that they could use it in their own churches. So here’s some guy in New York who’s got 14,000 scores he could look at, but no access to the original score, which is in the British Museum.

“It’s very easy to get mistakes into scores. You really have to go back to the source, but that’s what most people don’t want to do, because it takes a lot of time.”

This Friday, Wilkinson will conduct the 60-member Lake Hills Chancel Choir and accompanying orchestra in an evening performance of Mozart’s “Requiem.” Her choir has rehearsed for a year, using a version of the work created by Richard Maunder in 1988 while a fellow at Christ College in Oxford, England.

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“It is controversial. The thing about ‘Requiem’ is that Mozart didn’t finish it,” Wilkinson said, explaining that scholars are still debating how much of it was the work of his pupil, Franz Xaver Sussmayr, who completed the score after Mozart’s death. Numerous copies of the score, with conceivably numerous errors, were created and sold by amateur musician Count Franz Walsegg, the man who secretly commissioned the work.

“The amount of work in the ‘Requiem’ that is Mozart’s is still unclear. What Richard Maunder did is take the entire score and determine which pieces Sussmayr did, by analyzing Mozart’s known work.

“About 25 years ago, 12 measures of an ‘Amen’ were found in some old manuscripts of Mozart’s. So, Maunder completed that, based on the themes in the fugue by Mozart that were written down. That’s included in this work and it’s not in the edition that most of us are probably familiar with. But I do believe that it’s more thoroughly Mozart.”

Contrary to some of the popular depictions of Mozart at the time he was composing the “Requiem,” Wilkinson believes he was not in the depths of despair.

“There is no indication, historically, that Mozart was anything but happy at that point in his life,” she said. “The whole thing in the movie [‘Amadeus’] was that he was writing it for his own funeral, but there’s no historical evidence that he ever felt that way about that work.

“The ‘Requiem’ is incredibly powerful. It talks about God delivering us from hell, and you can hear it in the music, that agitation, that passion. He comes across in the movie as being this heartless, flippant kind of guy who doesn’t care about anybody. But when I read Mozart’s letters, I can see an abiding faith in God that was very real. You can hear it in the music.”

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Profile: Carolyn Wilkinson

Age: 44

Hometown: Los Gatos, Calif.

Residence: Laguna Niguel

Family: Three teenage children

Education: Bachelor’s degree in speech pathology and biology, master’s in audiology, both from Southern Methodist University in Texas; master of fine arts in conducting from UCI; doctorate in conducting from Claremont Graduate School

Background: Played piano at church and sang with a youth choir during elementary and high school years; summer choir director, Cavalry Baptist Church, Los Gatos; music director, Faith Presbyterian Church, Stuart, Fla.; working singer performing at special engagements and recording sessions in Southern California; music director, Pacific Bible Church, Dana Point; director of Coast Hills Camerata, Coast Hills Church, formerly in Dana Point; music director, Capistrano Valley Christian Schools; adjunct professor of music, Loma Linda University; minister of worship and music, Lake Hills Community Church, Laguna Hills, since 1992

On music and inspiration: “When we do music that’s got real depth and real historical continuity, we’re touching people at a level that they may not have known existed in themselves. That’s what music is supposed to do.”

Source: Carolyn Wilkinson; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times