A choir legend's notable conduct

By Martha Groves

June 20, 2009 12 AM PT

“Basses, you’re all over the place! Tenors, you’re too bright! Altos, I’m hearing foreign matter. Sopranos, stop wobbling. I don’t want this to sound like Podunk!”

For 40 years as choirmaster of St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Westwood, James Vail has exhorted his vocalists, often in a vexed high-pitched tone accompanied by loud piano-pounding, to mind their sharps and flats.

The USC professor emeritus has spared no section over the decades but has generally reserved his most caustic commentary for the beleaguered basses. (“Somebody is singing ‘Lorrrrd’ instead of ‘Lawd’!”)

His scoldings -- and genuine if less frequent words of praise -- have all been in pursuit of the unattainable: flawless music-making.

Vail’s many fans (including me, an alto in his choir the last four years) would argue he has come awfully close. Under his emphatic baton, choruses made up primarily of amateurs and handpicked orchestral ensembles have performed 125 major works, many of them several times, and myriad motets, anthems and masses. Call him elitist, and many do, but Vail cannot abide Christian “praise bands” and their amp-driven religious pop.

The concert ahead looms large. It will be Vail’s last at St. Alban’s because he has decided that, at age 80, it is time to go. Haydn’s “Creation” and Brahms’ “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place” must be just so. Let no mezzo mangle the high A’s, no baritone bleat on a rest. Vail is feeling the pressure, and that means his choristers are too.

Podunk will not do.

“Basses, you’re picking any old pitch out of the air!”

In an era when people sit passively listening to music, Vail has persuaded hundreds of amateur disciples -- many of them elderly -- to make music. Shunning the spotlight, and without benefit of a lavishly equipped performance hall, he has had a profound effect on the city’s choral and sacred music.

Vail -- lean and white-haired, with gold-rimmed spectacles -- is twice the age he was in 1969 when he walked through the doors of St. Alban’s.

Woodstock, the rollicking festival in upstate New York, had just reshaped the music scene. Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon. Protests against the Vietnam War were heating up.

Vail accepted the job after being assured that he could put on an annual concert series, as he had at his previous church, St. John’s Episcopal (now St. John’s Pro-Cathedral). It was a pioneering concept, one that many churches have copied.

Many choristers followed Vail from St. John’s, near downtown Los Angeles. One was baritone Scott Rasmussen, a retired pathologist who four decades ago met and married Nina Hinson, Vail’s alto soloist.

“When I met Jim, my whole exposure to music went up 10 or 11 notches,” Rasmussen said. “Very few people, amateur or professional, get to do as much and as varied music as we did at St. Alban’s, from Gregorian chant through Morten Lauridsen.”

As for Vail’s storied temperament, Rasmussen recalled the grandfather episode of them all: the evening many years ago at St. John’s when Vail grew so distraught over the choir’s ragged rendition of Bach’s Mass in B Minor that he banged down the piano cover and sputtered: “That’s it. I’m canceling the performance.”

He went to his office and slammed the door, emerging much calmer a few minutes later to find a lone singer: his wife, soprano Barbara Vail. “Where did everybody go?” he asked. A couple of days later, each member received a letter of apology.

“I see the tops of people’s heads. This I cannot tolerate!” Translation: If your noses are buried in your music, you can’t stay with the conductor’s stick!

Born in Los Angeles in 1929, Vail had a precocious passion for music that was nurtured at the First Baptist Church of Los Angeles, congregation with a fine choir and an impressive four-manual organ. As a child, he had a recurring dream that the family piano had morphed into an organ.

Lourene Vail, his 90-year-old sister, vividly recalls the family’s cross-country drive in 1933 to visit relatives in Pennsylvania. Fourteen at the time and the oldest of four children, Lourene kept the trip diary.

“Jimmy,” 4, the youngest, would be on his knees in the back seat of their Nash sedan, running his hands across a shelf under the back window, pretending it was an organ.

The family -- a musical lot -- stopped at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City to hear an organ concert, but ushers told Jimmy he was too young. His brother Herbert stayed outside with him, Lourene says, “and we could hear Jimmy crying even from inside because he wasn’t allowed to go in and hear that organ.”

His sister became Vail’s first piano teacher, but he soon surpassed her. “We had a basement in Glendale, and he had a church down there,” she says. “He would preach a sermon and then play piano and pretend he was directing a choir.”

When Vail was a high school senior, First Baptist hired organist John Burke, who began giving him free lessons. Alexander McCurdy, a renowned organist with whom Burke had studied, granted Vail an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Like others at the prestigious school, Vail attended on a full scholarship.

To cover room and board, Vail led the choir at St. Elisabeth’s Episcopal Church in South Philadelphia, where the young Baptist was introduced to “sky-high” church ceremony: bells, confessionals and billows of incense.

After graduating in 1951, Vail considered becoming a minister but was drafted and sent to Ft. Eustis, Va., where he assisted Southern Baptist chaplains.

“I longed for the Episcopal Church,” he says. On his first leave, he returned to St. Elisabeth and was privately confirmed by a bishop.

After his Army stint, he went to USC for both his master’s degree and his DMA, or doctor of musical arts. In 1961, USC invited him to teach, and he stayed for 38 years. During his long tenure, he mentored many students who went on to acclaim.

One was Lauridsen, whose choral music is widely performed and who received the 2007 National Medal of Arts. While a student, Lauridsen showed Vail his first choral composition and stood by as Vail examined the score. “We’re going to take it on our concert tour, and you are going to conduct it,” Lauridsen recalls him saying.

“It was very generous of him,” Lauridsen says. “I always remind him that he’s the one who started the ball rolling.”

“Don’t just sit there with your faces hanging out. Brahms should be more subdued, like nymphs jumping around.”

Each rehearsal becomes a tutorial in technique and diction, as if professor Vail were presiding over his classroom at USC’s Thornton School of Music, where he headed the choral and sacred music department for 15 years.

He is a stickler for schwas (the “uh” vowel sound in many lightly pronounced syllables, like the “o” in harmony) and the “Daniel sitteth” rule (if “ew” or “u” is preceded by any of the consonants in the phrase “Daniel sitteth,” it should almost always be pronounced “yoo,” as in “illumined”).

At one session, Vail, dressed in his characteristic jeans and polo shirt, steals precious moments to read from “Dear People . . . Robert Shaw,” a biography of the late choral master for whom Vail occasionally played the organ at rehearsals and performances.

“We’ve worked hard on musical disciplines,” Vail begins, reading words that might just as well have been his own. “They aren’t good enough. They never are. But all that we have accomplished is worth nothing at all unless it releases the spirit to sing and shout, to laugh and cry, or pray the primitive prayer. . . . If hearts hymn, then the sound is illumined. . . . The life of music is reborn at every singing . . . “

Overcome, he passes the page to an alto, who finishes:

”. . . Of all the arts, music is the most linked with community of expression. This meaning of music is somehow most open to the amateur musician, and nowhere does it find its expression so fully as among people who sing together.”

Later, Vail says: “This is what we do. This is what I’ve done for 62 years. It’s my life. I choked up because I suddenly thought I wouldn’t be doing this much longer.”

“Sopranos, if you can’t sing it floaty, don’t sing it!”

Vail’s conducting days almost ended prematurely. One afternoon in 1976, feeling ill, he drove to the hospital, where he suffered a massive coronary. When he came to, he saw the Rev. Norman Ishizaki, then the rector of St. Alban’s, making the sign of the cross over him.

“Where the hell am I?” Vail said. “I can’t stay here. I’ve got a concert on Sunday.”

Today, he recites Scripture from memory, knows the liturgy better than many priests and walks with a youthful bounce. He plans every concert and all the Sunday hymns and anthems, as well as the toccatas and fugues he executes with seasoned flair.

“If we don’t get that right, basses, it’s just not going to be any good!”

As Vail steps into the St. Alban’s sanctuary on June 7, more than 300 guests rise as one -- a standing ovation before a single note has been sung or played.

This is the crowning moment of a six-decade career, during which he received honors and conducted his choirs in cathedrals and abbeys throughout Europe.

For the program, Vail has picked sacred and secular gems. Samuel Barber’s haunting “Adagio for Strings” moves people to tears. Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Linden Lea” enchants them. Hearts hymn, evoking thunderous applause and shouts of “Bravo!” for the 58 vocalists and 26 instrumentalists -- but mostly, they know, for their esteemed conductor.

The next day, Vail is smiling broadly.

“I think it went beautifully,” he says. “The choir and orchestra finally came together in a wonderful way.

“It was not perfect,” he adds. “Nothing ever is.”

On Sunday, Vail’s last at the console of the St. Alban’s Aeolian-Skinner organ, he will perform Bach and Messiaen. “It’s a bittersweet feeling,” he says. “But I’m looking forward to playing, as I always do.”

martha.groves@latimes.com

latimes.com/columnone

A video of choirmaster James Vail in action is available online, along with previous Column One articles.