Interview with Christopher Moore

CONTENTS

Introduction

WTH = W. Thomas Huyck
CM = Christopher Moore

6 - Schools Programs

CM: When the Librarian of the Raymond School, who is a long-time member here, Aurelia Moody, came to me one Sunday after church and said "Chris, we've heard this rumor. Is the rumor we have heard true that the choir is willing to work with a school in developing a program?" And I said yes.She said, "Well, we'd like to be considered. Would you come down to Raymond and get acquainted and talk to us?" So this was six months after we'd given that first concert at Raymond, and I went down to meet the principal, had lunch with the faculty in the library -- they all came -- and as we all talked about what might be possible, what interested them and all the rest of it, it became quite clear that this was a go-getting school whose faculty wanted to see this approach tried and we began in February.

WTH: But I'm not quite clear at that point why the Choir here at the Unitarian Church conceived this interest in developing a choir at a school.

CM: Well, we were already aware that we did not have enough top voices -- that if you wanted a top program, you had to have top talent. You could not settle for just what a scene happened to offer you.

WTH: So you had to go beyond just religious education kids. In other words, try to draw in.

CM: Right. The other part of it was that we saw a purpose as an integrated group in an integrated community. We saw that that gave us an opportunity to reach into other more isolated communities and draw kids in who could be comfortable because the milieu they were coming into was integrated. I think we also had some insight at that point to the fact that some of our next best steps might well be with kids whose lives were not saturated with special opportunities. Now I'm not sure just when that insight hit us, but what I'm pointing to, of course, is the fact that in a community like Hyde Park, it's long been true that you don't get all the top talent that's there that you want because some of them are going to choose other activities as their priority, so you have some advantage in building a core if you are the mind blowing, unusual, creative experience in the life of some kids. And that gives you an expected dividend from your altruistic outreach. And that, of course, did turn out to be true...some of the strength of the choir was built from the extraordinary talents of kids whose way into the mainstream became their vocal prowess and the experiences and relationships that it opened up for them, not only in terms of their formal education, but in terms of their social experience, giving concerts, meeting people, touring and all that follows.

WTH: I would imagine that the music programs provided in the schools by the Board of Education are probably not too enriching.

CM: Well, it just was nonexistent in most schools. Most of the schools at the point that we entered the scene in the early 60's did not have music teachers in them below high school level. Most of the music that existed was what the classroom teacher could pull together or resulted from the presence of a classroom teacher with interest who would then, with principal assistance, make a deal with other teachers that that person would do music with a bunch of other classes if other teachers would cover some other subjects areas in exchange. But it was this informal kind of thing. And nobody was really teaching kids how to sing, and that hasn't changed in over 20 years.

WTH: They just don't have enough money to provide music teachers.

CM: They have even less music teachers in the public schools now than they did back in the 60's because budget pressures have wrung out that item.

WTH: Now what arrangements have evolved from the meeting that you had with the Raymond School faculty.

CM: Well, the arrangement was that I would come in with whatever assistance I could get, screen kids and form a chorus and try to train them the same way we were training the kids here in Hyde Park.

WTH: And then you would be paid a salary for doing this?

CM: Initially, I was a volunteer. When we expanded the Raymond program several months later, there was an informal understanding for a salary that I had to push on when the moment came. I can remember going to the president of the Institute for Cultural Development within days of when I was being married -- in fact I think I may have actually picked up the check the morning after I was married. The morning before Judy and I left for Europe on honeymoon because at a certain point I had been promised monies and I needed the promise kept because it was part of what I intended to pay our honeymoon costs with -- that was a little touch and go.

WTH: Now, in October of 1964, there were some articles -- October 26, 1964 -- there was an article in the Chicago Tribune that has pictures of two young men in opera costumes and the headline is "Gateways Kids in Carmen Chorus. Two years ago they hadn't heard of opera." And one of the pictures is of Gilbert Rogers and the other one is Don Hollins -- is that the same Don Hollins that.....

CM: The Casals soloist. And Gilbert was one of the crew who was also a soprano and one of the crew that followed in the fall that became members of our commuter squad and thus of our choir out here.

WTH: How did this...did this article just evolve from some reporter that was covering the Lyric, finding this a human interest story?

CM: I've forgotten whether it evolved from that or somebody who had been close to the Urban Gateways development at Raymond School scene, but there was heavy coverage, there were all kinds of photos taken besides those which made this large part of a page story -- and Lyric cooperated with it, of course, because the photo of the kids on stage in the first act of Carmen is a Lyric Opera photo made during dress rehearsal.

WTH: This article -- did this article have some impact at the Raymond School?

CM: Well, the chief impact it had was the fact that Ben Willis, then Superintendent of Schools, who was very much a do-it- my-way man, learned that we were stretching the limits of what the schools would allow, and he went after the principals.

WTH: In what way?

CM: Well, we were operating programs in schools that his staff had not directly or fully approved of. In the spring of 1965, we had to make the program temporarily an after-school program in connection with the so-called "social center" at Raymond School. It did not work out as well, and the OEO contract specified in-school program and the Board of Education signed the agreement to have it go this way so within some months, that problem was solved, but the Raymond program was stopped in its tracks as an in-school program because I wasn't a Board of Education teacher and there were various little details on which you could hang it if you wanted to hang it, and...

WTH: Let's go on now. Could you just describe sort of how the operation went, and sort of during these years when you had the OEO money supporting the Urban Gateways program. What did the program consist of? How did it operate?

CM: Well, the program consisted of two or three of us doing school training units and doing screenings -- the identifying of talent and then the developing of a program on-site at the school in a series of schools. That's what first related us to the Fiske School, to Tesla, to St.Clara's (which didn't stay operating in the format of those days for that long). We stayed with the Raymond School and then we took on a group of three schools in Lawndale.

WTH: On the West Side?

CM: On the West Side. Johnson School, Howland School, and St. Agatha's. Now, St. Agatha's was a Catholic parish with white priests serving a black community, but white priests who developed quite a reputation and got national awareness at a certain point as they left St. Agatha's for being on the forefront of liberation movements and the development and leadership in the local scene.

WTH: So how many school programs were there during this period of OEO funding?

CM: Well, there was a program at Fiske. There were programs at all three schools that I mentioned in Lawndale, and there were various attempts at St. Clara's and Tesla. I'm not sure whether we had talked to any other schools or not. At a certain point, with things not going quite the way we wanted them to in the Woodlawn situation, we tried combining programs and meeting at First Presbyterian. We had good cooperation with First Presbyterian, but that was the time that the Blackstone Rangers were headquartered there, and some of our parents were scared stiff of it, and, you know, there were various tribulations.

The other thing is from Lawndale it was absolutely clear that we had to bus kids, so we had to transport any kids that were going to get from Lawndale to here, just as we had to transport kids from Raymond, whereas from Woodlawn, there had been the thought that maybe it was close enough so they could get here. Well, the distance is just great enough to be awkward, especially in cold weather. The psychological distance is tremendous. The Midway is not only a barrier for cold wind and getting soaked in the rain, but it's been over the years a cultural barrier as well representing a pile of other differences, so that we never had a completely easy relationship. We had always hoped that in serving Woodlawn we could get significant numbers of kids and we probably did a better job quantitatively in involving kids from Lawndale and from Raymond over the years than we ever did involving kids from Woodlawn.

WTH: Now, I saw a reference in looking through the files of these various school choirs of a scholarship, that you had a program where you had a form letter in there where you offered a scholarship to the Children's Choir. How did that operate?

CM: Well, there were a couple of things involved in this. On the one hand, there was money coming directly to the program here early on to stand behind the kids from inner city communities who were chosen through the Urban Gateways program to come here. The other idea was to be able to say it costs money, but you don't have to pay it. In other words, that on a merit basis the costs involved will be covered, and scholarship was a better strategy interpreting this because it suggested investment in resources, but it also suggested it on an honorable and acceptable format for parents so that it wasn't a handout or otherwise demeaning to people who had a great deal of character but not that much money. And the whole idea was that you don't have to bear the cost for the opportunity -- the opportunity was awarded as a scholarship in honor of the talent potential of your son or daughter.

WTH: We're looking at a memo that's apparently from 1971 that mentions the Ray School Learning Center.

CM: In 1970-71, I went to Sal Vallina, who was then principal of Ray School, with the idea that Ray had just had dumped into its older student body a large number of graduates of Fiske school who were coming across the Midway for seventh and eighth grades. We had been running a choral program at Fiske for some years, and the thought occurred to me that if we offered a music program at Ray for older kids, that we might be able to help bridge a variety of problems for the kids coming in from Fiske to the new situation at Ray.

Sal Vallina found this intriguing, but he had a counter-proposal that he thought would be of greater interest to us. They had a specially funded series of programs called the Gifted Center that was able to draw kids from a dozen schools in Hyde Park and Woodlawn, and with Sal's encouragement, we developed a proposal for a once-a-week major session that would draw from a number of schools talented kids that we had identified at certain grade levels to work together in a project that we would staff at Ray. A special room was equipped for this, and we invited some adjunct staff that was interested in creative educational methods in music to join with us, and for a number of years we ran this program. Many voices that flowered in the Children's Choir concert teams of the years that followed came out of that workshop.

WTH: Now, is this what led to eventually...I know at one point you would go to different schools auditioning kids....

CM: This is what led...we had always gone and auditioned at the Urban Gateways schools at which we had in-school programs, but this, then, took us into all of those schools that were entitled to feed the Learning Center to identify a handful of kids -- 4, 5 or 6 kids of top talent from each school who might be invited to join that workshop group. And that gave us our first contact with the schools. Now, sometime later -- some years later when it would become apparent that the workshop format had a series of limits for us: In the cruelest weeks of the winter, it was a real problem getting kids from schools at a distance to Ray. It became quite clear that many of them would not make it there on their own.

There were years in which it was Bret Harte, Murray, Ray that were the principal components of the workshop. There were a few years when the choir operated a bus -- owned a bus which it got in a special grant in the mid-70's from the Racial Justice Fund of the Unitarian Universalist denomination, which permitted us, with someone on staff to drive that bus, to collect kids at some of the distant schools that we wanted to see involved and to get them to the workshop and back from the workshop and to some after-school sessions of the choir as they became promoted into those programs. But when the original bus wore out and the bussing process was wearing us out, we then experimented with a format of putting school choruses directly into Bret Harte, Murray, Carnegie, etc.

WTH: These were schools in the Urban Gateways program?

CM: Yes. And doing this because it gave us a more effective working relationship and it cut down the transportation logistical headache.

WTH: How would you identify these students? When you went to an elementary school, I take it you had just one time that was given to you to audition. How would you take a room full of little kids -- what were they... third graders or fourth graders?

CM: We aimed these programs at that point, I think, at fourth, fifth and sixth.

WTH: So how would you go about in a limited time identifying these voices?

CM: Well, we'd simply have them sing My Country Tis of Thee, even on la-la-la if they didn't know the words and we'd go on to a round in which they would sing it a cappella and listen to who was strong, clear and able to get through the whole piece.

WTH: You mean the whole class would be singing My Country 'Tis of Thee and you would just walk around the room and ...

CM: The whole class would be singing and we would just walk around the room and identify the couple of top kids, and then we'd come back and, you know, do a little follow-up. If we were going to half a dozen classrooms, then we'd have to bet on the top 3, 4, 5, 6 kids.

WTH: But the voices you would pick would be, what, the ones that would be in tune and the ones that were also strong, or ....

CM: Strong, clear, high potential. Yes, in tune at least as far as they went, and probably voices that were able to cover not only that piece, but other things besides. And sometimes we'd take a few minutes with just a couple of kids and do a follow-up with a piano, if possible, and do a more elaborate screening of the total range of the voice and what was going on.

Now, it will move us ahead of our story, but I think that two other developments in this whole program that are worth noting and one or two of them have just happened in the last couple of years. But at a certain point, the University of Chicago developed a particular interest in Murray School and Shoesmith School, both schools that they wished to be more effective and more highly regarded in their communities because it would assist the University in its effort to gain graduate students with families and younger faculty, and they had in mind arts enrichment experiences. We got wind of the idea, and strongly suggested to the university...

WTH: Now approximately when was this?

CM: This was the later '70's. We strongly suggested to the University that if they were going to move in that direction, especially if they were going to offer anything in music, that singing was a natural, but that it would be pathetic and frustrating to just have a fun program in a given school that didn't qualify kids for the choir, with the choir sitting here in the middle of the neighborhood. And we were persuasive enough in our arguments and impressive enough in our interest in being a part of whatever the University did, so that at the point that we first moved the program into Murray and Shoesmith, it was with the University's financial backing, and we subsequently found ways of adding a few more of the schools that had been music workshop schools to that kind of approach. Shoesmith had been of interest to us because we had had some of the least effective results in getting the kids from Shoesmith to the Ray workshop, but there had been an increasing level of impressive talent showing at Shoesmith.

Now, after my 20th anniversary sabbatical, I came back to work with a program that Ray School parents and faculty invited me to consider which was developing an all-school program, an all inclusive program for the students at Ray School. And this required that we use some formats that had not been what the choir was doing, although I did screen the voices at Ray for the first couple of years to identify the kids who most needed help -- to identify where the top talent was that could provide, with some special coaching, the encouragement for the rest of the students. After that program had been running for a season and a half and had succeeded in involving the whole school -- all the fourth graders, all the third graders, all the fifth graders....I then had a discussion with the Shoesmith faculty about whether they would agree to certain modest terms that included the teachers coming and participating -- being with their classes and not doing other work -- to try a Ray School-like program at Shoesmith.

WTH: Now, who was paying for your time at Shoesmith?

CM: Well, the University of Chicago still has a supporting grant in the Shoesmith situation, and the Chicago Office of Fine Arts...

WTH: That's the City of Chicago?

CM: Right....is supporting the present Dumas program. And the Dumas PTA is also supporting it. So the Dumas program we are attempting to have pay for itself.