Interview with Christopher Moore

CONTENTS

Introduction

WTH = W. Thomas Huyck
CM = Christopher Moore

10 - Unitarian Hymnbook Commission & Contemporary Composers

WTH: Your work with the Children's Choir here led you to become involved in the denomination as a whole and teaching or explaining or whatever what you're doing here.

CM: Right. And we created the Simple Gifts booklet with some anthem materials and a lot of rounds, both for home consumption and for making some of the materials that we found could work and did work, more widely available.

WTH: Was that like both words and music?

CM: Yes.

WTH: And it was published here?

CM: It was published by the Cooperative Recreation Service, Lynn Verbow in Delaware, Ohio, that has subsequently been bought out and become World Around Songs in Burnsville, North Carolina. I continued with the Commission's work during the several years that led to the publication of Hymns For The Celebration of Life in 1964. Now, the importance of this to the Choir was that not only could I feed into that Commission anything which I had discovered and materials which First Church had developed for congregational use, but I was the beneficiary of all the research work that the Commission was doing, and it was our children's choir that tried out all or much of the new material. All of the new material that was directly approachable by children, and it gave us a diet of Robert Frost, Archibald MacLeish, Lewis Untermeyer, Ridgely Torrance, Kenneth Patton.

WTH: Well now, were those contemporary composers?

CM: These were not composers. These were poets. The settings were traditional hymn tunes that we'd found or new material by our composers, most especially Robert Saunders and Henry Duram Clark.

WTH: I was noting here a notation of Gilman Collier in the early 1960's having written a piece on the choir.

CM: The first time that the choir worked with a composer was, I think, our first telecast with the Chicago Area Council of Unitarian Churches, because Norman Curtis shared with us a couple of settings he had made of William Blake's Songs of Innocence. And we used those as a moment of sharing with the camera singing with a composer dealing with the choir on his own work. So that was the first encounter of this sort.

Now Gil Collier and I had been classmates at Harvard, and Gil had a tremendous influence on my musical awareness. And we kind of got back together in the early 1960's. He was a composer/gentleman/musician in his home territory of the Asbury Park area -- Oakhurst, New Jersey. But at a certain point, Gil and I re-established contact. Gil came out to visit and heard the choir, and at that point in February of 1963, we received a setting of the 23rd Psalm as a valentine. It was a piece in four parts, so we really had to work to perform it because we were just moving into four-part singing...We could do Give Me Jesus and Lonesome Valley and other simple things.

We had already started work on the Scarlatti Exultate Deo, but it was some time before we ever mastered the whole motet and in the midst of having died in preparation, Gil sent us this four-part setting with the sopranos and altos divided of Psalm 23. And we learned it, performed it and then, a year later, since it became a part of our sort of semi-permanent repertoire when we once learned it, he got to hear it because it was performed as part of the prelude music for my wedding. Since he was best man, he got to hear it live, and that's when he started in with the kids, working out some ideas he had for another piece.

WTH: Oh, I see. He brought a piece he was working on....

CM: He brought an idea he was working on....as a matter of fact he got together with some of the kids around the edges of the wedding activities, saying to them, "Is it 'Sing Unto The Lord A New Song?' 'Sing unto the Lord a new Song?" Playing with the different word rhythms. The piece that he created used both word rhythms when he finally put it together, and alternated them in certain ways. It made an interesting challenge to the kids, but he came out the following Christmas and met with the kids, presenting us with Psalm 96 and personally introduced it at the first rehearsal. I remember that [choir member] David Ashenhurst looked up at Gil in the midst of that and said, "You think you've got us beat this time, eh?"

WTH: It was a difficult piece?

CM: It was a very difficult piece. It became the most difficult piece that we mastered at that point, and one of the reasons that we mastered it was, I swear, that it had been written for us and we knew the composer and we were going to prove that it was doable. We also, in this same period, developed a relationship with Dan Pinkham.

Daniel Pinkham had been invited by the choir festival that Frances Wood had a hand in founding decades before -- the New England area choir festival -- to write a piece for them, and he wrote a Te Deum. We actually gave the premiere performance of the Te Deum here. It was a very demanding piece. The choir festival for which it was written had a heck of a time with it. But we put it into repertoire and had a great time with it. That led to our commissioning two pieces -- further work from Gilman Collier -- that completed a series that we call the Four Chicago Songs for which, if you consider this, a kind of choral symphony of song settings. Psalm 23 is the third movement. And then Psalm 96, which is the second one, which he wrote, is the first movement. And then there are two other psalm settings that are the second and fourth movements if one is to do the complete group. But we also issued a commission to Daniel Pinkham because we were intrigued by the texture of the Te Deum and we had found useful and approachable a group of pieces called Five Canzonets which were little a cappella duets on various playful secular text -- like "I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear but a golden nutmeg....something, something and a golden pear." And the fifth of those was the William Blake "Sound the flute, now it's mute, bridge delight, day and night," one of the Songs of Innocence. We wanted some sacred texts that were offbeat, that weren't doctrinal, that weren't christian with a capital "C" because of our ecumenicity of membership and audiences, and he did four or five pieces from some of the most traditional biblical books like the Song of Solomon, and there was a group of pieces Listen to Me, and we perform some of those items still. They are like the Canzonets -- two-part a cappella. Very ingenious. An utter delight.

It was 1969 before Dan Pinkham got to hear the choir live when we went to Boston that summer for the General Assembly. We arranged to get the choir together with Dan Pinkham so he could hear some of his music as sung by us that he'd written for us. It was some years later that James Unger, who was a student at the University of Chicago and an independent composer because his field became Japanese language and literature, served with us for a number of years as an accompanist.

WTH: There was a Tom Mboya, the African politician, was here?

CM: Well, the Tom Mboya visit was in the spring of 1959, and there was a dinner for him downtown for which we sang and for which Ella Jenkins sang. And that led the following year to some conversations between Ella Jenkins and myself and that resulted in a group of our kids being the voices that Ella Jenkins used on a recording in June 1961. And then there have been a series of times since, the most recent of which was just a couple of years ago when our workshop experiment that I was directing made a record with Ella Jenkins.

WTH: Now, when they sang with Ella Jenkins, did she prepare them or did you?

CM: We worked together. It was her material. The other two threads that we should pick up here in connection with the Hymn Book Commission's work, which brought me in close colleague teamwork with Vincent Silliman, a fellow member of the Commission who at that time was Minister of the Unitarian Church in Beverly to the south of us, resulted also, coming out of our telecast work for the Chicago Area Council of Churches, in creating a festival format that children's choirs from other Unitarian Universalist churches in greater Chicago could join in. Kids came in from Rockford even. And for a few years, we hosted these festivals. We had the first one, I believe, here, and the second one Evanston physically hosted.

WTH: These would be festivals in connection with the church conference?

CM: No. These were freestanding events to which people came, starting with the parents and friends of all the different kids of all the different groups that were in it, but they became major Chicago area events for the Unitarians. But I knew musically what I wanted -- what Vincent and I did together was to create a service, a celebration -- one of them, I remember, was called "Seasons of the Heart," that would allow the use of music not in a concert, but in a kind of concert service that was in its total unity saying something. So there would be spoken items, there would be readings, if you will, spoken and sung, and participation by the audiences' congregation, but the key to this was the enthusiasm that Vincent Silliman and I shared for this kind of gathering, this kind of celebration, and we simply chose what I felt children could sing that would be a good experience for them and that would fit together, but the teamwork was extremely important because much of what we did and did best over the years involved teamwork with others.

Eleanor Lewis and I together, with the help of others, but with a lot of time spent together writing, arguing, talking about it, created the Christmas Vespers. We recreated, or reconceived or refined Flower Communion. And we created an early morning service for the Church school and their families at Easter...because we wanted a celebration that was more universal than some of the Church services at 11:00 were on Easter morning for our families to share, and these special services here and the area festivals were of a piece in the way they were conceived and each of them required a certain human teamwork, in other words they did not come out of me --they came out of me working with others to develop something that would say something to the kids who participated, to the adults who were there. And this required a kind of thinking out loud together, whether it was with Eleanor and others in this Church, or with Vincent, particularly, in the area. And the other event that should be linked into this was the singing of the choir at the time the General Assembly first came to Chicago -- the national meetings of the Unitarian Universalist movement. We had a curious situation develop.

ORIGIN OF SPRING GALA CONCERT

WTH: And that was about when?

CM: About 1961. It was just before we recorded with Ella Jenkins. The curiosity was that we were invited to provide music for at least one occasion, and we were also invited to do a kind of plenary session singing report for the Hymn Book Commission. That is, to introduce, to be present for, lead the singing of some of the new materials that were headed for the hymn book that was officially introduced in published form in 1964. But one other thing happened -- our General Assembly appearances were limited in time scope and/or in materials, the Hymn Book Commission items being a unison sharing, and we were not able to get from the planning committee any kind of go ahead to do anything that would let people see the choir in its own terms. So what we did was to organize the first of the gala concerts -- what became the first of the gala concerts -- a tradition that we slowly, steadily built on over the years; that is, on a certain night, with publicity given at General Assembly to those attending, we held a concert evening that people could come to and see our program in public performance doing its own thing its own way. People had to get from what is now, I believe, the Radisson -- what used to be a Sheraton up by the Tribune tower, which was where the assembly was being held.

WTH: Where was the concert?

CM: The concert was in our own nave down here at 57th Street. And some people did come -- not an enormous number -- but some people did come. But that, I think, if you would trace it, would turn out to be the first gala concert -- the first spring concert at home. But it had as its special purpose providing an opportunity for those who were interested enough in what we were doing who were here for the General Assembly to come down and hear us as we were in our own terms, not just hear us sweetly singing in unison some of the lovely material that the Hymn Book Commission had created.