The Dale Warland Singers have helped shape choral music in the United States for more than three decades, so why is the chorus disbanding?
By JOHN FLEMING
Published March 2, 2004
Describing the sound of a chorus is a loose game, but Dale Warland gave it a try the other day over the phone from his home in St. Paul, Minn. Here's what he said he hears from his conductor's podium in front of the Dale Warland Singers.
"I just love pure, free singing, always combined with being as musical as possible. So I hear free singing and singers being extremely musical - and being very fussy about the details."
Another, more analytical description comes from Timothy Sawyer, who sang under Warland and is now director of choral activities at Northwestern College in St. Paul.
"He has a signature sound and, to my ears, it includes a sinewy legato, purity of tone and vowel, an ease of enunciation and naturalness of delivery, and a fierce attention to detail in the rehearsal process," Sawyer said in a booklet paying tribute to Warland, published by the McKnight Foundation.
However it is described, the Dale Warland sound has been an important influence on U.S. choral music for more than 30 years. The choir has made 26 recordings and commissioned an astounding 260 works from composers such as Dominick Argento, Stephen Paulus, Libby Larsen, Aaron J. Kernis and more.
Now, in a somewhat surprising move, not only is Warland stepping down as music director of the 40-voice professional chorus, but the group also is disbanding after giving one last concert at Minneapolis' Orchestra Hall, home of the Minnesota Orchestra, at the end of May.
The chorus is going out at the top of its form, having sold more tickets, released more recordings and done more touring in recent years than at any time in its history. Its CD of Argento's Walden Pond was nominated for a Grammy Award this year.
"I think artistically we're at our peak right now," Warland said. "The board just decided there's nothing wrong with ending when you're ahead. It's such a challenge to sustain nonprofit arts organizations anyway, and to rev up and get a new conductor and build a new reputation would be difficult."
Tampa Bay listeners have a chance to hear the chorus Wednesday and Thursday. Warland and his singers, in residence at the University of South Florida, also are holding a master class, open rehearsal and conducting workshop today through Thursday on the Tampa campus.
Warland, 71, emphasizes that he is far from retiring. "I feel very young, but I know the clock is ticking, and there are certain things I want to do personally before it's too late," he said.
He has mixed feelings about the winding down of his choir, which he founded in 1972, when he was director of choral activities at Macalester College in St. Paul.
"The big thing is that I'm giving up my instrument, but I'm also giving up the pressures of running an organization, which is a seven-day-a-week job," he said.
"Certainly I don't want to stop conducting, so guest conducting will be a key part of my life. But it's not quite the same when you don't have your own choir. I hope to be able to do more composition as well as teach and conduct, and a few other things that normal people do, like go to a movie or read a book."
Choral singing in the United States is mostly an amateur pursuit. The Warland Singers are the rare group whose members are paid. They have rehearsals two nights a week and usually several performances a month.
"It's not a full-time job for the singers, but the demands are almost full-time with the amount of music that we have to learn," Warland said.
Though the group includes a number of freelance professional singers, most members hold other jobs. The chorus includes many school and church choir directors in the Twin Cities. Everyone auditions yearly.
The only full-time professional choirs in this country are Chanticleer, a male chorus in San Francisco; the Metropolitan Opera chorus in New York and the military choruses.
Even the famous groups of yesteryear with whom the Warland Singers are frequently compared - the choruses of Robert Shaw, Roger Wagner and Norman Luboff - were part-time. "They would get their choirs together to go on the road and for recording projects; they didn't exist from day to day," Warland said.
Aficionados savor the contrast in the sounds of these choirs, but Warland is too much the practitioner to get caught up in stylistic comparisons with other conductors.
"We all have something in our inner ear that drives us to say and show certain things in order to get certain results," he said. "I think most people could tell right away the difference in sound between Shaw and the Dale Warland Singers or Wagner and the Dale Warland Singers."
Warland, who grew up on an Iowa farm, conceded that his singers do reflect a certain sense of place, with many coming from the Scandinavian culture of the upper Midwest.
"We don't have the problem of unifying our approach," he said. "I suppose our pronunciation and way of singing comes out of the singing tradition in the Midwest, the Scandinavian tradition of knowing the importance of singing. We would sound quite different from a choir from the South."
Warland laments that choral singing has never been fully accepted as a major art form in the United States, even though a 1997 National Endowment for the Arts survey showed that one in 10 people sang in a choir.
"That's about 20-million Americans. There's no other activity in or out of the arts that even comes close to that. But the curious things is . . . guess what's No. 2, according to this survey? It's quilting. There are 14-million quilters!"
Warland chortles at the thought of all those quilters. He also acknowledges that choral singing's very ubiquity has hurt his cause. "That's been a good thing and a bad thing, because people think, well, anybody can sing, so why pay for it?"
He has conducted choirs all over the world, and the situation is much different in other countries.
"This country is still not where it should be in terms of the repertoire or the level of singing when you compare what goes on in other countries," he said.
"In Korea, for instance, they must have at least 20 full-time professional choirs, and that's a small country compared to the United States. Well, that seeps down and inspires the young people. We just don't have that in this country. It's such a struggle to do something that's so wonderful and can be such a great influence on young people, but we go for hockey and basketball and other things here."
Warland's proudest achievement is the new music his chorus has performed.
"It was pretty lonely at the beginning, because I had very small audiences when we did just 20th century music," he said. "Commissioning new things was even more risky. But now every chorus in the country, practically, is commissioning, so I feel very proud that we, as an organization, broke that barrier of the fear of hearing music of our time. People don't stay away now like they used to."
Still, despite all the new choral music of recent years, Warland remains devoted to the American classics from earlier generations by Charles Ives, Irving Fine, Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson and William Schuman.
"There is certainly more composition going on for choral music, but the percentage of the works that is really top notch is small," he said.
Warland's programs this week are an eclectic mix ranging from contemporary works by Paulus, Eric Whitacre and John Rutter to Hanson's A Prayer of the Middle Ages to Russian music to She'll Be 'Comin' Round the Mountain. Perhaps the centerpiece of the program is Herbert Howells' Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing, a memorial to John F. Kennedy.
"Everything Howells does is magic because he has the combination of high technical skill and spirituality," Warland said.
Is the best choral music inevitably spiritual?
"Yes, because it's so personal," he answered without a pause. "That doesn't mean it has to be a religious text. The musical craftsmanship has to be good, first of all, but so much depends on the composer, what kind of person they are. They instinctively write of spirituality in the music."
PREVIEW: The Dale Warland Singers perform at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, First Presbyterian Church, 701 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg; (727) 822-2031, ext. 31. Also at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, University of South Florida Theatre 1, 4202 E Fowler Ave., Tampa; (813) 974-2323. $20, $10 seniors, $5 students. For information on a master class, open rehearsal and conducting workshop with Warland at USF, call (813) 974-0444.
