"What is liberal arts?" Having been trained as a musician in what were essentially conservatory programs at Duquesne University, Southern Methodist University, and Catholic University of America, I found teaching at Gonzaga, a Catholic, Jesuit, and liberal arts university in Spokane, an entirely new adventure. The eleven years I've been there have been a gradual process of discovering how each of these labels affects my work. "Catholic" and "Jesuit" were, at first, easy enough, but "liberal arts" was something very new. But my first years at Gonzaga taught me that all these labels required exploration and redefining.
Prof. Edward Schaefer directs choral activities at Gonzaga University in Spokane and chairs the music department. He's found that the Jesuit, Catholic, and liberal-arts atmosphere at Gonzaga has molded his sense of what it means to be an educator.
That first year the choir had 23 students, several of them only because of some rather aggressive encouragement on my part. My goal was to revitalize the university's choral program, a long and celebrated tradition at the university. My efforts to produce definitive performances of pieces I thought the choir could sing well met with modest success, and the choir began growing in numbers and proficiency. I began to grow too, especially in my understanding of the real role of music -- the material -- in my classes. There was an evolution from music as an end to music as a means.
Gonzaga's liberal-arts environment brings to the choir a unique group of students. Some will indeed end up with careers in music, while most of them are future engineers, poets, teachers, homemakers, or lawyers. But all of them are bright and intellectually very curious -- even hungry. As I began to understand this phenomenon of the liberal-arts student, I began to realize that while most joined the choir because they previously had had a good experience with music, they joined not for the music but for something else. For them, the music was not an end in itself but a vehicle to achieve some other goal. I had to discover what this other goal was and help them achieve it using techniques and language they could understand.
I found my answer to this search in the Catholic and Jesuit character of the university. Catholic traditions, practices, and beliefs infused with the Jesuit charism create an intellectual and moral environment that makes learning an experience involving mind and spirit and body. While students may not come to choir consciously to engage Catholicism or "Jesuitness," they do come for an experience that is all encompassing. As one student put it, "When I sing in the choir, I feel and express things I don't feel or say in any other way. I connect to people in a special way."
Choir rehearsals today are no less intense than they were when I began at Gonzaga. We still begin with a short prayer offered by a student and warm-ups that may include calisthenics as well as vocal exercises. We rehearse with the same goal of musical perfection that I have always had.
Today, however, I employ a methodology that is more encompassing than one that stresses vocal technique alone; it is one that puts musical perfection into a larger context and uses a language that speaks to a very disparate group.
For example, suppose we are rehearsing a setting of the text "Arise, shine, for thy light is come"(Isa. 60:1Ð2). Ten years ago I would have used a lot of technical terminology to ask the choir to sing different dynamic levels and to create different tone colors to highlight the changes in text from "the darkness has covered the earth" to "thy light has come." Today, choir members use their own words to express their ideas about why it seems the composer has set these texts to different music. Their own understanding, often expressed in nontechnical language, gives them an ability to effect sensitive changes in dynamics and to create tone colors in their singing to express this text in a way that technical instruction alone just could not achieve. The choir experiments by singing the piece in different keys, looking for one whose "color" fits the sentiment of the text.
Such an experiment places the choir at the side of historical musicologists who study the effects of early tuning systems on the compositional process. In today's equal-tempered tuning system, all intervals, such as thirds or fifths, are tuned on a piano so that they sound the same no matter where they occur on the keyboard. Earlier "unequal-tempered" tuning systems, in which thirds and fifths were not all tuned the same, effected unique tonal qualities for each key, qualities commonly attributed to different emotions. When the choir "tunes" in to the emotional content of the text and explores different keys to match it, the technical problems of actually singing the piece in tune often disappear. They listen and sing with an intensity that a technical request to "sing higher" or "sing lower" simply couldn't produce.
The Gonzaga University Choir has recorded two CDs of sacred music from the Baroque to the contemporary periods, and a Christmas music CD is in the works.
This exploration of text for its emotional content and its relationship to a musical setting also provides some significant nonmusical benefits. Students start discovering the literary as well as the spiritual qualities of texts.
For many students, thinking deeply about these texts serves as a catalyst that encourages them to think about other aspects of their lives as deeply. Just as rewarding as a concert performance is having a student tell me that she's taking instruction in the faith because of something she sang in the choir, or another to say that he's considering a religious vocation because of something he experienced in the choir. Choir rehearsals are not catechism classes, but they do provide students with an environment in which they can explore aspects of their faith while engaging in an academic and artistic endeavor. This, it seems to me, is the goal that the Catholic and Jesuit nature of Gonzaga infuses in our teaching, that of enabling students to find their faith in whatever they do.
An enjoyable aspect of Gonzaga's choral program is the opportunity it gives us to embrace a tradition of fabulous music. We sing sacred texts almost exclusively -- a privilege of teaching at a Catholic university. Music of the Renaissance, and especially that of Palestrina and Victoria, the two greatest composers of the Renaissance, holds a place of honor in Gonzaga's choral program. A Jesuit colleague reminded me that when we perform the music of Palestrina and Victoria, who taught at the Jesuits' German College in Rome, we enjoy a continuity of tradition.
Even more enjoyable, however, is the satisfaction we derive from not only concerts but also rehearsals. The 100 students who sing in the two large choirs and two smaller ensembles at Gonzaga are joined by about 30 others, including faculty, staff, alumni, and members of the local community. One choir rehearses every day in the late afternoon. For an hour, as we explore texts for meaning and find ways to sing them expressively, we all forget the nagging troubles of the morning and afternoon and end the day feeling uplifted. At the end of rehearsal there's an announcement or two about a rock concert, a political rally, or a pro-life meeting, and then we all leave hungry for dinner, but with smiles on our faces.
Page maintained by R VandeVelde, vande@math.luc.edu. Updated: Fri., February 28 1997