When I was nine, I joined a church choir.
I wasn’t especially religious or prodigiously musical, but it was something to do. My mother thought would be a good character-building experience, like Boy Scouts or swimming lessons. I was a pretty agreeable kid, so I went along with it.
The mandatory audition made it feel like a challenge, and probably contributed to the appeal. A lot of activities I was in – school teams, karate, the aforementioned Boy Scouts – accepted anybody (and in the case of Scouts, I really mean aaanybody) so the idea that I could be turned away if I didn’t show promise made me think I had something to prove.
The audition was probably a formality of course, but the choirmaster, a stately British-Canadian composer named Dr. Derek Holman, made me leave the room feeling like I was going to be a superstar. He was the church choir equivalent of one of those little-league coaches from the movies who takes a directionless kid and instills in him a deep and lifelong love of baseball.
He didn’t say much, just the occasional mono-syllable of encouragement, with a hint of a smile behind his white beard. Something about him compelled attention and demanded great respect, but without the element of intimidation that so many old-world authority figures stereotypically rely upon.
Derek Holman (we just called him “Dr. Holman”) was a bit like Santa’s introverted and better-dressed cousin. And rather than leading an army of toy-building elves, he led an army of scraggly boys like me, who never dared to tell their friends at school that they belonged to a choir, but who felt, thanks to Dr. Holman, like part of something important and magical.
Having been admitted into the choir, I started coming to the twice-per-week rehearsals, which at that particular moment were focused on preparations for the upcoming spring concert: Bach’s St. John Passion.
Dr. Holman always found ways to make the rehearsals interesting. He was just as likely to spend 10 minutes explaining the nomenclature behind a latin musical term as he was to tell a story of the creepy janitor he interacted with in Westminster Abbey years ago.
I was a bit lost in those early days. Seated next to a more senior boy, I would dutifully imitate the notes I heard around me and pretend to follow along with the music. Every few minutes, when my wandering voice indicated that I was thoroughly lost, the older boy would gently turn several pages and point to the right spot.
At first, we rehearsed with the full choir, while Dr. Holman covered the orchestral part as best he could on the piano. Being young, naïve, and barely able to tell Bach from a VW Beetle, I didn’t actually know that our performance of the St. John Passion was to be accompanied by an orchestra. So when we eventually moved our rehearsals to the main space of the church and joined the musicians, I was in for a surprise, and perhaps one of the most memorable experiences, musical or otherwise, of my life.
The first movement of the St. John Passion begins with a long, pulsing, and steadily growing orchestral introduction, and as that first with-orchestra rehearsal began, my brain simply could not cope with the sheer beauty of being immersed in such a sound.
When it finally came time for the choir to sing, I couldn’t. My mouth may have been moving, but I’m sure I wasn’t making any noise. It was all I could do to remember to breathe.
My life pivoted strongly in the direction of music at that point, and Dr. Derek Holman, who died last week at the age of 88, shares a large portion of the responsibility for my love of music.
It’s the kind of story that feels like it ought to end with something like, “and now, here I am, first violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic,” or, “25 years later, I accepted a Grammy for my critically-acclaimed film score.”
But what makes his years of work with children’s choirs so special, in my opinion, is that I didn’t have to become a famous musician in order to validate what he was doing. He wasn’t looking to forge the next generation of top-flight classical musicians. That was accomplished through his work as a professor of music at the University.
For our little church choir, his everyday miracle was making normal boys love choral music. He made us hear music differently. Most impressively, he made us want to work together to perform it. How many people in the world would be able to do that with a group of 8-to-14-year-olds?
Former students of Derek Holman’s are spread around the world. Some of them have forged careers in music, but many more are bankers, teachers, web developers, filmmakers, whatever. No matter what they do, I’d bet they are all a little better at it thanks to Dr. Holman’s influence.
Although he composed a large body of work himself, his humility was such that we seldom performed it. So this week, I’m giving a second listen to a piece he published in the same year I joined his choir: “Serenade for Clarinet and String.”
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. It’s difficult music. The key shifts, the harmonies are unpredictable, the dissonances are jarring. Perhaps it wasn’t just his humility that kept him from having us sing his choral work very often; perhaps he knew it was too tough for us to do properly.
2. In all the chaos, little moments of conventional melodic beauty pop up unexpectedly, like at 3:47.
3. That motif at 3:47 returns several times later on, but that repetition doesn’t seem to anchor the piece. It’s ephemeral, un-grabable. A bit like the composer himself, who was both somehow politely friendly and just out of reach, a storyteller who loved an audience, but an introvert who preferred the company of dogs to people.
Recommended listening activity:
Wearing a suit, even if you don’t have to.