i was born in new york city in manhattan and i have two older brothers who are 10
and 14 years older than i am i was an unexpected child um
no i wasn't the accident i was a true love child let's put it like that
my two brothers the first one came 10 months after the honeymoon and the
second one came 10 months after my father came out of world war ii
i'm the true love child at that one you can keep that in the thing
but they were just in the state of building a home on long island daddy
worked downtown manhattan rockefeller center
and he was a tailor and they were building this house when
they discovered i was popping along and i grew up in a wonderful church on
hempstead long island nassau county and there was a young couple would come
to my church when i was a child they were graduates of westminster choir
college in princeton they were indoctrinated in a wonderful
way that when you go out to serve whether in schools
especially in churches you want to create singing communities
and literally john philly williamson who's the founder of westminster choir
college had this belief that you create singing from the crib
to the grave and that's literally what carl and carol weber did when they came
to my church lutheran church of the epiphany
in hempstead and so i was one of the rambunctious six-year-olds in
sunday school or whatever and there were a bunch of boys and carol had her own
sons that are on same age and she just grabbed a bunch of us and
there were more boys in the junior choir than um uh
then girls which is especially even now that's really kind of unusual but she
knew how to do it and she gave me my first soul to sing
when i was six years old notice leave thy throne and thy king the
crown when thou camest to earth for me but in bethlehem's homeless there found
no room for thy holy nativity o come to my heart lord jesus
there's room in my heart for thee and it sounded just like me
yeah right two octaves higher about nothing
no but you plant something in a young person's mind and heart and it stays
there for a lifetime and she taught us proper singing but she
didn't dumb down to us and we learned not only to sing well we learned how to
behave without having parents right by us to
keep us still in church so there's a lot of self-discipline that
came out of that but really good singing techniques when i was about 10 11 years
old as graduates of westminster they would
take high school kids or a church down to
a summer vocal camp that westminster college quark house still runs
but at that time in princeton was a organization that was then known as the
columbus boy choir that later became the american boy choir
and they said you should we should take a bunch of you down to that summer camp
and i first heard the boy choir came to long island
uh in 1967 i heard a concert i went against my will if my dear mother
was on this earth still she would go you were the biggest pain in the neck
and my brothers i think were going to yankees game with my dad
and i said um all your bunch of little choir boys and i powdered the whole way
it was in the north shore of the island and i got in and heard one number and i
said i won in at which point she said to me you're going to be the death of me
yet and i went to camp there for two summers
they invited me to come to school but my parents we don't have the money to send
him away to school and you know my mother's side didn't have
this child at age 40 for somebody else to raise him
and through a couple of antics of my own we won't go into that right now but
um i eventually did get them to say yes and school was very uh
generous in scholarship aid and i sang the american board choir for two and a
half years and that was the thing that really kind
of lit my fire for coral singing um one of the things is in the late 60s
so this was a situation that once you got
inside those doors of that school you were judged on who you were as a
person and what your skill level and what your talent was not your
socio-economic background not your race or ethnicity this is about
the time soon yeah i went to school soon after dr king
was assassinated you know so to really to live in an
environment where somebody does judge you on your head
in the content of your heart was it was a powerful thing
i also may be one of the few times i i ever encountered not in the school but
on a tour segregation my first tour was down to
the southwest in tennessee and i remember going getting off the bus
there was another young uh african-american boy in the choir and
we both had to go to the bathroom we had been on that bus forever
and we darted towards the front and the uh the choir mom who was traveling with
us said you need to come i said ma'am i have to go really bad
you need to come with me and we had to walk about a block and a half
and i saw the sign for colors
i still remember that you know i still remember that but what i also remembered
is that was never the condition the boy
choir you know we were you know but that was the thing that
really it you lived at 24 7. you know sang with some of the great
orchestras in this country in canada when i was a sophomore in high school
my college my my church assistant pastor had said i want you to hear this
choir that's coming from minnesota they're known for their beauty of sound
and after you sung in the boy choir you would love them because
there's soprano saying the women's son was such a purity of sound
and i said well thanks a lot but i have tickets that same night for the moody
blues of the garden well he went behind my back to my
parents my father was not going to be the one to make me give up those tickets
my mother said you know i went through this at the boy choir thing
just the man is going to offer you free tickets go i said but i paid for these
tickets myself in the moody blue she said
tough you're going to go with him so my buddies and i all went on the same train
long island railroad to penn station they go up to the garden i got in the
cab with this guy lincoln center we got in there just
before the the choir marched on the stage and he
said you really love this thing so pure and i never use instruments so i pointed
the station so what's that there's a little porter chief work in
the string basis that's strange choir comes out and then the conductor
comes out he says well dr chris johnson looks like
he's uh tied his hair and he's gone shorter well
it wasn't all of chris johnson the second conductor of the choir it was
kenneth jennings who was my mentor later it was his first tour to in his 22
year history as conductor this is first sort of the
east coast i remember years later when somebody
asked me what did you think of the choir i said ah they were okay
they're pretty good little did i know you know years later i'd
be their conductor i went to san juan college for several different interests
music won out and i have a vocal performance degree from
san olive and went on to university of illinois for master's degree and that's
where andre thomas and i met he was starting his doctoral program i'm
starting my master's it's been a 40-year long friendship and
he and his wife and i i was about to go i thought i've had
enough of the midwest i'm going back to civilization on the east coast and i had
a teaching job offer for a very uh kind of
prestigious private school up in massachusetts the north field on hermann
school and procrastinated like i often have done in
my life about things and didn't sign the contract yet and all of
a sudden i get a call my our major professor harold decker called
me in the office he said i've had a call about you
oh from north carolina said no no calvin college in michigan i said
calvin college where he said i didn't play they said well they know
about you and they want to interview for a one year sabbatical lead
i remember calling my parents and my father said you're gonna go someplace
for one year you're staying in the midwest and you
could come back to the east coast and have a long time job that's a cure at a
very prestigious school i said you know but
i'm 23 and they offered me a college job
and when i said i was taking that's my dad said you're your mother's child you
really are your mother's child sometimes but one year i went there for sabbatical
leave after that first year i applied to 25 jobs and got rejected by all 25 jobs
and thought i was selling shoes or something i didn't know what i was going
to do calvin called back in the summer and
they said we can have part-time well they were paying me part-time i was
working full-time plus but it i took over the symphony course
uh children's course at one point i was directing seven different choirs
you know but it was a good life and i was there for ten years and uh so one
year turned into ten years and i'm in my 29th year not saying off
the choir is 107 years old and i'm the fourth conductor in that
time and right now i've surpassed my my immediate predecessor's record he was
he taught there 37 years but he had the choir 22 years his predecessor the
son of the founder older chris johnson at the choir for 27 years so i'm trying
to catch up with the old man in three years i'll have matched him and
i'll give him a couple more years and someone else can take over at that point
it's been a good run i i think you're always a music educator
when you're in this type of work whether i'm in the private studio whether i'm in
the classroom whether in rehearsal setting
and you're constantly being an advocate i'm not a composer
uh you would not want to hear my compositions uh
but i do edit two choral series that have done very well i'm co-editor with
uh my retired colleague john ferguson of a
coral single coral series of augsburg fortress publishers
and then now for over 25 almost going on 26 years
um i've edited a series for earth songs i i think it was one of the
first one of the first years that when ron jeffers started the company
he reached out to me he knew of my interest in doing especially
multicultural choral music and he believed in me and he was an
incredible man and he was also meticulous in the types
of music he put out and so even to this day while we have
independent publishing and self-publishing
earth songs has been i think i've been proud to be associated with them
because they turn out a a product the highest quality
we lost ron a few years ago but the people have maintained the company have
under understood his philosophy and his
standards of excellence so i i think you're you're an advocate
you're you're trying to share and for me though
i would say i shepherd a tradition in saint olaf that
was known especially for its vocal sound it's coral sound
but my predecessor i think evolved that tradition in such a way to look at what
how you do proper historical performance practice
of older music i've opened the door to looking at global music that you
you bring the art music and the folk music of people and you
pay you do your studies saying that you would do on a bach motet
i do for an african-american spiritual or i do it for a latin american
folk song you do you must do the same you must have respect for whatever
tradition that type of advocacy has been important
to me but i've learned more and more in the
years that i've taught music is about a vehicle to reach human
beings
and if you don't transform the hearts and minds of the people who perform the
music and then in turn the people hear the music
becomes really quite vain idolatry very narcissistic you know and
the art has so much more meaning when it can transfer
when i teach as a teacher of singing some
some people say well you're teaching this sort of western european concept
you're saying yes but i'm trying to teach a style of
saying that that will allow them to sing literally from the crypt to the grave
i don't want them to be singing a style of music that will just use one aspect
of the voice and that will shortchange their ability
to make music
you