Nerdspecial Stanford’s William Mahrt, the champion of chant, dies at 85
Stanford’s William Mahrt, a number one scholar in early music, died at this time at 85. He carried out Gregorian chant for greater than 60 years and impressed and guided generations of students. He directed Stanford’s Early Music Singers and St. Ann Choir, a Gregorian schola. He was additionally a private pal. That is an article I wrote for Stanford Report about Invoice Mahrt on October 2nd, 2007.
For practically two millennia, the sound has been a daily pulse beneath the pores and skin of Western civilization. It reverberated by way of Dante’s thoughts as he scratched out the cantos of the Purgatorio. It was the inaudible vein of thought operating beneath the chords of Mozart’s Requiem. Crusaders trudged to the East with these melodies of their coronary heart, however they had been too late – Jerusalem had echoed with it centuries earlier. It was ubiquitous, common – that’s, till about 40 years in the past.
William Mahrt directs the St. Ann Choir, which he says has had a “fruitful interplay” with Stanford’s doctoral college students of musicology, who discover it “a really great laboratory for the research of the music of historical past.”
The tide could also be turning, and, if that’s the case, will probably be William Mahrt’s second within the solar.
The origins of Gregorian chant are enigmatic. It seems to have its roots in fourth-century Jerusalem. The hyperlink with Pope Gregory the Nice (590-604) is the byproduct of early spin, based mostly on what might be an misguided assumption that he composed and picked up early chant.
The otherworldly impact of the music is difficult to explain, however Mahrt, an affiliate professor of music at Stanford, lately gave it a attempt: “It’s what we name monophonic – that’s to say, it’s a melody that’s unaccompanied,” he mentioned. “A free rhythm has a capability to evoke everlasting issues, greater than passages tied all the way down to common time. It’s a sprung rhythm that has a freedom to it – like Hopkins’ poetry.”
Mahrt has carried out Gregorian chant for greater than 40 years with no break. He’s the director of Stanford’s Early Music Singers and of the St. Ann Choir, a Gregorian schola at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto. He instructs singers within the mysteries of “the mantra,” in addition to the fantastic polyphonic music that got here after it. In actual fact, it’s potential that there’s extra chant sung in Palo Alto than anyplace else within the nation, with the potential exception of monastic communities. Mahrt has impressed and guided generations of students and singers.
Certainly one of his star college students, Kerry McCarthy, now an assistant professor of music at Duke College, is the creator of Liturgy and Contemplation in Byrd’s Gradualia and one of many world’s main students on William Byrd, the preeminent English composer of the Renaissance.
“The most effective selections I’ve made in my life was to come back to Stanford and work with Invoice,” McCarthy mentioned. “The issues I realized from him right here I couldn’t have realized anyplace else. Not simply within the classroom, however in efficiency. Particularly in efficiency.”
Acclaimed music author and jazz scholar Ted Gioia remembers going to listen to the St. Ann Choir, composed of scholars and members of the group at giant, when he was learning for an MBA at Stanford. Typically he discovered just a few fellow listeners within the pews.
“The factor I most miss about Palo Alto goes to these Gregorian Lots,” he mentioned. “It’s so energizing. That was the best-kept secret in Palo Alto. Invoice was the one that actually opened my ears to that. He had a profound affect on my conception of music – by way of the power of his instance.”
Mahrt’s work has certainly been quiet. Moreover, he has encountered resistance from a church that has not at all times valued its personal heritage.
“There’s an enormous resistance from the clerical institution to doing any of this,” mentioned Stanford alumna Susan Altstatt, who has been a member of the St. Ann Choir since 1967. “Invoice has lived a charmed life on this regard. Invoice has managed to do what he’s doing by speaking to bishops and clergymen and figuring out what he’s speaking about. He’s a hero, so far as I’m involved.”
Mahrt defined the resistance: “Gregorian chant went out of fashion when the language was modified” – that’s, when the common Latin was modified to the vernacular English. “Within the absence of any good answer about what to exchange the mantra with, I might say business pursuits stepped in and hawked a progressively cheaper and cheaper music, and the business pursuits nonetheless prevail at this time.”
For instance, one of many main publishers of “missalettes,” the flimsy and disposable paperbacks that embrace “new” church music, distributes 4.3 million of the quarterly copies a yr and owns 10,000 music copyrights. That’s a number of business pursuits.
The outcome was summarized by one disgruntled reviewer on Amazon.com: “The Roman Catholic Church, in search of to be extra ‘related’ to its flock within the antispiritual local weather of the second half of the twentieth century, deserted its historical Latin liturgy and dignified music in favor of poorly worded vernacular texts and worse music. This music often tends towards banal couplets set to insipid tunes strummed on ill-tuned guitars and whined right into a microphone to the banging of a tambourine.”
Mahrt mentioned there’s a motive for the ill-tuned guitars and whining: “The usual of efficiency in recorded pop music may be very excessive. A little bit combo in a church can’t probably maintain that commonplace. There isn’t the identical commonplace for chant. Its complete standards are completely different. Singers can grasp it otherwise.”
In contrast to different kinds of music, McCarthy mentioned, “You don’t must must have great approach and study to breathe out of your diaphragm and so forth and have 20 years of voice classes. It’s on a really human scale. It’s actually self-regenerating. You possibly can sing particularly psalms for hours with out getting drained, and there aren’t many sorts of music you’ll be able to say that about.”
In line with Mahrt, the St. Ann Choir has created a “fruitful interplay” with Stanford’s doctoral college students of musicology, who discover it “a really great laboratory for the research of the music of historical past.” Members of the choir, which performs the year-round cycle of chant, are maybe the staunchest advocates of the music anyplace: “This is without doubt one of the main cultural landmarks of Western society,” Altstatt mentioned. “Its preservation is essential. It must be sung – it has to come back by way of the human voice. You need to be taught, in a residing custom. You possibly can’t get it by way of a e book. You get hooked on it, you internalize it and must do it. It’s a splendid factor.”
In recent times, a youthful viewers, in search of music with a little bit extra historical past and that means than its standard fare, has turn into hooked otherwise: A technology has snapped up Gregorian chant and made recordings into crossover hits. Within the final decade, the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos’ Canto Gregoriano would turn into one of many world’s biggest-selling classical compact discs, with worldwide gross sales topping 6 million.
However the commotion and hoopla miss the purpose, Mahrt mentioned. “Chant does come up out of silence, and it goes again to silence,” he mentioned. “In our personal tradition, we typically don’t have any silence. I feel amongst college students, as an illustration. They go into the dorms and the partitions are thumping 24 hours a day. There may be by no means an opportunity to be alone, in silence, inside your individual residence. However the reality is, I feel, myself, the perfect location for the contact with God is in silence.
“When silence happens, then you’ll be able to look interiorly and discover an order and a goal that the noise of the media operating day and evening obscures. So, likewise, the mantra, which is pure, a single melody, will not be difficult, arises out of silence and goes again into it, as a means of returning to that interiority.”
Early curiosity
Mahrt grew up in a small farming group in japanese Washington – a spot the place “church music” meant sentimental hymns sung by a “little choir of women who sang to a harmonium.” His College of Washington grasp’s thesis as a pianist was the work of Robert Schumann. Mahrt found the mantra on the College of Washington. Dominican friars, who had been Catholic chaplains on the college, determined to reinforce their choir, instructed him, “You need to sing chant for Holy Week.”
“It’s the toughest chant of the yr in some methods. So we did it,” he recalled. “And I mentioned that is what I’ve been lacking. That is what I’ve been ready for. I joined the Cathedral Choir and sang chant there for the subsequent two-and-a-half years.”
He headed to Stanford to check Mozart and in addition joined the St. Ann Choir, which had been launched by one of many college’s arithmetic professors in 1963. A yr later, the professor departed for one more college and handed the reins to Mahrt. The yr was a landmark in chant in one other means: That was the yr the Catholic Church started utilizing native languages within the liturgy, and the mantra was all however deserted.
“Our choir was began one yr earlier than the language modified – if we had tried to begin one yr later, we would not have been capable of do it,” Mahrt mentioned. “I noticed this music changing into much less and fewer fashionable with individuals who had been entranced with folks music.”
The leap from Mozart to the mantra was not as radical as is perhaps supposed; Mahrt factors out that “definitely Mozart grew up figuring out chant – a really 18th-century chant.”
“Most composers by way of the nineteenth century – in Austria, France, Italy – merely had chant of their background, and of their each day expertise of church. It’s one thing the historical past books don’t let you know,” Mahrt mentioned.
Mahrt carried on for the subsequent 40 years largely alone. He mentioned he knew his determination to dedicate his life to chant’s preservation would meet battle, struggles and disappointments. “It’s value it. Any person’s obtained to maintain it. It must be saved alive in numerous locations all through the world. So we’ve obtained to do it.”
His persistence could also be paying off. Pope Benedict XVI, himself a musician, has taken an curiosity in restoring musical traditions, in addition to encouraging the Latin Mass. The 1,700-year-old Gregorian chant is perhaps an concept whose time has come once more. In actual fact, it is perhaps an concept moderately arduous to kill.
“One great factor about chant is it’s virtually viral,” mentioned McCarthy, who has began her personal chant group at Duke. “Individuals who study it are likely to go elsewhere – teachers, particularly, are usually migratory birds. After we transfer to the brand new place, we begin a chant group ourselves. I calculate that in about 60 years, we’ll have taken over the world.”
Mahrt’s group has spawned spinoffs throughout the USA, moreover the one at Duke. Alstatt’s daughter Alison, who’s doing doctoral work in medieval music on the College of Erlangen in Germany, joined the St. Ann Choir when she was 11 and has began a bunch in Berkeley, the place she had been a scholar on the College of California. There are actually teams in Los Angeles, Cleveland and Arkansas.
Mahrt has even discovered a substitute to direct the choir – lastly permitting him to take a extra energetic position in selling chant nationally and internationally, given the current renewal of curiosity. Does he be happy ultimately, after 4 a long time of being tethered to the annual cycle of chant? Mahrt seems to be up in wonderment on the query: “It’s a success, not an oppression. I miss it after I go away. It’s a routine, however the music and liturgy are all a part of the rhythm of life.”
Postscript from jazz scholar and Substacker Ted Gioia on January 1, 2025: “Not many knew that Gregorian chant and medieval/Renaissance polyphony flourished in Palo Alto — however I’d be there, and I’d see René Girard there too. It was all due to William Mahrt—a beatific soul (who additionally inspired my jazz educating at Stanford, at a time when some had been skeptical about its legitimacy). He we beloved by those that knew him.”
The tributes proceed to pour in:
From David A. Lawrence: “Invoice’s unprecedented accomplishments as each a scholar and the chief of the St. Ann’s Choir are well-documented. What I really feel compelled so as to add, within the wake of my shock on the information of his passing, is what a wholly candy human being he was. In a career that doesn’t lack competitors for awards, accolades and promotions, Invoice was type to all people. In my 50 years at Stanford I by no means as soon as heard anybody point out a harsh phrase about him. As well as, he was an outstanding trainer. In my early years on the school I might disguise myself as a scholar and sneak into his courses. After all Invoice knew about it, and had completely no drawback with it. I used to be notably struck by the truth that, whereas his main focus might have been on a composer like Guillaume de Machaut, no one taught the music of Johannes Brahms with higher perception and sensitivity than Invoice. I’ll miss him terribly—each professionally and personally. Relaxation in peace, pricey man.
From Patrick Hunt: “As standard, Cynthia Haven’s perception, light appreciation and honed writing go to the center of a matter, on this case Mahrt’s beloved legacy on medieval chant. I used to be at all times struck by Mahrt’s meditative quietude and humility, by no means one to hunt consideration even when so properly deserved. Properly completed, Cynthia!”
From John O. Robison: Invoice got here to Stanford as a younger professor in September 1972, after I had simply completed my MA and was starting the doctoral program. I at all times thought that hiring Invoice was one of many Stanford Music Division’s best accomplishments! He was such an incredible trainer and mentor throughout my doctoral years at Stanford, and most of my analysis initiatives had been completed beneath his steerage. At any time when it was time to delve into a brand new analysis venture, he would merely say “Okay, what do you wish to do subsequent?” and let me pursue that matter (anyplace from c. 1000 to 1800) to its fullest potential. I flew out to California for his eightieth birthday celebration in March 2019, gave him considered one of my Ralph Marlin fish ties as a small current (which I’m positive he by no means wore), and had a pleasant time explaining how vital his mentorship has been to me as a performing musicologist working in vastly completely different areas of analysis. He was a really type individual, one who was extremely devoted to chant and Catholic church music, and whose presence will stay on by way of all who had been lucky sufficient to know him. – John O. Robison, Prof. of Musicology, College of South Florida
Tags: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Kerry McCarthy, René Girard, Ted Gioia, William Mahrt
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