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108 5 Ideology and Practice in the Career of Robert Shaw When he died in 1999 at the age of eighty-two, Robert Lawson Shaw was the preeminent American choral conductor of the twentieth century. As director in the 1940s and 1950s both of the Collegiate Chorale, whose members were highly skilled amateurs, and of the smaller professional ensemble that bore his name, Shaw brought high seriousness to choral singing through his musical gifts, repertory choices, and ideological commitments. In 1956 he became associate conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra and injected new life into the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, which he directed. Subsequently he moved to Atlanta, assumed the role of conductor of the Atlanta Symphony, and founded two choral groups affiliated with the orchestra. Throughout his career he won fourteen Grammy Awards for his recordings—performances that encompassed Christmas carols, sea chanteys, and “Negro spirituals,” as well as Bach’s B Minor Mass, Brahms’s German Requiem, and virtually every other work in the choral repertory that has come to be seen as a masterpiece. Alongside his accolades, which included the National Medal of the Arts, he accrued the reverence of choral singers both at home and abroad.1 Yet Shaw’s fame has eroded in the years since his death, in large part because of the standing of choral singing in American culture. At least to sophisticated observers enamored of the avant-garde, the practice is likely to appear as the musical equivalent of crafts and scouting—a wholesome, earnest pastime undertaken largely by amateurs who often also sing in their church choirs. As it turns out, Shaw’s career does not entirely fit that profile: he was on the political left, and he was known to be as irascible as 109 Ideology and Practice in the Career of Robert Shaw he was dedicated to his art. But the greater interest of Robert Shaw lies in the light his activities cast on several salient issues in cultural history. The first of these concerns Shaw’s stance as a cultural mediator, situated between composers and performers and the audiences who listened to their music. As he assembled concert programs and issued recordings, Shaw engaged in a kind of canon formation, and the distinguishing feature of his canon was eclecticism: Bach and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Brahms and Porgy and Bess, the modernist and the traditional. On the face of it, those combinations are a powerful counterexample to the argument adduced in Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988): that the sacralization of classical music over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries effected the separation of high and popular art.2 Shaw’s commingling of European and American music also had a bearing on the centuries-old problem of American provincialism in relation to the vaunted superiority of European culture. The beliefs that Shaw brought to those eclectic choices , ideas he developed beginning in the 1940s, thus warrant a closer look. The second issue is related to the first: the embrace of democratic ideals that Shaw evinced in foregrounding the African American musical heritage as well as both old and new music in the Western classical tradition. David Hollinger, in his 2011 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, made a compelling case for recovering the history of ecumenical Protestantism in the postwar period, a movement that turned diversity and the equality of all people into articles of faith.3 Shaw positioned himself as a disseminator of liberal tolerance: accepting of diverse styles in the repertory, mindful of the human capacity to appreciate music, which he believed all people possessed. Grasping that aspect of Shaw’s career helps us to see how a cultural practice—performing and listening to choral singing—enabled the convictions of the mainstream Protestant leadership to make their mark on ordinary citizens. The third issue entails Shaw’s activity as a reader of literature, particularly American poetry. The works he read helped to form Shaw’s conception of his choruses, and his efforts in commissioning composers to create musical settings of poetic texts gave those choruses new music to sing. In the process, Shaw facilitated the creation of what scholars have demarcated as literary sociability—the formation of relationships among individuals based on a shared encounter with fiction or poems.4 We are becoming familiar with the social applications, as well as the social sources , of literature in the guise of book groups, poetry festivals, and citywide “big reads,” but the choral performance (and...

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