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  • Guided by VoicesFinding Grace Through Shape-Note Singing
  • Robert S. Brunk (bio)

Growing up in suburban Chicago in the 1950s, I lived on the very distant outskirts of popular culture. I was a Mennonite, the only one besides my brother among the more than 1,000 students attending Glen-bard High School. I was not allowed to dance (even square dance), go to movies, ice skate on Sundays, or participate in any of the noisy seductions of the secular world. And though I did sing in the high-school choir (one of the few acceptable activities), I spent much of my young-adult life struggling under this heavy blanket of prohibitions. Sometimes I dreamed of the day when I would be free from the strictures of the church, free to create my own life. It was a vague, adolescent dream, but I held its promise close.

After I graduated from high school in 1959, I attended, at my parents’ insistence, Goshen College, a Mennonite school in Northern Indiana. Life there was less fractured than my time at Glenbard High, as I now lived in a thoroughly Mennonite culture. Still, we could not dance, and female students could not wear Bermuda shorts, both seen as unnecessary, worldly temptations.

All freshmen were required to take a two-semester course, Introduction to Fine Arts, taught by Mary Oyer. She asked us to sing familiar Mennonite hymns with her, then diagram their repeating elements to understand their structure. She played symphonic works and helped us find all the times and ways in which a four- or five-note motif was scattered through the work, like tiny jewels in a handful of sand. She held these works up to us with intensity, joy, and intellectual dexterity. She was utterly convinced of their importance, and I believed her.

Mary Oyer introduced me to Byzantine architecture, Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamps, recent sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, and the music of John Cage. But I was most intrigued when she played excerpts of Gregorian chant and the madrigals and motets of Michael Praetorius, John Dowland, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and many other late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century composers. These works all took root in my growing awareness of unaccompanied vocal music. Some were complex harmonies, others spare lines with only one or two voices, but I was drawn to their clarity and coherence. I listened to each piece as one might approach an unexplored landscape: attentive to the topography, the play of light, and the possibility of mystery. Each line of music seemed to have a life of its own, and collectively these works seemed knowable, almost personal to me.

As my interest in music grew, I worried less about the deprivations of a Mennonite life, and for the next two years I sang in two of the large choruses at Goshen. In my third year, I decided to audition for membership with the Motet Singers, an elite group of twenty musicians. I was moved by the works I had heard two years earlier, and believed this music held [End Page 130]


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[End Page 131]

great promise for me. Even though I was only an average singer, I wanted to learn to sing motets: contrapuntal works written for unaccompanied voices, and usually based on sacred texts.

I climbed the stairs to Mary Oyer’s office on the second floor of the Fine Arts Building. She greeted me with her friendly, toothy smile, inviting me to sit in an armless chair. Her office was bright and orderly but dense with shelves of books, stacks of music, color prints of works of art, and cabinets of notes. Though seldom called Dr. Oyer, she held a doctorate of musical arts performance in cello from the University of Michigan.

Now I sat forward in my chair, my back straight as a good musician would sit. Mary Oyer sat beside me in a folding metal chair, then handed me the Mennonite Church Hymnal, opened to “O Worship the King,” a familiar hymn I had sung for years. I relaxed a bit. She asked me to sing the...

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