The Skipperlings: a Review and an open Letter

The Skipperlings, a vocal and string band, played for the Iowa City Farmers’ Market the other day, Wednesday, July 26. I wrote of them here, but it is time to write some more.

The group is of particular interest to me because all three of them sing in my choir: Caleigh, Greta, Claire. Their “arranger, accompanist, and manager” (as she was introduced; on banjo in the photo above), Jean Littlejohn, is my closest musical friend. In our differing spheres of activity, both of us are committed to getting people to sing. For me, it is the Songs of Zion; for Jean, it is mostly folk music and community singing, especially the choir she founded and directs, the Family Folk Machine. All this is to say: expect no objective detachment in my appraisal.

But that is part of my point. Music at its best grows from community, as I tried to describe in my recent RSCM Reports. It is local, homespun. It is not something reserved for a handful of glamorous superstars; music is meant to be made among friends and family and church congregations. People you know. Children from your church choir. Neighbors. Co-workers. Friends. In this, the Skipperlings are a first-class example.


This was a full-fledged gig: two hours of music. Greta told me during the ten-minute break that they were singing “everything we know, and a few that we don’t know.” Those who are performing musicians know what it means to prepare two hours of music – memorized, all the kinks worked out. It is a lot of hard work, the stuff that separates the pros from the dilettantes. And every song, every last one of them, was solid, their beautiful close-knit harmonies perfect and strong, always sung with strong Connection.

It is not insignificant that the girls were at the RSCM Course. On the one hand, six hours of daily singing put them in top vocal condition; on the other hand, I doubt that they found time for their Skipperlings songs, other than the one they sang at the talent show. They were home two days, and then the gig. That is impressive.

All of them are string players as well as singers: Caleigh on the violin, Claire and Greta on the cello, which they sometimes played as a miniature stand-up bass by extending the end-pin all the way out. They have both learned to sing and play the cello at the same time, which is not elementary. But it ties them to a long tradition, right back to the medieval troubadours and jongleurs, some of whom played the viola da gamba as they sang.

Their presentation was ideally suited to the venue, the local farmers’ market (which to their credit strongly supports local music). People walking around, shopping, eating food from the vendors, lots of noise. Lots of families and children. For most of the people, the Skipperlings were background music, a welcome addition to the market. A few people drifted in and out from the “stage” area (a concrete pad at one end of the parking area-turned-market), listening for a few songs. Maybe twenty or thirty listeners of this sort at any one time, and a few people that stayed for most or all of it.

One of their songs called for Kermit the Frog (a stuffed animal version), whom the girls sat in front of them as they sang. A little boy toddled up, hugged Kermit, and toddled off with him, his mother chasing him – all while the girls sang, giggling a little at what was going on. It was delightful.

It was all low-key, relaxed, fun. The girls bantered among themselves between songs as they tuned. They introduced the songs, sometimes with good-natured disagreement as to what the song was about. Claire encouraged us to visit their Facebook page.

Local music, local food. Both homegrown by people of the community. If there is hope for the United States and beyond, this is part of it.


I do not know what lies ahead for the Skipperlings. As a group, they are not likely to be famous, though they do have a significant local presence and following. Caleigh’s voice and stage presence remind me more than a little of the young Alison Krauss, fiddler and singer and one of my favorite musicians. By Caleigh’s age, Alison had a contract with Rounder Records and was working on a commercial recording, “Too Late to Cry,” released when she was sixteen. Here is an old video of the title song, back from those days.

None of the three Skipperlings are yet at that level as musicians, though I would not rule out one or more of them getting there someday. But that does not matter; Claire, Greta, and Caleigh will walk their own paths which may include some fame, or not. What is certain is that their futures, together and apart, will include lots of quality music-making. And right now, the summer of 2017, is a special time for them, and for all who hear them. One can ask for no more.

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Dear Skipperlings:

You are unexpected.
I do not think that anyone, even Jean, foresaw what you have become by singing together, playing instruments together. Your music brings light and joy to the world. This is no small thing. When you sing at a farmers’ market or Uptown Bill’s or anywhere else in the community, you change the world. Not by very much, mind you; it might be one person who was sad and depressed and you brought them light, at least for a little while as they listened to you. Or it might be a child, like that little toddler with Kermit, who sees and hears you and the seed is planted: “I could do that. I could sing like that someday and be a musician.” The work of music is given to us. But it is not given us to know the results of it, not in this life.

Days will come when you are the one who is sad and depressed, or frightened, or without a clue as to your next step. It is then most of all that you must keep on singing. The light shines in darkness, your own as well as that of the world around you.

There is a purity and innocence to your singing. I hear it in your voices, see it in your onstage demeanor; it is a part of the delight you bring to your audiences. This is partly because you are young. But it need not disappear as you get older; I see and hear some of it (for example) in Jean when she is working with the Folk Machine or playing the organ at church. Jeff Capps and Tara Dutcher have this, too, as do many others. I hope that wherever your paths lead, you continue to carry it with you.

For the best examples, one must look to the saints: Joan of Arc, for one. Cecilia, patron of music. Francis and Clare of Assisi. Most of all, look to the pure and innocent Lamb whom I know you follow and in whom you rejoice. He was pure of heart and soul and entirely innocent right through the Cross and into the pit of Hell. And He can carry us with Him all the way through the worst of it into heaven.

Don’t forget the church songs: the hymns, and the sort of things we sang this summer at the RSCM Course and in our church choir, and the people who sang them. I do not need to tell you what these things mean; you have experienced them for yourselves.

Finally, here is some advice I wrote a few years ago for others; it applies now to you and I hope you will take the time to read it:
Advice for young musicians

Whatever happens, whatever form your music takes, keep on singing and playing your instruments. You are a light in the darkness.

RSCM Report, part three: Taking it Home

I have taken choristers to RSCM courses for upwards of thirty years. Most of those years, it has been just a few young people, a fraction of the choir back home. Where I now work, it began with two little girls entering the fourth grade, the minimum age for the course. They came home with a vision of the possibilities and did all that was in their power to make the parish youth choir better. As did I, year after year.

This year we took fourteen choristers and a proctor. It is almost the entire Youth Choir, plus Tom (who now sings with the adult choir). No longer do we need one or two people to show the others how it is done; they all know, and several of them were among the leading choristers vocally and musically. All of them know what it is like to sing this kind of music well, with connection and intensity and total commitment, among a group where everyone is at that level. All of them surely want to keep singing this way.

It is an opportunity unique to my decades of church music, and unique to the choirs participating in the course this year. I do not think that any of the other directors are returning home to as strong of a group as I will face in our first rehearsals a month from now - not even Mr. Buzard, our course director, who has the task of building a program for young singers from scratch at a distinguished cathedral where there have been choirs, but no young singers for almost a century. I am sure he would love to start with a group such as what we will have back in Iowa City.

It is a test for me. How can I help these choristers maintain the level of work that they have done this week? Here we have six hours or more of rehearsal a day; at home, it amounts to one hour a week, and many of the choristers cannot be there for all of that. That is the issue, a perennial issue for most church choirs of all ages. One rehearsal a week is not sufficient; it is like trying to play the organ by practicing one day a week.

But the choristers (and adults) have busy lives, of which choral music is only a part, and it is right that it be so. On the wider scale, is choral music at a high level going to be solely for the handful of places with choir schools, daily rehearsals, daily choral services, semi-professional and highly trained singers on the ATB parts? Is music at this level a closed door to everyone else?

The answer to that comes down, in microcosm, to what I do with these choristers back home, starting on Wednesday, August 23. We repeat the Bruce Neswick anthem “The Invitation” for a service with the bishop on Friday, September 8. Can we sing that anthem and that service with the intensity we gave to choral evensong at the RSCM? Can we then carry this forward into the fall and winter? We plan to sing the Vaughan Williams setting of “Lord, thou hast been our refuge” on Christ the King; can we make this as strong as the Howells canticles and “Rejoice in the Lamb” at the course? And in doing such things, can we incorporate new first-year choristers and give them a good start?

I can and must do some things at home which are not feasible at the course. Can I do better about teaching them solfege and making them independent musicians? Can I work with our young choirmen? They are not maintaining good posture at all times in rehearsal. Several of them need to open their mouths for a taller vocal space. Can I help them make these things habitual? Many of the choristers, trebles and teens alike, are not marking their scores. That is because I have not taught them to do this, and that is one of the ways in which choristers - or any professional musicians - can remember what they have rehearsed when it has been a week since they last met. Can I help them make music an essential part of their lives for the rest of their days, and beyond that through the ages of eternity? And most of all, can I through the music we sing and rehearse do my part in bringing them into the full maturity of the image of Christ?

And can we do all of this in that one little hour per week? For me, it is now or never. I will be judged on this at the Day of Doom. Will it be recorded in the presence of my Lord and the holy angels that I gave it all that I have, leaning ever on the Holy Paraclete for guidance and strength? Or will the record state that I slacked off, allowed the choristers given into my care to slack off, and squandered the opportunity? “Where much is given, much is required.”

Jesu, juva.

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I acknowledge Mike Wagner for his sermon at one of the weekday evensongs at the Course, which I think he titled “Taking it home.” Mike sings in one of the finest choirs in America (the Nordic Choir of Luther College), and described how another collegiate director said to his director “this choir has ‘it,’” meaning by “it” what I call “connection.” Our RSCM director of a few years ago, Andrew Walker, called it “attitude.”

Back at the Choir College, Dr. Flummerfelt described it as Connection, and I will probably use that word, though Attitude needs less explanation. When singing, are you connected to the text and musical line with all of your being? Or are you going through the motions? It might be possible for instrumentalists to sometimes get away with the latter, but the voice is so thoroughly a window into the soul that it is immediately obvious if the singers are not Connected -- and, if the other basics are in place and the group has done its homework, Connection makes it possible for the song to touch the hearts of the listeners. This will never happen if the hearts of the singers are not likewise touched by the Song and absolutely committed to it.

Whatever we call it, we had it at the Course, and now we must take it home. Tomorrow’s essay will describe an example of how this is done.

RSCM Report, part two: Some thoughts on Renaissance polyphony

In some respects, the most challenging piece in our repertoire was the Ave Maria by Robert Parsons (c. 1530-1570). For the singer, especially in the ATB parts, it is a doorway into another plane of existence. From the outset, we launch into long melismatic lines on the first words, Ave Maria. The tenor (which is what I sang) has twenty-four notes on the syllable “ri”; the other voice parts are similar. The melody goes on, and when you sense that it is nearing a cadence, it goes on some more, far beyond what I can sing in one breath, or even two or three.

Why? For what reason would a composer write such a ravishingly beautiful melody for two words, most of it for one syllable? And then bury it in the middle of the texture, where no one except the tenors will know how beautiful it is?

It is for love of Our Lady. Love even for her name, love overflowing into melody.

And that is not enough, for the basses and the two alto parts are also singing, their melodies equally beautiful, the four lower vocal parts overlapping one another, entwined most wonderfully. And finally, the trebles soar above the texture in long notes. At first, Ave. Just the one word, as if they cannot bear to go on. Then Ave Maria.

The music flows onward, phrase after phrase, each more beautiful than the last. Gratia plena. Benedicta tu. The melismas seek to show how completely full of grace she is, how blessed. Fifteen hundred years and more of painters and sculptors, of architects and poets, have sought to express this; I think that they fall short of the musicians. Perhaps it is because our art is participatory; one experiences it properly only by singing it. The choral art is communal, as well; no person can experience this motet without the other singers. Renaissance polyphony of this sort is one of the clearest expressions of community. The six vocal parts are thoroughly interdependent. As a singer, you focus on your own part, but you are constantly aware of the other parts, all related to one another, but each with its own melodic and rhythmic flow. So it is with the Kingdom of God.

The Parsons is a masterpiece. The Ave verum corpus of William Byrd (c. 1540-1623) is even more of a masterpiece. Three pages, only a few minutes - but every note is exactly what it should be. Offhand, the only thing to which I can compare it in size and perfection is the motet on the same text by W. A. Mozart, one of his finest works -- but the Byrd is its equal. Here, the music expresses devotion to the Real Presence of Christ in the transfigured Bread and Wine - at a time and place when both the theological truth and the Latin language were illegal. As Mr. Buzard told the choristers, this was never sung in public in Byrd’s lifetime; it was probably sung in secret at someone’s house, and probably with one person to a part. It is thus more intimate than the Parsons, each voice part more of an individual outpouring of love, of wonderment at the Sacred Mystery. But it is still four parts, no one complete in itself - still the expression of a community, albeit small. In our rehearsals at home, I told the choristers that the Byrd is a very great masterpiece, and I hoped that they would grow to love it as much as I do. Mr. Buzard said pretty much the same thing to them at the Course.

O dulcis,
O pie,
O Jesu fili Mariae,
Miserere mei.

For the most part, we have shied away from this repertoire at the RSCM courses. It is often challenging to maintain one’s own part with so much going on around it, and I suspect the idea is that it would be a bit much for young choristers to master in one week; also, it is less dramatic than music of later eras and (one might think) less immediately interesting to young singers.

I submit two points: First, it was not the trebles who found either the Parsons or the Byrd to be difficult; it was the ATBs. Second, one would need a heart of stone to remain unmoved in the singing of either of these motets. That is as true of a ten-year old chorister as it is of an old choirmaster like me. I wonder what it is like to experience something like the Byrd for the first time.

We sang these things at the Basilica of Saint Louis. Crowded onto the choral risers behind the Altar, surrounded by these my friends, many of them choristers from our parish, singing these things in such close proximity, the vocal parts interweaving into a whole, was an extraordinary experience. And I think we sang the Byrd with more connection than the Tallis Scholars in the recording linked below, or any of the several other recordings I sampled – perhaps because we had many trebles and teen ATBs for whom this was their first exposure to the piece.

Earlier, I gave short shrift to the visual artists. They are in fact part of this as well; the music needs the gorgeous large acoustic of the Basilica, about seven or eight seconds of reverberation. It is supported by the visual splendor; everywhere one looks in such a building, there are statues, mosaics, paintings, windows -- all pointing toward our Lord Christ. They are beautiful and compelling - but the music breathes life into the room.

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Here are YouTube recordings of the Parsons and the Byrd – not by us; some of our services were live-streamed, but I am not aware of any recordings that remain on the Net.

RSCM report: part one

Rejoice in God, O ye Tongues; give the glory to the Lord, and the Lamb.
Nations and languages, and every Creature, in which is the breath of Life.
Let man and beast appear before him, and magnify his name together.
(Christopher Smart)

This year, I am not writing a detailed account of our RSCM experiences. Were I to make the attempt, I would mostly be repeating what I have written in other years: for example here and here. I content myself with a few observations:

Last year, the trebles began the week sounding tentative, young. This year, the distinctive sound of a strong, confident treble section was present from the first warmups. On the other hand, last year we had an unusually large group of adult tenors and basses. This year, it was one of the smallest adult contingents of recent years. It was our turn to sound tentative in the first rehearsals, for the large majority of the tenors and basses (and one of the male altos) were young men in middle school and high school, some with newly changed voices. These young choirmen are one of the special glories of the St. Louis Course, this year perhaps more than any other. By the end of the week, they sang with distinction.

This year’s music director was Stephen Buzard, who recently moved to St. James Cathedral in Chicago as organist/choirmaster after service at St. Thomas, New York City as assistant and then interim director. It was he who had to carry forward that top-line choral program after the sudden death of John Scott in 2015. Stephen attended the St. Louis Course as a treble; I remember him from those days. That made it a special delight to have him return as the course’s music director - his first time directing an RSCM Course. I expect that it will not be his last. He is every bit the equal of the distinguished musicians we have had in the past, and better than most of them. I grew quite fond of him this week, as did the choristers.

Our repertoire for the week was challenging, featuring the Britten “Rejoice in the Lamb.” One of my choristers, eyeing the forty-page choral score, asked at our first rehearsal back home: “Are we going to sing ALL of this?” Yes. And we did it exceedingly well. As if that weren’t enough, we had the Howells Collegium Regale evening canticles on the same service.

At the Sunday Mass in the Basilica, we sang three of the finest Latin motets, of which I will have more to say in Part Two:
- Parsons: Ave Maria
- Byrd: Ave verum corpus
- Duruflé: Ubi caritas

I hope that the choristers will long remember what it feels like to sing such things in that acoustic, and in the context of a Catholic Mass. I hope also that this music was an icon for those who heard it, a window into the eternal Song. It was a privilege to live intensively with this music for a week, and to sing it with these people whom I love.

That brings me to my final point: my pride in these choristers from our parish, and my affection for them, as well as for many of the adults and choristers from other congregations who have over the years become my friends. Were we to never gather again, it would be a hard thing. But we shall: as I have said many times, it is my hope that we might together make music before the Lord our God through the ages of eternity. My guess is that it might not be that different in essence from the rehearsals and services at the RSCM courses and (sometimes) back home. Then we shall hear the voices of our fellow choristers as they really are, complete in Christ and more glorious than anything we can here imagine (C. S. Lewis wrote of this, frequently).

Looking about the dining hall at meals, the chapel during rehearsals and midweek evensongs, and seeing groups of them singing, talking, laughing, playing, making new friends and renewing old friendships with young people from other choirs, sometimes supporting one another through difficulty, and at the last watching them reunite with their parents after Evensong, I thought my heart would burst for joy.

Almighty God, we entrust all who are dear to us to thy never-failing care and love, for this life and the life to come, knowing that thou art doing better things for them than we can desire or pray for; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP p. 831)

[to be continued]