The Mormon Tabernacle Choir by Michael Hicks

Author:Michael Hicks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252097065
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

The First Presidency had to have noted that the list nowhere mentioned the Choir’s missionary assignment, which in their minds trumped all the others. Now Cornwall was moving in the same art-based direction.

Cornwall’s aesthetic aims would compete for dominance when the Choir returned to record making almost a decade after their experimental stereo discs for Fletcher. During the last two and a half years of the war, the government had essentially shut down all commercial record making in the United States because of a ban on the nonmilitary use of shellac. After the war ended, Columbia had devised a new speed and a new disc material—vinyl. The combination of these two things would enable what was once called an “album”—a binder of short-playing discs needed to encompass a complete single classical work— to be consolidated into a single, larger (and less breakable), long-playing disc. These new long-playing “albums,” also known as LPs, could also contain sets of shorter pieces.

The twentieth anniversary of the radio broadcast occurred in 1949. Looking forward to the anniversary, Frank Stanton, now president of CBS, had arranged for Columbia Masterworks to record two albums of the Choir doing, in effect, a “best-of” selection from their radio shows. The Choir recorded these sets 2 June to 4 June in the Tabernacle, using the Church’s equipment, which was more accustomed to dealing with the unwieldy Tabernacle acoustics than the equipment Columbia had brought to the building. Under the simple title The Mormon Tabernacle Choir of Salt Lake City, Columbia issued the first album in October—twelve tracks opening with the Choir’s two most popular radio hymns (“Come, Come Ye Saints” and “O My Father”) followed by six more hymns and three anthems, ending with “Lift Thine Eyes” from Elijah. To be safe, the label issued this album in the three competing formats of the day: four 12-inch 78rpm discs, four 7-inch 45rpm discs, or one ten-inch 33⅓rpm LP.

The other nine tracks the Choir recorded were released the following March with a “Vol. II” attached to the original title. This time the label dropped the 7-inch format, whose use was veering toward popular music, but kept the other two formats. This new album displayed the Choir’s showier, more pretentious side, all but one of its tracks being anthems, ranging from Evan Stephens’s “Let the Mountains Shout for Joy” to the Wagner Pilgrim’s Chorus to short works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and, of course, Mendelssohn (this time from St. Paul). The Saturday Review called the results “as fine choral recordings as have yet been done, in spite of the echo of the Tabernacle.” The Tabernacle Choir, the magazine said, “sings circles around some plushier, less spontaneous groups.” High Fidelity invoked familiar thoughts about the Choir, praising its “massive, homogeneous tone. . . . as long as it is dealing with nonpolyphonic music.” At the same time, these records began to be used to train local choirs of all denominations. One non-Mormon choral director, for example, wrote to Cornwall that of the thirty-five members of his choir, only five could read music.

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