Mormons: Singing Saints

For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me, and it shall be answered with a blessing upon their heads.

—Doctrine & Covenants, 25:12

During the long and uncertain trek westward over the plains in 1847, Brigham Young’s Mormon pioneers obeyed this admonition, never beginning a day without a song or meeting the night without a hymn of thanks. So ingrained did the joyful habit of singing become that Young founded a choir at journey’s end. This week the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, having long since won world renown, starts its 35th year of radio broadcasting—the longest sustained network program in history.

It was in 1867 that the Salt Lake colony finished its famous 8,000-seat tabernacle, built to house the choir’s sound of worshipful music. The tabernacle was and is an acoustical masterpiece, in which one can hear a pin drop 250 ft. away. The choir grew to fit the building and to become the most powerful unofficial missionary that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ever had. Beginning in 1929,” Sunday after Sunday the half-hour radio show known as Music and the Spoken Word from the Crossroads of the West reshaped the world’s image of Mormonism.

Polyphony, Not Polygamy. The program and the choir were never—and are not—intended to proselytize. In fact, the word Mormon is mentioned only twice in each show, and then only in the name of the choir. “The aim of the broadcasts was and is intended to achieve a universality,” says Apostle Richard L. Evans, who for 33 years has supplied the spoken word. His sermonettes heard with the choir contain no doctrine of the Latter-day Saints, in stead deal with Christian ethics. “Don’t let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was,” he may say. Or, “There is no way of avoiding the moral consequences of a dishonest, unethical or immoral act.”

The choir sings Mormon hymns no more often than Catholic or Protestant ones. But Mormon President David McKay called the choir’s general effect “inestimable” in helping 13,000 Mormon missionaries over the world bring in multitudes of converts (100,000 last year) to a church once only known and derided for its long-banned polygamy. “The choir makes friends and opens doors,” says Richard Condie, 65, choirmaster since 1957 and a professor of music at the University of Utah. He directs 375 singers, divided into four-part men’s and four-part women’s choruses. All members are adult volunteers, including many housewives, but also four doctors, three lawyers, two bankers and one dentist—plus a glass blower and a hog caller.

Uncanned Covenant. The choir has never been better. When Condie took over, he auditioned everyone in it and let 75 go at once. “It wasn’t a pleasant thing to do,” he says. Now there are auditions at least every two years. Rehearsals are held only two hours a week, but the choir never actually rehearses the entire radio program as it is broadcast. Condie tapes rehearsals, plays them through to himself, and corrects flaws next time around.

The repertory of 1,200 numbers goes from spirituals to Bach, Beethoven and Mendelssohn. Backed up by the 10,000-pipe tabernacle organ, with Veteran Organists Alexander Schreiner or Frank Asper, the choir, nicknamed “the singing Saints,” has a weight and body unexcelled in choral sound. But “we have not let this become a canned thing,” says Director Condie, and he often explores more dissonant modern music. Still, his favorite is a hymn written by one who went with Brigham Young’s wagon train, William Clayton, while the prairie winds blew about him:

Come, come, ye Saints, no toil nor labor fear,

But with joy wend your way;

Tho’ hard to you this journey may appear,

Grace shall be as your day.