Gregg Smith Singers At 50

Ask Gregg Smith about the highlights of his 50 years with the group that bears his name and you'll soon hear about Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives and William Schuman, Ned Rorem and Lukas Foss, Elliott Carter and William Hawley, Fred Thayer and Martha Sullivan. Some names are well-known. Others, you come to find out, are known primarily because the Gregg Smith Singers found them, commissioned them to write pieces, and then performed and recorded their work.

Arguably, no chorus has done more to nurture and preserve new choral music, particularly American choral music, than the 17-member Gregg Smith Singers. A quick read through the group's discography—130 albums, cassettes, and CDs, 90 of contemporary American choral music—astounds with its range and depth. Of particular note is their dedication to recording not just one or two of a composer's pieces but an entire body of work. In the 1960s, for example, the Singers set out to record all of the choral music of Charles Ives. Two of those early albums won Grammy awards, and in 2006 the Singers hope to complete this decades-long project with the release of a CD of Ives's early choral music.

In some ways, championing contemporary composers comes naturally to Smith. He is, after all, a prolific composer himself, having written more than 400 works, some 100 of which have made their way into recordings. In fact, it was his composing that inadvertently gave birth to the Gregg Smith Singers in 1955. Smith needed a group to perform his arrangements of the music of Stephen Foster for a television biography of the composer. The project was a success and the singers decided to stay together.

Smith's devotion to living, and especially American, composers also owes a good deal to luck and serendipity. In 1959, Smith and his fledgling group of singers were asked to participate in the Monday Evening Concert Series in Los Angeles, an important early venue for contemporary music. The way it worked was Robert Craft, the series director, would call Smith and say, "We'd like your singers to perform this work next month."

"It's interesting because we performed a lot of things just because we were assigned to do them," Smith recalls. "At a certain point they wanted me to do some Schoenberg. Unlike a lot of people, I was willing to go out there and try it."

Because of those early experiences, the Singers were asked to perform Schoenberg at the Edinburgh Festival in 1961. A London music reviewer singled out the concert as one of four highlights of a festival that featured hundreds of performances. Thereafter, Smith embraced Schoenberg as an essential part of the Singers' repertoire and made several recordings of his works.

"That was one of the first lessons," says Smith, "that you can't be afraid. When I first started on Schoenberg, it was so hard that I just didn't think I could do it. Then bit by bit, things began to make sense, and 12-tone music began to make sense. Just working on it brought the music to the foreground. Now the Schoenberg pieces, even the wild ones, Opus 27 and 28, are wonderful to me."

The association with Craft and the Monday Evening Concerts also brought Smith and the Singers into contact with another great composer - Igor Stravinsky. The Singers recorded his Mass with Stravinsky himself conducting in 1961, and in the 10 years before his death in 1971, performed and recorded many of Stravinsky's works, including what Smith calls the "heavenly" Symphony of Psalms.

During the 1980s and 90s, the group devoted itself to recording complete albums of American composers, including Elliott Carter, Irving Fine, Louise Talma, William Schuman, Ned Rorem, and Lukas Foss. Even with these major bodies of work under his belt, Smith still is on the lookout for the next "heavenly" piece, yet unheard, by some unknown composer. It might come out of the Composer's Workshop held every summer at the Adirondack Festival of American Music, which Smith founded and directs. There, amid the pine trees of upstate New York, composers present their new choral works to the Singers for a reading and critique.

"It's a marvelous opportunity for composers not only to hear their works sung but to hear other composers' works," says Smith. He estimates the Singers have read more than 200 new works as part of the Festival, and hopes such venues will encourage composers to keep at it even when the going gets tough.

For Smith, the lesson is simple. It's something he learned from Stravinsky: Do the music that you love. "Stravinsky was in love with the music, he focused entirely on the music, that was the essence of him," Smith says. "My advice to young directors is, don't be afraid to do the music that you want to do. As you do in all of life, respond to the challenges of the works."