Anton Bruckner & Bartlett Butler

Anton Bruckner Bartlett Butler

I first encountered the music of Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) during my second year in college.  Though I had moved up to the “A Choir” (called the Nordic Choir) at the end of my first year, I maintained a relationship with the B Choir (called the Chapel Choir), mostly because of the group’s conductor, Bart Butler.  Primarily a historical musicologist, he programmed first-rate repertoire for us — both because he loved it, and because he felt a pedagogical obligation to introduce good music to his students, many of whom were music ed majors and would be teaching music someday. 

My college was noted for the high quality of it’s choral offerings, but that quality didn’t reflect good repertoire so much as it reflected outstanding choral technique and discipline, group cohesion, and the ability to appeal to our constituency and to recruit students (and money) for the college. The music we sang was not schlock, but I would not program most of it, myself.  

I was not unusual; I wanted the reward and recognition that came with singing in the A choir, wanted the polish and shine that were part of that experience, wanted to go on extended tours. Like other first year singers, I treated the B choir year as a necessary step on the way to the A choir.  

But even during that first year, I realized that there was something very special about what Bart Butler was offering. I didn’t grow up in a musically enriched environment, didn’t attend concerts (other than the school programs I sang in), didn’t listen to recordings of classical music. That first year, in the Chapel Choir, introduced me to sounds and musical ideals I hadn’t previously known existed.  We sang Bach, Palestrina, Schütz, Vaughan Williams, Brahms, Purcell, Byrd, others I don’t recall.  Many of my fellow students were unimpressed, but I was completely hooked, mesmerized. In the following years, I would go and listen to Chapel Choir rehearsals, in love with the repertoire, then return to sing with the Nordic Choir, in love with our success.  

During that second year, Chapel Choir sang Os justi, by Bruckner.  I attended rehearsals during which the singers struggled to come to terms with Bruckner’s angular melodic lines, his explosive emotionalism, his extreme contrasts of dynamics and tessitura, his meltingly beautiful harmonies in one passage suddenly interrupted by a strident, rhythmically compelling phrase in the following measures.  This was impolite music that grabbed me by the heart and wouldn’t let go.  It pulled me in, and I have been a Bruckner devotee ever since.  Primarily a composer of large symphonies, Bruckner composed only a handful of motets, as an adjunct to his profession as a church musician; but they are among the best, perhaps the best, sacred choral music composed in the nineteenth century.  Chorale will sing a number of them, including Os justi, on our June concert.  

I’m sure I would have encountered Bruckner on my own at some point; but I feel a deep and lasting gratitude toward Bart Butler for introducing me and a generation of college students to him, and to many another composer whose music has become my daily bread over the course of my career.