Charisma
Chorale featuring Charis’ poems, composed by Julia Locke
I have always loved choral music and singing in a choir. Though I haven’t done it for many years, it is still something I love and would love to do again. I sang in high school choir one year and in two choirs at BYU while a student there. In addition, I studied conducting, sight singing and music theory while in college. In the 1970’s, when we lived in Michigan, when my children were young (born in ‘71, ‘74, and ‘76), I was directing the choir at church, and when the Michigan Mormon Concert Choir was formed, I began also singing with them. It was an 80 voice group under the direction of Ed Yager with Alan Young as the accompanist, and once again, I loved having the kind of choir experience I had enjoyed during my school years.
With my three little boys growing up so fast, I had little time to spend on hobbies beyond working in the church. Besides choir and congregational conducting, I worked at various times with the children and teen programs, and at some time during this period, I also taught a monthly class for the church women in appreciation of the arts. However, whenever I had a spare moment, I sat at my piano improvising, writing down musical phrases that appealed to me. I often wrote arrangements of hymns or Christmas music to use with my church choir, and I was thinking of writing something appropriate for the larger concert choir.
With Charis’ death in 1970, she was always much on my mind during this time. My music helped to express my mournful feelings much better than words. I don’t believe that my sons understood what I was going through during their early years. I really have never analyzed that aspect of that time, but it no doubt had its effect upon them. With my poor piano skills, I’m certain my family got tired of hearing my stumbling at the keyboard, but they seldom complained. Sometimes, however, they had to holler to draw me out of my musical trance back into the world of young motherhood.
Still, I wanted to write something of worth. I don’t remember when I got the idea to compose something in my sister’s memory, something to honor her and add to her legacy, not something mournful but something that would represent her love of life and her convictions and also express my love for her. Since choral music was my artistic outlet, I decided to compose music to one of her poems. I read through them looking for possible candidates. There were many that I would have loved to include, but their length was a problem. I studied the shorter ones that would lend themselves to a choral piece. I also was looking for rhythm that suggested musicality. I wanted to use poems that demonstrated her faith and love of life, but finally, I chose a sad one, Butterfly. I was so happy with the way the piece turned out, I did a second one. Before I knew it, I had written seven songs—enough for a 20 minute song cycle which I titled Charisma.
It was just in handwritten manuscript, but it was fairly neat and readable. So one early Saturday morning in 1978 or 1979, I mustered my courage and took it to Ed Yager and Alan Young before rehearsal. Alan was especially impressed. He was a master of improvisation, and as he played the score, he embellished, improving my meager accompaniment as he went. Ed agreed to give it a try. I temporarily left my precious score with him to make copies, and the next week, he presented me with an octavo of Charisma that he had had copied from my score…enough copies for the whole choir. We were going to prepare it for performance by the choir. You can imagine how happy and excited I was! One thing about choral work is that the choir is the instrument of the composer and of the conductor. We literally ‘play’ the choir, and you can never really hear the music until you have a choir to sing it. Of course, nowadays, computers have changed that, but I didn’t have that back then. Because of the choir, I was able to hear my composition truly for the first time outside of my own imagination.
I believe the premier public performance of the piece was at a concert at the Bloomfield Hills Stake Center sometime during the spring or summer of 1979. Ed conducted the choir. However, on September 27, 1979, we were to perform a benefit concert for the renovation of Detroit Orchestra Hall. We had performed an earlier benefit concert there sometime prior to that, and it was a project we enjoyed supporting. Sometime early in the rehearsal time, Ed asked me if I’d like to conduct the piece in the September concert, and of course, I jumped at it. What a thrill it was for me to have 80 voices at my command throughout the rehearsal period leading up to the concert. I felt so honored to be given that experience, and it is a memory I cherish.
Mom, Dad, and Sister Genevieve traveled from Pennsylvania to attend the concert. I believe we left our little boys with a sitter. We shared the program that evening with a well-known Mormon pianist whose name escapes me. He performed the first half of the program, and we followed. When it came time for us to perform Charisma, I strode confidently to the podium. Because I am short, they had put a platform there for me to stand on. As I stepped up onto the platform, the heel of my high heeled shoe caught in my dress hem. Fortunately, I was calm enough to reach down and disentangle my hem, avoiding what might have been an embarrassing and probably injurious accident.
Dad taped the song cycle from his seat in the audience with his portable tape player. Many years later, in the late nineties, I transferred that taped recording to a CD. I also had found a cassette recording of some of our rehearsals, both with Ed and myself conducting. It was such a sweet discovery to revisit that creative process and our time of learning a piece that had never been performed before. The rehearsal recording is as precious to me as that of the performance, maybe even more so because it includes my own voice leading the choir through some of the rough spots in the score, stopping them to do a passage over and over until we got it right.
The creation and performance of this work was a labor of love that took many hours over the course of a year and a half. After our concert at Orchestra Hall, the choir also traveled to Salt Lake City in July 1980 to perform in the Tabernacle on Temple Square in celebration of the church’s Bicentennial Celebration. Ed begged me to make the trip to conduct the song cycle, but I felt that I could not. Jack was traveling so much for his job at Ford Motor Company that I didn’t feel I could leave during that time. I’ve always regretted not making that trip. Ed conducted my song cycle in the Tabernacle in my place. Unless one of the ensemble members snitched a copy and has performed it elsewhere unknown to me, that was the final performance of the work.
However, it was not the end of the piece’s life. It was given new life through Michael’s use of Butterfly and other elements of my work in his composition of the music for Patty’s jazz ballet Unfinished Fragments, done so with my full permission. I’m glad, by the way, that aside from Butterfly, Patty used different poems for her piece. It allowed for artistic interpretation of more of Charis’ poems. My Charisma music has taken quite a journey. Perhaps someday, I will have the happy fortune to perform it again.
I know this is the work of an amateur composer, but it is also strictly ‘amateur’, i.e. the work of someone who did it for the love of it. Charisma is my homage to my dear sister Charis. Mom and Dad didn’t realize when they named her as an infant that she would grow into such a charismatic woman, someone who was loved by all who knew her, a sensitive and artistic soul with a remarkable insight into life even as a young girl. Her wisdom, her genuine goodness, her regard for truth and integrity—her personification of so many admirable qualities still guide those of us who loved her. Still today, forty four years after her death at the age of 29, I still miss her and somehow feel her with me even now. Charisma was and still is for her.
Julia Ann ‘Julie’ Greenwood Locke
(Sister to Charis)