The Retirement of Choral Conductor James Vail

I read in the Los Angeles Times the other day that Dr. James Vail is conducting his last concert for St. Alban's Church in Westwood, where he has directed the choir for over 30 years. Dr. Vail was the conductor of the USC Concert Choir when I was singing with that group in the mid 1970s.

I have lots of good memories of Vail and those times. At one concert at Cal Arts we sang in the big hall that opened out to the rest of the campus allowing people (and animals) to wander freely into the area. We were about half ways through a Brahms motet when a dog traipsed in, ambled up to Vail and began sniffing his leg as it might be a fire hydrant. After a few anxious moments, the dog left, but we all wondered what Vail would have done if the dog had done his worst.

I recall the somewhat reserved Vail with an ecstatic look on his face when he conducted the Bach Bm Mass. I remember a completely different look when, on the final cutoff of the last concert of our Northern California tour, we shot off party favors.

But what I remember about Vail the most was that he was (and presumably still is) an exacting conductor and demanded that same attention to detail from his choir. I remember him painstakingly having every tenor sing a particular vowel to find out who was not blending. I don't remember, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had been me! I truly empathize with my singers when I subject them to this embarrassing but necessary torture.

I also recall how in a baroque work (was it Schütz?) he pointed to how on the word God (Gott) there was a sudden shift to a major chord. "Hey, that's pretty cool," I thought. But why had it taken me so long to realize that composers did that sort of thing all the time (and much subtler things)? Why was I so slow in recognizing the art in music?

As a student, I blame myself for being so thick headed. As a teacher, I wonder if my teachers had really done their best in getting us students to understand music at its deepest levels. It is one thing to get a choir to make a nice hairpin phrase. It is another for them to really feel that musical gesture. It is yet another to lead them to discover how carefully a composer constructs a phrase in relation to the text and how a sensitive performer will be able to communicate that emotionally and musically to an audience.

The art of music is the hardest thing to help students to fully comprehend, yet it is the most critical. Once found, it is never forgotten. It becomes the driving force behind all musical growth.

One cannot simply tell students what art is, describe in flowery terms what they are supposed to feel, or point out meaningful musical gestures. At its core, it must be discovered by the student - an "ah ha" moment when suddenly art is revealed in all its subtlety and depth. The challenge for the teacher is to set the stage for that discovery.