A Master of His Art

Joseph Flummerfelt is not a household name, but he was well-known and deeply appreciated by lovers of choral music around the world. He recently died, and this is an at-best amateur musician’s appreciation of him.

I first became aware of Dr. Flummerfelt because of the choral leadership position he held for many years at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, NJ. I knew of the College itself because of its long and outstanding tradition of preparing musicians for professional positions in churches. He was the school’s chief choral conductor, and I owned a couple of his recordings. His Westminster choirs often performed with the New York Philharmonic, and with other ensembles as well.

When our younger daughter, Rebecca, was choosing a college, she knew that she wanted to study vocal and choral music. I may have been the one who suggested to her that she look into Westminster Choir College. On the weekend we visited and she auditioned at Westminster, we were able to sit in on a rehearsal for an upcoming performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah Oratorio. Dr. Flummerfelt was working with the choir on the “Baal Choruses,” where the prophets of the “false god” challenging Israel’s “true god” cry out to Baal to light the fire on the water-soaked altar Elijah has prepared.

What impressed me at the time was not only Dr. Flummerfelt’s attention to the myriad musical details, but his eagerness to teach the students what that unusual series of choruses is all about. It’s not often choirs get to petition Baal! He was as interested in getting them into the text of the music as into the music itself. He knew that choral music, fine as it might be as just music, is a vessel to convey a story, an image, or even a faith to the hearer. I wish all choral conductors took this part of their job seriously.

My second first-person memory was at the commencement ceremony when Rebecca graduated from Westminster. Dr. Flummerfelt was the main speaker, and he gave a thoughtful, insightful, and yes, inspiring address on the relationship between breath and spirit in singing and in life. He knew, of course, that the biblical words for breath and spirit are the same in both the Hebrew and the Greek languages. He tied them together in the act of singing in his send-off for the class. I don’t know if he’d have agreed to let me call what he said a sermon, but that’s what it was to me…an inspired and inspiring homily.

In recent years Rebecca’s career path gave me my only opportunity to shake hands with Joseph Flummerfelt. Many of Rebecca’s singing colleagues in the Philadelphia area are Westminster grads, and her Crossing Choir is directed by Donald Nally, a Westminster grad and close associate of Dr. Flummerfelt. Dr. Flummerfelt sat in the pew behind ours at a Crossing concert we attended several years ago, and Rebecca introduced us to him after the concert. I doubt that he remembered the moment for long, but it was an honor to me to shake the hand that so beautifully conducted those choirs.

Joseph Flummerfelt is important not only because he was a fine choral conductor, but because he was a teacher, and an inspiring teacher at that. He left the world not only with recordings of his own work, but with a host of students who carry on his passion for the best in choral music. I am grateful our lives crossed paths—though not closely enough that I could ever call him “Flumm,” as many did. I am grateful for his influence upon Rebecca and so many others.