L. Stanley Glarum, 1908-1976
L. Stanley Glarum, a prodigious choral composer and conductor who published over 200 compositions in his lifetime, was a man firmly rooted in his Northwestern heritage. Born in Portland on April 19, 1908, Glarum had his start in choral music immediately following his graduation from high school in 1926, when he became the accompanist and arranger for the Portland Advertising Club Gleemen. In this group, he learned to arrange for the male chorus and for male quartet. During the next ten years, he also studied jazz and classical piano, organ, theory, and composition privately. He left Portland after that period for St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN, where he studied composition with F. Melius Christiansen, the famous Norwegian-born conductor and composer of a cappella and predominantly sacred music in the Lutheran tradition. It was in this time with Christiansen that Glarum began to develop his compositional style; the influence of Christiansen’s style would indeed be present in Glarum’s music for his entire career.
L. Stanley Glarum Ca. 1950
Glarum's Education
Glarum graduated from St. Olaf in 1939 with a degree in music education, upon which time he got a job teaching high school music in Battle Ground, Washington. He taught choir, band, strings, and general music at the high school until 1942, when he joined the Air Force. He served through World War II, directing and arranging music for the Air Force Choirs. Following the war, he attended the University of Washington, where he studied composition with George Frederick McKay. It was just after the completion of his studies at the University of Washington that Glarum's first works, which were sacred a cappella choral pieces, were published. After receiving his M.A. in composition, he joined the faculty at Lewis & Clark College in 1947, where he would teach until his retirement in 1975.
Lewis & Clark College Choir, 1949-50
Building the Choir Program at Lewis & Clark
At Lewis & Clark, Glarum built a formidable choral program on the model of Christiansen’s program at St. Olaf. Beginning in his second year at the school, Glarum began touring the choir around the west coast, and later around the country. The choir toured to cities and states including Salt Lake City; Hawaii; Vancouver, B.C.; Denver; St. Louis; and Chicago under his direction, in addition to many tours around Oregon, Washington, and California. He became the chair of the music department in 1959, and the Lewis & Clark Choir served as the official broadcasting choir for the Presbyterian Church in the USA for the year of 1962. In this and other capacities, the choir appeared on numerous national radio and television broadcasts. The choir also released four highly professional LPs during Glarum's tenure.
Under Glarum, the choir’s signature piece was Christiansen’s Beautiful Saviour, though they often performed Glarum’s own compositions. His works were performed nationally and internationally, by choirs including the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (which performed an all-Glarum concert) and the Mormon Youth Concert Choir, a group of 4,000 young singers.
In 1968, Glarum was awarded an honorary doctorate by Whitworth College. As a conductor, he also performed and led workshops around the United States, and in 1969 he organized and developed an annual conducting workshop in Cannon Beach, OR, which by 1972 was already attended by over 500 music educators. It was Cannon Beach, in fact, where Glarum spent his summers composing, and where he eventually retired to in 1975 and spent the final years of his life until he died on December 24, 1976.
The typed text of Glarum's lecture, "The Mysteries of Composition," 1973.
Glarum as a Composer
In addition to his work as a conductor and teacher, L. Stanley Glarum was an avid composer whose output was fundamentally shaped by his belief that music, especially singing, should be accessible to all. Perhaps the singular hallmark of his choral works is their singability; Glarum took particular care in writing for the comfortable ranges of each voice part with easily accessible texts and elegant harmonic structures. In his own words, “singing is such a natural act and I want to make it possible for the greatest number of people to enjoy the choral art”.
The same straight-forwardness that is prominent in his musical writing was also prominent in his compositional process. In a lecture entitled “The Mysteries of Composition” that he gave at George Fox University in January 1973, Glarum crystallizes his philosophy by declaring that:
"There are no mysteries of composition... the ingredients which I consider necessary are a pencil, manuscript paper, an idea and time set aside to do the job. You cannot do without any of the four... but perhaps the most important of the four is 'an idea'."
Glarum also emphasized the importance of text over music, clarifying that the music is merely “a vehicle to support the text” and to transmit the meaning of a work from singer to listener. His often homophonic writing style, in which the whole choir sings the text in the same rhythm together, exemplifies the importance of the lyric content of his works. Often derived from psalms or other religious texts, Glarum focused on choosing words that were both singable and meaningful to a large audience.
“Praise Ye The Lord” for double choir showcases Glarum’s philosophy of composition with its singability and clean yet interesting harmonies. The accompanying recording is of the Lewis & Clark College Choir under Glarum’s direction.
Glarum and the A Capella Tradition
Glarum’s output, almost always structured in the a cappella tradition he learned from Christiansen, was highly religious, musically uplifting, and very accessible for its era. His philosophy was centered on the idea that music should not be an activity reserved for the very talented, or as he put it, “EVERYONE SHOULD SING.” He kept on his desk an anonymous quote reading, “The forest would be very quiet if all the birds were silent except the best singers,” and that philosophy is reflected in the fact that his music was almost universally designed for performance by an amateur church choir or a student chorus. That is not to say that his style was not sophisticated; in fact, his harmonic and rhythmic complexity was quite innovative for the style that he was composing in, and he was an important figure in the revival of religious a cappella music in the mid-twentieth century. Rather, he believed that music should be above all singable, saying “altos can easily and beautifully sing the high A that tenors struggle for – why not let the altos sing it?”
In addition to his passion for religious music, Glarum also brought a variety of musical influences to the Lewis & Clark campus. His interests led him to bring conductors such as Norman Luboff, the composer of popular choral music, and Jester Hairston, the arranger of spirituals and other popular choral music, to work with students on campus. He also brought the art music composers Alan Hovhaness and Darius Milhaud to campus, and put together concerts celebrating their works, and in Hovhaness’s case, featuring the composer himself as conductor. Glarum was also interested in world music, collaborating in a choral performance with the traditional Japanese koto player Kimio Eto, and often programing works from a variety of cultures and traditions.