A Lenten Devotion by Rick Seaholm
For if those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves.
Galatians 6:3
To read the title of this post alone, knowing it’s a Lenten devotion, you might assume I’m referring to the events of Jesus’ final week on Earth, the term “Passion” being familiar to the mainstream since the controversial 2004 film and to choral enthusiasts like me since learning of the Baroque oratorios regarding Holy Week by J.S. Bach (and others).
This post, on the other hand, regards a more secular usage of the term, and serves as my tribute to the recently departed choral impresario Joseph Flummerfelt. In addition to establishing himself as the greatest choral conductor since Robert Shaw and personally working with (by my “back of the envelope” calculation) some 3,000 students at Westminster Choir College in a stunning forty year career, he sat in the audience at 600 choral performances with the New York Philharmonic, silently knowing it was his preparation that had gotten the chorus where they were, while conductors like Leonard Bernstein and Kurt Masur took them that final mile.
When I first went to Westminster in 1999, the world was a very different place. I was freshly engaged to Nicola and off on a scary new adventure for a few years without her. That was incredibly rough on its own. Compound that with the fact that I was 22 and still trying to learn who I was. I had been a shy, classical music- and church-loving high school student who made his way to the very small choral program at UMass Lowell where even after four years none of us would ever feel like we “fit in” amongst students in more popular and populous programs like Music Business, Music Education, and Sound Recording, not to mention all the larger programs outside the College of Fine Arts. It was a challenging place to find oneself. Westminster was a whole new world: a world where choral music was king, organs sounded around campus, everyone had a church job, and smart professors and studio teachers had fan clubs clamoring for face time.
Westminster’s male population was unlike any I’d seen before with a high proportion of gay students living, working, and dining with me for two years. The campus was a place where all were welcome regardless of, well, anything! In the 1990s there would have been very few places in America as inclusive as Westminster Choir College. I believe now that many pockets of the nation are catching up, but what a place to live for a brief period during my most formative years. I’m so happy to serve an ONA church with values I learned and ingrained at that point in my life.
While this may seem a digression, it’s quite a necessary part of this story, for Dr. Flummerfelt plays heavily into that accepting culture. Young men have historically been encouraged to show evidence of their grit, strength, and virility while silencing their emotional side. WCC could not exist if that were its philosophy. Every student there is called to bear their soul on a daily basis, interpreting a solo song or keyboard work. Conducting students are called to expose themselves emotionally before their choristers and those who advance the farthest are those who learn the earliest to dismiss those commands of the outside world to hide their true self. As his performing bios and recent obituary attest, Dr. Flummerfelt had advanced the farthest of all.
He exuded passion both off-stage and on-, the consummate example of a human who became something beyond himself anytime a podium was underfoot. For those (estimated) 1,500 young men (from those wearing bell bottoms in the 1970s through those trying to make sense of the cruel world in the first days of fall semester 2001), he wore his heart on his tuxedo sleeve and taught us to turn that passion during performance into an openness of soul that would accompany us in all our future adventures.
God, as we work to keep our souls open to opportunity, conversation, and real human emotion, reveal your work in those around us, that tomorrow’s world will become for us a more transparent place where all are welcomed, respected, and valued for who we truly are and not who we are forced to pretend to be in keeping with others’ expectations. Amen