Have ye not known?<\/em><\/p>\n
Have ye\u00a0 not heard?<\/em><\/p>\n
Hath it not been told you from the beginning?<\/em><\/p>\n
Hath it not been told from the foundations of the earth?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(Here’s a high school choir<\/a> doing it).<\/p>\n
I sang my part, nestled into the midst of seventy college kids who, for a couple of hours, felt like a single organism that was much better than the sum of our parts, as the conductor – listed on the program as Dr. Richard Harrison Smith, and never anything else – wrung the last little bit of execution, passion and yes, joy out of the evening.<\/p>\n
And while I didn’t dare make any facial expression, or even take my eyes off the podium, I smiled inside.<\/p>\n
———-<\/p>\n
I remember “Dick” Smith, as my dad always called him, probably about the same time he moved to Jamestown, ND.\u00a0 He and his family – his daughters, Kristin and twins Karen and Kathryn, all about my age – came by our old house in Jamestown, along with his wife, June, who’d just been hired as Dad’s colleague in the Jamestown High School English department.\u00a0\u00a0 Smith had just taken over the music department at Jamestown College, after earning a PhD in music and <\/em>an MA in Biochemistry. \u00a0I wonder sometimes if academia today would know what to make of a guy like him.<\/p>\n
But \u00a0I was years away from knowing any of this.\u00a0 I was six years old.<\/p>\n
Now, if there’s one thing people in small college towns appreciate – or appreciated, in those days before the internet and ubiquitous TV and travel –\u00a0it’s whatever scraps of culture they can get.\u00a0 And Dr. Smith quickly started producing some amazing culture.<\/p>\n
In town, we noticed this mostly from the college’s annual Christmas concerts – which morphed from sleepy little affairs into six-night runs with choir, concert band and elaborate production, lighting and sets, that drew packed houses and TV coverage.\u00a0 Packing into the college’s Voorhees Chapel, to the smell of pine boughs and scorched gels, is one of the most potent memories of Christmas as a child.<\/p>\n
Unbeknownst to me – because I was years away from caring about such things – Dr. Smith, starting in 1969, built the JC Concert Choir into one of the premiere college choirs in the United States.\u00a0 One review from the seventies – and no, I couldn’t find it if I tried – placed JC’s choir among the top three small-college choirs in the US – in the same league as the legendary St. Olaf Choir, in the (choir geeks will know this) Christenson era.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In 1972, the Jamestown College choir became the first American choir to sing at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. \u00a0In 1978, he engineered a visit to Jamestown by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra to accompany the choir in a concert – the highlight being Bach’s Magnificat<\/em>, if I recall correctly.<\/p>\n
You might be thinking “this is a small college choir that fought above its weight”. \u00a0It was – but that wasn’t even the amazing part.<\/p>\n
The amazing thing about Smith’s choirs throughout their history?\u00a0 While the other top-flight choirs, like St. Olaf’s, were made up of music majors and especially voice students, Jamestown just wasn’t that big<\/em>.\u00a0 In the seventies, the place had 600-700 students, maybe a couple of dozen of them music majors.\u00a0\u00a0 Over ten percent of the entire campus <\/em>sang in the choir – less than a quarter of them music majors.\u00a0\u00a0Imagine a tournament-grade basketball team that was 3\/4 walk-ons from the Theatre and English and Nursing departments; it was the same basic idea.<\/p>\n
And so year after year, for almost thirty years, Dr. Smith created top-flight college choirs from virtually nothing.<\/p>\n
———-<\/p>\n
When I graduated from high school. \u00a0I didn’t know what I wanted to be – but I knew I wasn’t going to major in music. \u00a0Still, I’d\u00a0had some musical training – none of it involving singing.\u00a0 I played guitar, cello and harmonica, and sang in a garage band, in a voice that was best suited for shouting out Rolling Stones and Clash covers. \u00a0That was all the singing I ever wanted to do.\u00a0 I was an instrumental guy, and proud of it.<\/p>\n
I’d known Dr. Smith and his family for about 12 years by that point – his wife June was my high school creative writing teacher; Karen and Kathryn were classmates at Jamestown High School (Kristin graduated a year before me).<\/p>\n
My mom worked as a secretary in the nursing department at Jamestown College, which would net me a nice tuition break, so in the spring of 1981 I enrolled at “JC”. \u00a0Of course, every penny counted, so I seized on every scholarship I could find.\u00a0 I got a grant to work as a stagehand in the theatre department and, late in the game, was recuited to play cello in a chamber group, and percussion and guitar for the concert and stage bands.<\/p>\n
One day, my senior year of high school, I went up to the campus to close the deal on the music grants.\u00a0 I walked into Voorhees Chapel for a chat with Linda Banister – and my spidey-sense started buzzing away; something seemed just a little bit off.<\/p>\n
There were always plenty of women auditioning. then and always,\u00a0for 35 or so soprano and alto slots – but in a school like JC, finding guys who could fill the choir’s 35-odd tenor, baritone and bass seats was a constant battle.\u00a0\u00a0 Smith, and his assistant, Linda Banister (a voice teacher who did double duty as the choir’s manager) prowled the campus, looking for guys who sounded like they that could be jury-rigged into instruments in a choral ensemble; they filtered through high school transcripts looking for hidden semesters in “choir”; they staked out football practice, listened in the cafeteria, and even (rumor had it) prowled the dorms, listening for guys singing in the shower.\u00a0 The men’s sections – the tenors, baritones and basses – were a grab bag of football players, computer-department night owls, and just-plain guys who could, to their amazement, carry a tune, most of them with absolutely no musical training whatsoever, most of them enticed by having $1,000 a year \u00a0lopped off their $4,000+ tuition; such was the choir’s clout.<\/p>\n
Anyway – after a too-short discussion that ended up with grant in hand way too quickly, Mrs. Bannister said “Now you need to go down to Dr. Smith’s office”.<\/p>\n
“Er – to\u00a0 talk about the instrumental stuff?” I asked, warily.<\/p>\n
“Yeah, sure!” she said, fast enough to make me even more suspicious.<\/p>\n
I walked downstairs into Dr Smith’s office, in the basement of the chapel.\u00a0 He was already sitting behind the piano.<\/p>\n
“Hi, Mitch”, he said – first names were fine, he’d known me forever.\u00a0 Then, before I could respond, “OK, say “Mi Mi Mi” and sing along with this pattern”.\u00a0 He pounded out a “C” arpeggio.<\/p>\n
Nonplussed, I sang.\u00a0 “Mi Mi Mi Mi Mi Miiii”, up and down the “C” chord..<\/p>\n
He walked me through several more patterns, up and down the keyboard, figuring out my range.\u00a0 “You have a good ear; we can work on the technique.\u00a0 You’re a baritone!”<\/p>\n
And that was pretty much it. I’d been shanghaied. Linda Banister was waiting outside the office.\u00a0 “We really need you in the choir…” she said.\u00a0 Being a small-town Scandinavian, my need to please others would have kicked in even had she not told me that singing in the choir was worth a $500\/semester off tuition.<\/p>\n
And so I joined the choir. \u00a0I’d be in the baritone section come the fall.<\/p>\n
———-<\/p>\n
Or would eventually, anyway. \u00a0Because before we could start choir that fall, Dr. Smith – and all of us, really – had a wrenching, existential diversion.<\/p>\n
On top of being a great musician, arranger and director, Dr. Smith was also a footnote in medical history. \u00a0A very important one, actually.<\/p>\n
In the summer of 1981 – the hot, arid three months before I started college – word made the rounds in Jametown that Dr. Smith had gotten very, very sick at the family’s lake cabin in northern Minnesota. \u00a0A very rare congenital enzyme deficiency had caused his body to start to destroy its own liver.\u00a0He was in a coma and near death at a hospital in Fargo.<\/p>\n
And at the metaphorical and literal last moment, the decision was made to fly him to the University of Pittsburgh for a medical procedure that teetered on the brink of science fiction at the time; a liver transplant.<\/p>\n
At the time, liver transplants were almost as rare and difficult as heart transplants; the liver may be, after the brain, the body’s most complex organ. \u00a0The biochemical system that the liver manages is as convoluted as anything in nature. \u00a0And it showed, medically speaking; at the time, nobody had lived even a year with a transplanted liver. \u00a0 The body inevitably <\/em>rejected the tranplant, as if it was a bacterium or a splinter. \u00a0The way it was designed to do.<\/p>\n
Liver transplants were so experimental, insurance companies were still years away from covering them. \u00a0The key to success – and it was an immutably elusive key, up until the spring of 1981 – was to quell the body’s immune system’s natural response of sequestering it off and killing it.<\/p>\n
Shortly before Dr. Smith flew to Pittsburgh that summer, a new drug – Ciclosporin <\/a>– was introduced. \u00a0Refined from a fungus found in the soil somewhere in Norway, it’d been used in treating a variety of other diseases – but it was going to be tried for the first time to prevent organ transplant rejection.<\/p>\n
And Dr. Smith was Patient 1.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t just the drugs. \u00a0Some of the very equipment and techniques that make the miracle of liver transplantation seem so commonplace today were invented as a result of Dr. Smith’s surgery. \u00a0From a Pitt Medical School publication on the transplant<\/a>:<\/p>\n
Fortunately, a donor liver became available. As Dr. Starzl \u00a0(the surgeon who pioneered the technique of the live transplant at Pittsburgh) pointed out in his book, the surgical team fought throughout the night to control the bleeding during Richard\u2019s surgery.<\/p>\n
Anesthesiologist Dr. John Sassano administered two hundred units of blood, pumping each unit by hand. When Richard survived the operation and Dr. Sassano\u2019s job was done, Dr. Starzl reported that Dr. Sassano broke down and cried out of relief and exhaustion. Dr. Sassano went on to invent the\u00a0Sassano pump, a rapid blood infusion system still in use today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The surgery lasted 14 hours.<\/p>\n
That I’m writing this article today should tell you it worked – all the pieces; the surgical skill, the brand-new, untried techniques and drugs, and of course the liver, from a 19 year old auto-crash victim.<\/p>\n
———-<\/p>\n
It was a solid semester before he came back to the choir. \u00a0The cocktail of drugs he’d been given, including the Ciclosporin, had played hob with his system. \u00a0He’d gained a lot of weight; his formerly hawk-like face was swollen. \u00a0And he could only direct for short periods, sitting on a stool, before he’d get tired and hand the choir over to his backup director.<\/p>\n
But once he started, you could tell he lived for it.<\/p>\n
And during the second semester of my freshman year, Dr. Smith gradually worked his way back onto the podium; by the time of our spring tour, he managed to direct (as I recall) every concert at every stop on the way.<\/p>\n
I’ll let that sink in; in eight months, he went from comatose to doing his job (albeit not at 100% just <\/em>yet), with a stop along the way for a gruelling, body-crushing, experimental, never-before-seen bit of beyond-major surgery.<\/p>\n
We knew it was remarkable back then; having nobody to compare it with – every previous liver transplantee had died in that kind of time – none of us knew how remarkable it was.<\/p>\n
———-<\/p>\n
If my experience with high school music groups – orchestra, stage band and the like – was like Pop Warner football, choir with Dr. Smith was like suddenly walking into Vince Lombardi’s training camp.<\/p>\n
Smith was a renowned arranger and conductor; his specialty, oddly, was traditional Afro-American spirituals; a Canadian paper once praised the Choir for being the most authentic-sounding choir of rural white kids they’d ever heard.<\/p>\n
Beyond that?\u00a0 The programming every year was very <\/em>non-trivial. \u00a0It\u00a0spun between spirituals, modern\/avant garde choral work, and the classics of the repertoire – and by classics, I mean the hard<\/em> stuff.<\/p>\n
The highlights?\u00a0 Every couple years, Smith would break out a new Bach double-choir motet.\u00a0 My freshman and senior years, it was Motet Number 7,\u00a0Singet Dem Herrn<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 15 minutes and 90-odd pages long, it required the choir to split into two separate choirs, singing Bach’s, well, baroque composition in\u00a0eight part counterpoint and harmony.<\/p>\n
All from memory.\u00a0 Smith allowed no sheet music on stage, and the choir was rarely accompanied (as in, one song that I recall in four years).<\/p>\n
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