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[Back to index of May 2007 articles] End of an era By Lucy Chumbley
Returning home after the final hymn, the young Scribner - who will retire as director of music at St. Alban's at Pentecost after 47 years - would frequently conduct a family service. "I would have bulletins, readings, designed," he remembers. "One of my early obsessive compulsive tendencies is that I would type things out of the Bible, and if it wasn't perfect, I would rip it up. Because it's the Bible. And it has to be perfect, right?" He laughs, but admits that although he's now 71, that perfectionist affliction has died hard - if it has died at all. "Sometimes I feel little attacks of it," he confesses, stabbing his finger in the air like a hornet about to sting: Sometimes he'll tear up an envelope if he has made a mistake in the address rather than scratch out the error and leave an ugly mark. "I do like things to be right," he concedes. "I sometimes suffer when they're not." "Yes, he is obsessive compulsive," says Anne Keiser, a longtime member of both choirs. "And we love it and it drives us crazy and we love it all at the same time. He expects top-of-the-line from us." "He is detail-oriented almost to a fault," says Rick Dirksen, who has sung solos in Scribner's choirs for years and whose father, the late Washington National Cathedral organist, choirmaster and composer Richard Wayne Dirksen, was one of Scribner's most cherished mentors and friends. "He insists that everything be done to the highest level of perfection that he can attain." But as a musician - and, in fact, in life, Dirksen says, it's one of the most satisfying experiences to know that "whatever you did, you did the very best that you could." He began taking piano lessons at age 10, he says, but when he was 13, he got a "new and very inspiring piano teacher" and set his sites on becoming a concert pianist. "I was absolutely rabid fanatic obsessive compulsive," he says. "I just practiced day and night." In high school he began playing the organ, and on Jan. 1, 1952, he started his first paid job as an organist at the First Presbyterian Church in Cumberland. He received a scholarship to Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory, and after graduating with honors, moved to Washington, D.C., to become the conductor of the American University Chorale. He was soon hired as assistant organist at Washington National Cathedral and organist/choirmaster at St. Alban's. As his commitments elsewhere expanded, he left the cathedral, but has retained his St. Alban's position to this day. So it should come as no surprise that this January, when he ended the St. Alban's choir rehearsal 10 minutes early to announce that he was retiring after more than four decades, his choir members were - and remain - deeply saddened by his decision. "It's hard to sing with a lump in your throat," says Carleen Dixon, who has sung first soprano in both Scribner's choirs since the mid 1970s. "I just find myself close to tears a lot of the time. It has been the one consistently good thing in my life other than my family all of these years." "We're all talking about that final Sunday, what are we going to do," says Keiser, who sings first alto. "It's like a family breaking up." Dirksen, a bass, describes the choir's final Easter Sunday performance, singing among old friends with Scribner conducting three of his father's compositions, as "bittersweet." With just a handful of Sundays ahead, memories loom large for the longstanding choir members. As well as all the hours spent in that intense connection between conductor and choir, there are a multitude of personal recollections: Scribner playing the organ for family weddings and funerals; holding children now college age when they were small. And of all the shared laughter that has seeped into the choir room walls. "He's a lot of fun," Dirksen says. "Rare is the rehearsal where he won't say something that he's trying to get across that will completely break the group up." Choir member Jim Shaffran has been penciling these "Normanisms" - "Basses, you sound like you're extracting barbed wire from your tonsils;" "Altos, you've got a couple of nasty curves there" - into the margins of his music for years. "You'll take music and you'll read through and see something Norman said seven years ago and start laughing all over again," Dirksen says. For his part, Scribner also finds his choir members highly entertaining. "I could write a very funny book," he says. "I could probably write a whole chapter on The Page Turn." Laughter aside, it is Scribner's deep spiritual sensibility that many agree is his most distinctive gift. "My worship is really kind of interlaced with my work," he says. "My work is my worship and my worship is my work. My life has been in the church and I have deep religious feelings that are at the absolute center of my life. "To me music is almost a religion in itself because it's magical how sound waves can arouse such passions in an individual. It's just like magic. You can listen to a B minor mass from Bach and walk out and be incapable of being a bad person." For Scribner, choral music is all about "adorning and enlivening the words." And in religious music "there's a spiritual underpinning that makes the phrases glow," he says, so he makes it his mission to convey the meaning of the music to the singers. "The text is the whole reason for the music being there," Dirksen says. "It is through that elementary focus that Norman has been most effective in communicating." Whether the words are in another language - his choirs have performed in more than 20 tongues, including Czech, Finnish, Greek and Yiddish - or just arcane, "Norman will always take the time to make sure his choristers understand," Dirksen says. "He brings a level of understanding of what it is you're singing," Keiser says. "Then you compound that with Norman's deep feeling and commitment to the music itself, and if that doesn't communicate over to a congregation, I don't know what does." A large man with expansive gestures, Scribner's conducting is "very clear," Dixon says, "something I think comes from his instrumental background. He has incredible ears - he can just hear the most subtle nuance. He's also a very humble man, which is something you don't always find in a conductor - very appreciative of other people and their talents." That someone so magnificently gifted has remained so loyal to a parish choir all these years is a testament to his humility, his choristers say, and also to his deep faith in God. "I believe that we're a channel for spiritual forces," Scribner says. "It's our job to let them flow through us into the lives of others." [Back to index of May 2007 articles]
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As a minister's son, Norman Scribner attended the Sunday service at his father's church, Centre Street United Methodist in Cumberland, Md., each week.
It's a trait members of his renowned choirs - the St. Alban's Senior Choir and the Choral Arts Society of Washington, both of which he founded in the 1960s - immediately recognize.
While Scribner's connection to the church came as naturally as opening a service leaflet, he found his musical calling a little bit later.