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Stanford’s William Mahrt, a leading scholar in early music, died today at 85. He conducted Gregorian chant for more than 60 years and inspired and guided generations of scholars. He directed Stanford’s Early Music Singers and St. Ann Choir, a Gregorian schola. He was also a personal friend. This is an article I wrote for Stanford Report about Bill Mahrt on October 2nd, 2007.

For nearly two millennia, the sound has been a regular pulse beneath the skin of Western civilization. It reverberated through Dante’s mind as he scratched out the cantos of the Purgatorio. It was the inaudible vein of thought running beneath the chords of Mozart’s Requiem. Crusaders trudged to the East with these melodies in their heart, but they were too late – Jerusalem had echoed with it centuries earlier. It was ubiquitous, universal – that is, until about 40 years ago.

William Mahrt directs the St. Ann Choir, which he says has had a “fruitful interaction” with Stanford’s doctoral students of musicology, who find it “a very wonderful laboratory for the study of the music of history.” 

The tide may be turning, and, if so, it will be William Mahrt’s moment in the sun.

The origins of Gregorian chant are enigmatic. It appears to have its roots in fourth-century Jerusalem. The link with Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) is the byproduct of early spin, based on what is probably an erroneous assumption that he composed and collected early chant.

The otherworldly effect of the music is hard to describe, but Mahrt, an associate professor of music at Stanford, recently gave it a try: “It is what we call monophonic – that is to say, it’s a melody that’s unaccompanied,” he said. “A free rhythm has an ability to evoke eternal things, more than passages tied down to regular time. It’s a sprung rhythm that has a freedom to it – like Hopkins’ poetry.”

Mahrt has conducted Gregorian chant for more than 40 years without a break. He is the director of Stanford’s Early Music Singers and of the St. Ann Choir, a Gregorian schola at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto. He instructs singers in the mysteries of “the chant,” as well as the glorious polyphonic music that came after it. In fact, it’s possible that there is more chant sung in Palo Alto than anywhere else in the country, with the possible exception of monastic communities. Mahrt has inspired and guided generations of scholars and singers.

One of his star students, Kerry McCarthy, now an assistant professor of music at Duke University, is the author of Liturgy and Contemplation in Byrd’s Gradualia and one of the world’s leading scholars on William Byrd, the preeminent English composer of the Renaissance.

“One of the best decisions I’ve made in my life was to come to Stanford and work with Bill,” McCarthy said. “The things I learned from him here I could not have learned anywhere else. Not just in the classroom, but in performance. Especially in performance.”

Acclaimed music writer and jazz scholar Ted Gioia recalls going to hear the St. Ann Choir, composed of students and members of the community at large, when he was studying for an MBA at Stanford. Often he found only a few fellow listeners in the pews.

“The thing I most miss about Palo Alto is going to those Gregorian Masses,” he said. “It’s so energizing. That was the best-kept secret in Palo Alto. Bill was the person who really opened my ears to that. He had a profound influence on my conception of music – through the force of his example.”

Mahrt’s work has indeed been quiet. Furthermore, he has encountered resistance from a church that has not always valued its own heritage.

“There’s a huge resistance from the clerical establishment to doing any of this,” said Stanford alumna Susan Altstatt, who has been a member of the St. Ann Choir since 1967. “Bill has lived a charmed life in this regard. Bill has managed to do what he’s doing by talking to bishops and priests and knowing what he’s talking about. He’s a hero, as far as I’m concerned.”

Mahrt explained the resistance: “Gregorian chant went out of style when the language was changed” – that is, when the universal Latin was changed to the vernacular English. “In the absence of any good solution about what to replace the chant with, I would say commercial interests stepped in and hawked a progressively cheaper and cheaper music, and the commercial interests still prevail today.”

For example, one of the leading publishers of “missalettes,” the flimsy and disposable paperbacks that include “new” church music, distributes 4.3 million of the quarterly copies a year and owns 10,000 music copyrights. That’s a lot of commercial interests.

The result was summarized by one disgruntled reviewer on Amazon.com: “The Roman Catholic Church, seeking to be more ‘relevant’ to its flock in the antispiritual climate of the second half of the 20th century, abandoned its ancient Latin liturgy and dignified music in favor of poorly worded vernacular texts and worse music. This music usually tends toward banal couplets set to insipid tunes strummed on ill-tuned guitars and whined into a microphone to the banging of a tambourine.”

Mahrt said there is a reason for the ill-tuned guitars and whining: “The standard of performance in recorded pop music is very high. A little combo in a church can’t possibly keep that standard. There isn’t the same standard for chant. Its whole criteria are different. Singers can master it in a different way.”

Unlike other kinds of music, McCarthy said, “You don’t have to have to have wonderful technique and learn to breathe from your diaphragm and so forth and have 20 years of voice lessons. It’s on a very human scale. It’s really self-regenerating. You can sing especially psalms for hours without getting tired, and there aren’t many kinds of music you can say that about.”

According to Mahrt, the St. Ann Choir has created a “fruitful interaction” with Stanford’s doctoral students of musicology, who find it “a very wonderful laboratory for the study of the music of history.” Members of the choir, which performs the year-round cycle of chant, are perhaps the staunchest advocates of the music anywhere: “This is one of the major cultural landmarks of Western society,” Altstatt said. “Its preservation is very important. It has to be sung – it has to come through the human voice. You have to be taught, in a living tradition. You can’t get it through a book. You get hooked on it, you internalize it and need to do it. It’s a splendid thing.”

In recent years, a younger audience, seeking music with a little more history and meaning than its usual fare, has become hooked in a different way: A generation has snapped up Gregorian chant and made recordings into crossover hits. In the last decade, the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos’ Canto Gregoriano would become one of the world’s biggest-selling classical compact discs, with worldwide sales topping 6 million.

But the commotion and hoopla miss the point, Mahrt said. “Chant does arise out of silence, and it goes back to silence,” he said. “In our own culture, we sometimes don’t have any silence. I think among students, for instance. They go into the dorms and the walls are thumping 24 hours a day. There is never a chance to be alone, in silence, within your own residence. But the fact is, I think, myself, the best location for the contact with God is in silence.

“When silence occurs, then you can look interiorly and find an order and a purpose that the noise of the media running day and night obscures. So, likewise, the chant, which is pure, a single melody, is not complicated, arises out of silence and goes back into it, as a way of returning to that interiority.”

Early interest

Mahrt grew up in a small farming community in eastern Washington – a place where “church music” meant sentimental hymns sung by a “little choir of ladies who sang to a harmonium.” His University of Washington master’s thesis as a pianist was the work of Robert Schumann. Mahrt discovered the chant at the University of Washington. Dominican friars, who were Catholic chaplains at the university, desperate to augment their choir, told him, “You have to sing chant for Holy Week.”

“It’s the hardest chant of the year in some ways. So we did it,” he recalled. “And I said this is what I’ve been missing. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I joined the Cathedral Choir and sang chant there for the next two-and-a-half years.”

He headed to Stanford to study Mozart and also joined the St. Ann Choir, which had been launched by one of the university’s mathematics professors in 1963. A year later, the professor departed for another university and handed the reins to Mahrt. The year was a landmark in chant in another way: That was the year the Catholic Church began using local languages in the liturgy, and the chant was all but abandoned.

“Our choir was started one year before the language changed – if we had tried to start one year later, we might not have been able to do it,” Mahrt said. “I saw this music becoming less and less popular with people who were entranced with folk music.”

The leap from Mozart to the chant was not as radical as might be supposed; Mahrt points out that “certainly Mozart grew up knowing chant – a very 18th-century chant.”

“Most composers through the 19th century – in Austria, France, Italy – simply had chant in their background, and in their daily experience of church. It’s something the history books don’t tell you,” Mahrt said.

Mahrt carried on for the next 40 years largely alone. He said he knew his decision to dedicate his life to chant’s preservation would meet conflict, struggles and disappointments. “It’s worth it. Somebody’s got to keep it. It has to be kept alive in various places throughout the world. So we’ve got to do it.”

His persistence may be paying off. Pope Benedict XVI, himself a musician, has taken an interest in restoring musical traditions, as well as encouraging the Latin Mass. The 1,700-year-old Gregorian chant might be an idea whose time has come again. In fact, it might be an idea rather hard to kill.

“One wonderful thing about chant is it’s almost viral,” said McCarthy, who has started her own chant group at Duke. “People who learn it tend to go somewhere else – academics, especially, tend to be migratory birds. When we move to the new place, we start a chant group ourselves. I calculate that in about 60 years, we’ll have taken over the world.”

Mahrt’s group has spawned spinoffs across the United States, besides the one at Duke. Alstatt’s daughter Alison, who is doing doctoral work in medieval music at the University of Erlangen in Germany, joined the St. Ann Choir when she was 11 and has started a group in Berkeley, where she had been a student at the University of California. There are now groups in Los Angeles, Cleveland and Arkansas.

Mahrt has even found a substitute to direct the choir – finally allowing him to take a more active role in promoting chant nationally and internationally, given the recent renewal of interest. Does he feel free at last, after four decades of being tethered to the annual cycle of chant? Mahrt looks up in wonderment at the question: “It’s a fulfillment, not an oppression. I miss it when I go away. It is a routine, but the music and liturgy are all part of the rhythm of life.”

Postscript from jazz scholar and Substacker Ted Gioia on January 1, 2025: “Not many knew that Gregorian chant and medieval/Renaissance polyphony flourished in Palo Alto — but I’d be there, and I’d see René Girard there too. It was all because of William Mahrt—a beatific soul (who also encouraged my jazz teaching at Stanford, at a time when some were skeptical about its legitimacy). He we beloved by those who knew him.”

The tributes continue to pour in:

From David A. Lawrence: “Bill’s unprecedented accomplishments as both a scholar and the leader of the St. Ann’s Choir are well-documented. What I feel compelled to add, in the wake of my shock at the news of his passing, is what an entirely sweet human being he was. In a profession that does not lack competition for awards, accolades and promotions, Bill was kind to everybody. In my 50 years at Stanford I never once heard anyone mention a harsh word about him. In addition, he was a superb teacher. In my early years on the faculty I would disguise myself as a student and sneak into his classes. Of course Bill knew about it, and had absolutely no problem with it. I was particularly struck by the fact that, while his primary focus may have been on a composer like Guillaume de Machaut, nobody taught the music of Johannes Brahms with greater insight and sensitivity than Bill. I will miss him terribly—both professionally and personally. Rest in peace, dear man.

From Patrick Hunt: “As usual, Cynthia Haven’s insight, gentle appreciation and honed writing go to the heart of a matter, in this case Mahrt’s beloved legacy on medieval chant. I was always struck by Mahrt’s meditative quietude and humility, never one to seek attention even when so well deserved. Well done, Cynthia!”

From John O. Robison: Bill came to Stanford as a young professor in September 1972, when I had just finished my MA and was beginning the doctoral program. I always thought that hiring Bill was one of the Stanford Music Department’s greatest accomplishments! He was such a tremendous teacher and mentor during my doctoral years at Stanford, and most of my research projects were done under his guidance. Whenever it was time to delve into a new research project, he would simply say “Okay, what do you want to do next?” and let me pursue that topic (anywhere from c. 1000 to 1800) to its fullest potential. I flew out to California for his 80th birthday party in March 2019, gave him one of my Ralph Marlin fish ties as a small present (which I am sure he never wore), and had a nice time explaining how important his mentorship has been to me as a performing musicologist working in vastly different areas of research. He was a very kind person, one who was incredibly dedicated to chant and Catholic church music, and whose presence will live on through all who were fortunate enough to know him. – John O. Robison, Prof. of Musicology, University of South Florida

Poet and former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia has been busy. He’s just published a spate of new books: Poetry as Enchantment and Other Essays (Paul Dry Books); Dana Gioia: Poet & Critic (Mercer University Press, edited by John Zheng and Jon Parrish Peede); and last and shortest (205 pages), Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry, also with Paul Dry Books. He calls the last “an idiosyncratic book about the extravagant and alluring art of opera.” He also calls opera “the most intense form of poetic drama.” We couldn’t agree more.

From the Preface:

“This is a poet’s book about opera. To some people, that statement will suggest writing that is airy, impressionistic, and unreliable, but a poet also brings a practical sense of how words animate opera, lend life to imaginary characters, and give human shape to music. And a poet knows about love. There is no art that I love more than opera. I have written this book for those who, sharing the devotion, have wept in the dark of an opera house.”

He adds that “the libretto is not a shabby coat rack on which the magnificent vestments of music are hung. Operas begin with their words. Strong words inspire composers, weak words burden them. Ultimately singers embody the words to give the music a human form for the audience.”

A mutual friend of ours, poet Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems, concurs: “As an opera lover myself, I agree with him. Especially when it comes to the way that libretti tends to be overlooked for music: “The literary elements of opera are misunderstood. There is an assumption that in opera words hardly matter, that great operas can be built on execrable texts. But the libretto is not a shabby coat rack on which the magnificent vestments of music are hung. Operas begin with their words. Strong words inspire composers, weak words burden them. Ultimately singers embody the words to give the music a human form for the audience.”

He continues: “Dana Gioia has done as much as any living poet in the last half century to restore music and drama to the increasingly tuneless and predictable realm of American verse. Now, with Weep, Shudder, Die, the fruit of a lifelong love affair with opera, he restores poetry and drama to their rightful place in the realm of classical music. Gioia argues that ‘in opera the words come first,’ but that the real gift of the medium—to poet, composer, performers, and audience—is the opportunity to collaborate in the creation and experience of a uniquely stirring work of art, a meeting of Muses like no other. This brief book is itself a showcase of critical acuity and stylistic flair, which, like the best librettos, will leave you humming long after the performance is complete.”

To borrow a thought from Measure for Measure, we are not dead though we have slept.

The Book Haven has been gone for over a month – and we’re coming back!

According to my “Google alert”, a welter of Book Haven sites seems to have cropped up in our absence. Today alone, we learned of the Bronx Book Haven, Helen’s Book Haven connected with Junior Eurovision, and a Book Haven in Kenya.

Be at ease. The Book Haven at Stanford has encountered some technological difficulties and limitations, but we carry on… with news about the book world, poets, and writers.

p.s. Meanwhile, you might want to check out our Substack, here: https://substack.com/@cynthiahaven?utm_source=user-menu

A letter from Alexander Deriev, husband of the late poet Regina Derieva. The Russian couple have a helluva back story. I wrote about her in “Writ on Water,” an 2014 essay for the Times Literary Supplement here. And I’ve written about her on the Book Haven here and here and here.

She and her husband have a helluva back story. from the age of six, she lived obscurely in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, “perhaps the most dismal corner of the former Soviet Union – once the centre of a vast prison camp universe, later just a gloomy industrial city,” according to the distinguished Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova. For him, Derieva’s precise, epigrammatic poems limn “the concentration camp zone, where space is turned into emptiness, and time turned into disappearance”.

The couple met at the Karaganda black market, while buying books. She was a pianist and the daughter of a KGB higher-up, he is an artist The two shared a love of Andrei Platonov and Truman Capote. They were Russian Jews, then fled to Latvia to convert (bypassing the corrupt Russia Orthodox Church, which has notorious state ties). Then they settled in Israel, before finally relocating to Stockholm, where she is buried after her death in 2013.

Now she has a new book out, Selected Clouds with Bondarenko M. O. , notwithstanding her death a decade ago. Deriev writes:

“Dear Cynthia, on Friday, September 20, Russian troops attacked Odessa again with ballistic missiles. Despite the bombing, the launch of Regina’s Selected Clouds in Odessa’s Literary Museum went well. About 40 or 50 people attended). However, several more presentations of this book will be arranged in other localities soon.” Photographers Stepan Alekyan and Vladimir Bogatyrov documented the event, which included translator Oleksandr Hint, and Kateryna Chernenko, the librarian of Odessa Regional Scientific Library.

The reading continued smoothly as the missiles fired. Grace under pressure.

Postscript: The poet Regina Derieva was also a great collector of seashells – many of them now housed at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. Alexander recently found one gastropod that bears the name Cynthia. See the attached photos of this shell. Canefriula cynthia (H. C. Fulton, 1902) – 36 mm, Humboldt Bay, New Guinea. He notes: “It is unlikely that the British malacologist, Hugh Coomber Fulton (1861-1942), when naming the newly discovered mollusk, had in mind the verses of Propertius addressed to Cynthia. Most likely, he used the epithet of the Greek goddess Artemis.” I’m flattered.

“I’d say you’re always involved personally with the biography you’re writing, no matter how hard you work to muss the trail.” That’s what friend and fellow author James Marcus told me some time ago.

He ought to know. He’s the celebrated author of Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, newly out with Princeton University Press. I’ve been following James’s long labor for a dozen years. It has been more than a “personal” saga for the author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.com Juggernaut.

I’ve been on the road, so I’m a bit late to the table. Here’s what Lawrence A. Rosenwald concluded in his New York Times review: “If this were a show — a staging of a masterpiece — I would pay good money to see it. Not because it is perfect or unprecedented, but because it is alive and provocative.“

More words. This from Connor Harrison’s in the U.K.’s Review 31:

Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson is, before anything else, a personal text. That is a difficult distinction, generally, especially when addressing Emerson, and even more so when discussing a biography about him. ‘All history becomes subjective,’ he writes in ‘History,’ ‘in other words there is properly no history, only biography.’ What has passed before our time remains a dead text without translation. It is only at the point of contact — at the moment of subjectivity — that history can be said to exist at all. When Emerson says biography he of course means the life we have now, as it grows and will be read in another present. But Marcus has not written a traditional biography, though biography certainly occupies the majority of his book. Glad to the Brink is a personal text because it is about Marcus, the point at which Waldo became subjective, or when the former discovered in the latter something of ‘[h]is own secret biography [. . .] in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born.’

“A portrait, then, is an appropriate subtitle, since it is made up as much of the sitter as it is of the paintbrush. Glad to the Brink moves from chapter to chapter, decided not by chronology or analysis, but by emotion; by proximity; the occasions when, as Marcus puts it, the spectre of American letters ‘spoke to me most directly’.

“The result is a flesh-and-blood Waldo, ageing and suffering the degradations of lecture tours and unwanted social calls, the humid nights spent with women and men on his mind, days and years worn into his desk, relatives passing out of his hands and into the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. Marcus’s prose, as well as his choice of scenes, complements this physicality. Unlike Waldo, he is conversational, practical. ‘When do you become yourself?’ he writes in the first chapter. ‘[T]he question is trickier than it sounds. At birth, we are presented with the raw materials of identity. But these are almost random. They are winnings from a game of genetic roulette, just waiting to be cashed out. What comes next is a long trek down the wind tunnel of childhood, the buffeting impacts of family and society and religion.’”

Andrew Epstein writing in The Times Literary Supplement, which calls him a “marvellous stylist.” He writes: “For Marcus, Emerson ‘was an aphorist forever seeking the minimalist blow to the head.'”

In Albert’s Camus’ 1942 The Stranger, a French shipping clerk named Meursault shoots an Arab man on the Mediterranean beach. Algerian author Kamel Daoud retells Camus’ famous story from the point of view of the dead man’s family: “My brother’s name was Musa. He had a name. But he’ll remain ‘the Arab’ forever.” 

Another Look discussed The Stranger in 2015 – now we’ll read Daoud’s 2013 retelling of the story, seventy years later. Please join us at 7 P.M. (PST) on Wednesday, November 13, 2024, at the Stanford Humanities Center when Another Look presents Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation. James Campbell,writing in the Wall Street Journal, calls it “a shrewd critique of a country trapped in history’s time warp.”

Panelists will include Stanford Prof.  Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts.  

Stanford lecturer Michaela Hulstyn will round out the panel. Her Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness was published with the University of Toronto Press in 2022. Her research interests encompass the global French literary world, including texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium along with writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. 

Like Camus, Daoud was born in Algeria. He says Camus “cured” him in a time and place where ideology has become preeminent.  “His priority is not an ideology, but his life, his body,” according to The Financial Times. 

“The problem was I liked doubt,” Daoud said.”I was deeply wary of totalitarian explanations. I was born in a collectivist period. The primary value was the group, not the individual. And I am profoundly individualistic.” He now lives under a fatwa.

We are announcing our fall event a little bit early, to allow you time to revisit The Stranger and reacquaint yourself to Camus’s timeless classic. You’ll want to keep it handy.

Register on the link below:

https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_z2rkF4XhS1ay3pIoJvFJAg