By Jane Dieckmann:
For Katherine FitzGibbon, interim director of choirs at Cornell this year, April is the month for singing. It started with a vocal recital, part of the music department’s mid-day concert series, and will end with the spring concert of the Cornell Chorale. In between comes the performance of the Glee Club and Chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (the Choral Symphony) with the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, and a whole bunch of rehearsals, as many as four a week, some with longer hours involving soloists, or subgroups of the main choruses. This semester has been extremely busy, with a concert or recital or some performance — either as soloist herself or as director of various choruses — coming every other week.
This active and gifted musician, already with an impressive career at the age of 30, has been an important presence on the Cornell campus this year. With a bright and open countenance, she radiates authority and confidence. In rehearsals she is alert and good-natured, with a great sense of humor. The pace is brisk, and time is used well. She aims to teach by encouragement, but stands her ground and let’s you know who is in charge. “Please don’t talk,” she says crisply. “If you have a question about the music, I’d be happy to answer it.” She also encourages her singers to work on the music away from rehearsals. She chooses programs with a theme and expects her choruses to think about the context of the music they sing. Teaching is all important for her, and one learns at every rehearsal, not only about the present repertory but also about languages and voice production. One rehearsal included a brilliant description of the 12-tone scale and its application to modern music.
With an appointment at Cornell for academic year, Fitzgibbon arrived in Ithaca last fall and settled into an apartment on South Hill. She said it was “great coming to Ithaca, feeling there were people here I already knew.” She had met Scott Tucker, Cornell’s director of choral music, at the American Choral Directors conference last February. Besides having many things in common — teaching in Boston area private (and rival) schools, holding the assistant conducting position at Harvard, participating in the same Italian festival — they shared teaching philosophies and laughed at the same jokes. The job opened up here and she was asked to apply. She inherited two major works, already scheduled — the Duruflé Requiem, part of an all-French program for the Glee Club and Chorus in February, and the Beethoven Ninth. She directed the Chorale in the fall, and has all three choirs this spring, while Tucker is on study leave.
Kathy FitzGibbon has been involved with performance from the start. Born and raised in Indianapolis, she comes from a “heavily academic background” and a family of lawyers, what she calls a “law dynasty” (her late grandfather was a prosecuting attorney at the Nuremberg trials), but not many musicians. At age 5 she started dance — tap, jazz, ballet — and early on caught the “performer bug.” She began piano lessons at 9.
In her high school was a “show choir” that put on a “miniature theatrical extravaganza” every year. She was in every show and started taking voice lessons. By junior year she was into serious classical solo and choral repertory. At Princeton she sang with the Glee Club, joined an a cappella group and became its musical director. She took lessons in conducting at the Westminster Choral College. In her first year she had auditioned for the Cunegonde solo “Make Our Garden Grow” from Candide, discovered her full soprano voice, and worked to create extra opportunities to perform. Already then she knew she wanted to go into teaching of some sort, and took a year off to teach in private school outside Boston.
Then she was off to the University of Michigan for an MA in choral and orchestral conducting, where she held an assistant conductor job and continued solo training and concertizing while studying with Martin Katz. She stayed an extra year to obtain teacher certification. During her last two years there, she served as chorus master of the Windsor (Ontario) Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, and during that time worked on major choral works with 80 adult singers. She also was giving private voice lessons.
While an undergraduate, FitzGibbon had began her association with the Berkshire Choral Festival — which sponsors eight week-long programs for about 200 singers per week, something like summer choir camp for adults. The festival has five sessions in Sheffield, Massachuetts, one in the West, and two abroad. She arrived in Sheffield as an intern in 1997, and was invited back as a paid apprentice the next year, during which she was given special jobs. The festival’s executive director then created for her the position of assistant to the executive director.
After skipping a year to participate in a summer festival in Rome, FitzGibbon joined the faculty, becoming a full-fledged section leader the next year, and in 2004 was named head of the faculty. This is her 10th year with BCF. “I started as kid and now I’m a big cheese; they have let me grow up and have had the job grow up with me.”
After getting her Masters and teaching public school for a while, she realized she wanted to work with college-age and adult singers. She obtained part time jobs as director of choral activities at Clarke University in Worcester (a job she will resume) and as the assistant at Harvard. She also joined the Boston Secession, a 24-voice ensemble, with thought-provoking and innovative programs. She now is the group’s assistant conductor, a position created for her. But to teach college students, she needed a doctorate, so, again, it was back to school, this time at Boston University. She says her audition there (with Ann Howard Jones, who served as assistant to the late, great Robert Shaw) was “one of the best conducting lessons I have ever had.” She has completed her course work.
This year, while at Cornell, she has passed her two written exams and just two weeks before her April recital, she passed her oral exam. She will now write a thesis on “alternative requiems” — by Brahms, Max Reger, and Hugo Distler — works that use historical German musical materials and have brought increasing attention to national pride. She also is very much interested in the divide that exists in both general thinking and academic institutions between the performer and scholar, a divide she would work to bridge. Already in her career she has done this. With deep interest in many different ideas, she works to create programs with a special intellectual context and wants her singers to think about the relationship of the pieces they sing not only to one another but also to situations in today’s world.
“It has been a wonderful year here, she says. Her greatest challenge has been working with the Chorale, which has people of different ages, backgrounds, and musical experience. As for the men’s Glee Club and women’s Chorus, both want to be pushed very hard, but one has to approach the two groups somewhat differently. She has made it clear to both that “I’ll give you a hard time if you’re are not working well.” With the men it has been fun “to subvert the gender paradigm. We’ve really come together very well and they have let me push them musically.” For the women, they tell Fitzgibbon that they have been excited to experience life with a female conductor. Clearly she is an inspiring role model. She likes to relate the words of Margaret Hillis, prominent woman conductor of the Chicago Symphony Chorus: “The only woman who could not conduct was the Venus de Milo.”
On Friday night FitzGibbon’s combined choruses will join with soloists to perform the monumental Beethoven Ninth Symphony in an important concert marking the 30th anniversary of the CCO and the last to be conducted by its music director, Kimbo Ishii-Eto. She has prepared the work before, and that particular experience gave her great confidence. It was the Rome summer music festival, and rehearsals were with a bunch of opera singers brought in to sing something else and unaware that they were to perform the Beethoven. For one rehearsal she had only a glockenspiel to give pitches. She taught it from scratch in three rehearsals. Actually it is only about 10 minutes of choral music, with only a few tricky places, but it is vocally difficult for young choristers with its demands for loud, sustained, and, particularly for the sopranos, very high-register singing. It requires real stamina and sensible use of energy.
On April 29 FitzGibbon will conduct the Cornell Chorale in its concert of American 20th century music, entitled “The Home of the Brave.” The program includes Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Aaron Copland’s In the Beginning, and Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei, an arrangement of his famous Adagio for Strings. All three works have religious texts.
The final commitment involves rehearsing and conducting the Chorus and Glee Club for the Commencement Concert in late May, featuring favorite works from earlier concerts of both groups this year, plus some combined repertory. And there are the Cornell songs, of course, many of which FitzGibbon as a collegiate singer already knows.
“I have loved being here — walking on the South Hill Recreation Trail and in the parks; the view out the back of my apartment, with Cornell to the right and the lake below; going to the Farmers’ Market, GreenStar, Wegman’s.” She has enjoyed the mix of an academic town, getting to know people interested in culture, music, theater. Her local contacts extend to Ithaca College — some IC students are part of the community that makes up the Chorale, and she studied voice there as well. The town has a “great energy about it, and I have met so many kindred spirits.”
It has been a wonderful year but “bittersweet,” getting attached to friends and colleagues and students, knowing she has to say good-bye. She has worked with about 250 students, watched them grow and take risks. “I want to follow through with them.” And many will be sorry to see her go. One student wrote her of his feeling that he has become a better musician having worked with her and that he has learned so much from her. There is general admiration for her ability to command attention, not by force, but by quietly proving that she deserves respect.
It would have been possible for her to stay on, but with great reluctance she returns to Boston to complete her DMA in Performance. This way she can move on to a permanent job teaching and conducting on the college level and/or beyond. Judging from her accomplishments, she will go far, and we will be hearing much more about her in the future.