CJ Replay: Robert Shaw Biography

“In presenting his rationale for the writing of this biography the author says in speaking of Shaw … “there has always been a ceriteredness about him and that center is congruent with the mystereous core of the experience of music … There is that incredible vitality . . . There is his perception’ of the potential relationships between life ‘and art . . . There is that guileless courage to ‘confront novelty without fear, even eagerly,
and to choose freely among the options … Many of those who have known him in the late seventies might recognize in him a paradigm of that rare type called “a self-actualizing humanist.” In a wise and useful fashion Mussulman strengthens such personal judgments by allowing Robert Shaw to speak for himself thi-oughsome of the “Dear People” letters which he addressed to members of his choruses in New York, Cleveland, and Atlanta.”
 

(from the Choral Journal review of “Dear People . . . Robert Shaw, A Biography“, by Howard Swan)