Molina: Would you now care to comment, based upon your wide range of experiences, upon some ideas or concepts which I have come upon in my comparative study of choral and orchestral conducting? For instance, several conducting books make the observation that the general musicianship of most choristers is inferior when compared to that of most orchestral players. Would you agree?
Shaw: Almost always. yes. Obviously, there are exceptions. Certainly, the singer’s musicinship is often inferior in terms of the strictly musical-technical digital proficiency. But it is almost the opposite in terms of the general richness of the total aesthetic. And by this I mean knowledge of painting, poetry, literature – a wider humanistic background. For instance, in the United States, many of us have experienced a certain large coefficient between medicine and music there are doctors’ orchestras in New York and Cleveland and other places. In the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, almost half of our members were associated with medicine either as doctors or nurses, interns or laboratory technicians. We were in an educational complex at Western Reserve and Case University where there were a lot of medically related studies going on. Anyway, what I wanted to say was: If you tested the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus on strictly musical proficiency, or on vocal proficiency, the results may not be very high. But if you gave everyone a general test of knowledge of the fine arts, of history, philosophy, and so on, the Chorus might outrank the Orchestra by 10 to 15 points.
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