Paul Salamunovich is a highly noted conductor who has contributed greatly to the world of choral music. He is internationally known and recognized having conducted numerous choral festivals and clinics throughout the world. He has been the music director of St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in North Hollywood, CA since 1949 and is renowned for his work with sacred music, especially Gregorian chant. In 1969, the Vatican honored him with a Papal Knighthood in the order of St. Gregory. He was named Music Director Emeritus of the Los Angeles Master Chorale, in 2001, after serving as its director for ten years. During his tenure, the chorale received a Grammy nomination for Best Choral Performance. Paul Salamunovich has provided the choral music in many feature films and television productions, including “First Knight,” “Air Force One,” “A.I.,” “Sum of All Fears,” “XXX,” and “Peter Pan.”  It was a great pleasure and honor to conduct the following interview with this famed conductor.

Paul Salamunovich

• How did you become interested in choral music?

“That is practically telling why this little venture is so important: children’s choirs. I was in a little parochial grade school in Redondo Beach, CA. When I was 10 years old, there was a young priest who came and became the assistant pastor. He had an avocation for music, so he started a boy’s choir. I was hooked. All we sang was Gregorian chant, so we sang all the funerals at the church. I would do that for about 3 years (1937-1939), and then in 1940 my family moved to the Hollywood area and I went into a new parochial school. At the school there was a choir director who had a very noted men and boy’s choir, so I tried out. I went in and the director saw me and he saw my size and the fact that I was 13- you are never supposed to take boys that late in their careers, you always take them as about 5th graders. Here I was an 8th grader. But it seems that I had experience, so he listened to me and he was very moved by what he heard. I would stay in that choir even as I was going to a public high school. The director’s name was Richard Keys Biggs and he happened to be the organ teacher of the noted conductor, Roger Wagner. I subsequently would get to know Roger Wagner and begin singing with him at age 14. In any case, I was hooked on singing immediately at the age of 10, and went crazy about it when I moved and went into that big school choir at age 13.”

“I went into the service at age 18 and came out at age 19. Roger Wagner was then a church music director, and when he heard that I was out, he called me and said, “You’re back! How wonderful. Perfect timing. I have a new job where I am going to be the coordinator of youth choruses for the Los Angeles Bureau of Music.” It turned out he was using many of his ex-choirboys, now with voices changed, to be his tenors and basses. He would audition the girls from the other youth choruses throughout the city. It was a great age for choral music. I call it the Golden Age of choral music, because we had youth choruses all over the city besides the school choirs. The city of Los Angeles sponsored after school youth choruses in all the areas of the county. It was a great time. I joined Roger Wagner’s new youth chorus, and in that first choir was a 13-year-old girl by the name of Marilyn Horne who would become a renowned diva. There was also a girl about 14 years old by the name of Marnie Nixon, and she would become the ghost singer for all the great movies such as “West Side Story” and “The King and I.” Both of these girls got their start by singing with Roger Wagner. In any case, within three years we got so good that we became professional and did our first motion picture. We sang the background for the picture “Joan of Arc,” which starred Ingrid Bergman. We changed our name to the Roger Wagner Chorale, and that following summer we sang at the Hollywood Bowl for MGM night. From then on, we were often singing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“Roger Wagner is the one who talked me into going to music school. I said at the time, at 19, “Why would I want to take music at school? I’m not going to be a musician.” He said, “What have you got to lose? The government is paying for it.” So I went, and within two years I came out. By that time, Roger Wagner had become so busy with the chorale that he offered me his second church job, which was choirmaster for St. Charles Borromeo in North Hollywood. I said, “I don’t know anything about conducting.” But he thought that I should take the job, so he gave me some conducting lessons and now here I am starting my 57th year at the same place. Because of that early, great gift that happened to me: being in a children’s choir, I have been conducting my own children’s choir for 56 years. Who knows who in my group might not find their way to being the next professional conductor? Therefore, they should all have this presentation in their lives. So here I am, still doing it, and my choir has become so wonderful and noted. They have sung in motion pictures, they have made recordings, and they have sung for Pope John Paul II three times.”

“So there you are. That’s how I got into music. All because of that one little choir that a priest started because he thought we should sing. It included maybe no more than about 20 boys, but I just thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world and I enjoyed it so much.”  

 

• What effect did Roger Wagner have on your life? Did he act as a mentor to you?

“Yes. In other words, I learned: not necessarily that he gave me lessons. The fact is, that I paid attention and was sensitive to what he said and how it worked with my voice. I would take that and develop it into my own system of teaching. I learned to take what was given to me and improvise with it and maybe sometimes make it better or take it in a different approach.”

 

• How would you describe your approach to choral singing? What techniques are most important or useful in getting the sound you want?

“The most important thing that I do is to develop the tone concept that I have. In any choir that I conduct, no matter where I go, no matter what the choir sounds like, I will change their sound to suit my desire. I have developed a system to make them sing using a tone quality that I want. Again, it was inherited through my growing up under Roger Wagner. I used to do his assistant work for him and he loved it because he didn’t have to work as hard. I would develop the sound for him. He had faith in me that I would do it. One time he came back from a tour just in time for the dress rehearsal of a very beautiful program of early music. As he went through each piece just once, he would say, “That’s great. Next one.” After about the fourth piece he said, “We haven’t been together forty years for nothing.” In other words, everything was the way he wanted it, including the sound. Now, many conductors go out there and they take whatever these singers give them with a little subduing of the loud singers and all that, but the tone is not developed. Developing the tone is usually done with only young choirs, but I teach the big choirs to be just as fundamentally sound as a young choir starting out. They must develop that tone and it doesn’t have to be through vocalization. It can be by using the music itself.”  

 

• What is the most memorable concert or project in which you have participated?

“People always ask me that: “What is the highpoint?” Here I have done movies, I have done the Music Center and Disney Hall, and I have done 800 festivals all over the world… The highpoint for me was in 1988, June 29th, and it was in Rome. I took the St. Charles choir to sing the feast of St. Peter and Paul in St. Peter’s Basilica with Pope John Paul II presiding. It is a Roman holiday: it was televised all over Italy. There were about 120,000 people there. We performed out in the square because there were 25 new cardinals being inaugurated and they had all brought pilgrims, so it had to be moved outside. There we sat with the whole diplomatic core of the world sitting right in front of us and The Sistine Choir was on the other side. I conducted the main parts of that service. We are the only American choir that has ever been invited to sing for that event, and only one of five choirs in the world other than the Sistine Choir that has ever performed that noted day. That is the highpoint of my life.”

 

• What is your favorite style of music/ composer? What do you like about it?

“Renaissance. My favorite composer: Tomas Luis de Vittoria, 16th century. It is spiritual, pure, never showy, and very meditative.”

 

• How have choirs changed since you first became involved in choral music?

“Choirs don’t change; only conductors change. It depends upon who the conductor is. Choirs have gotten better, but not all conductors are better. Roger Wagner, my teacher, said, “There are no good choirs and there are no bad choirs. There are only good conductors and bad conductors.” It depends upon what they know, what they have learned, and how they expand. They must advance their knowledge by listening to many styles and many other groups in the world and learning to know the best, then trying to achieve the best.”  

 

• What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?

“My greatest accomplishment is my family. Family is the most important thing in the world.”

 

• Do you have any goals for the future?

“To just hang in as long as I can, because my health has not been good. Just about all of my contemporaries have retired and I’m still going. They have retired from the universities and from active conducting, but I’m still going. It is very demanding with the church choir. We just sang Thursday night and we sang during the summer. This choir has recently sung for the Bob Hope memorial the month after he died. All the celebrities in the movie industry and government officials were there. In fact, we sang again in August at the dedication of the Bob Hope Memorial Garden (that is where he is now permanently buried). They had a very special service dedicating it, and I conducted the choir at that event.”

 

• Is there any advice that you can give a young person in a choir who is considering a career in music?

“To study hard, take piano, and become a good musician. Listen and learn. Listen to other choirs; buy recordings and attend concerts. Develop a criterion that is of the highest level. Always improve your listening ability so that your desire for a better quality is always improving.”

 

• Do you have anything extra that you would like to add to this interview?

“I’ll say one last thing. One of my favorite concerts that I gave was at the Music Center in March 2001. I had soloists Marnie Nixon, Marilyn Horne, and Harve Presnell, who was a very important singer on Broadway. He was in the movies- “The unsinkable Molly Brown” and “Paint Your Wagon” among others. Those three wonderful soloists were all members of the Roger Wagner Chorale way back. I now had them as guest artists in a concert that I called “The Golden Age of Choral Music,” which means that it is when (all of a sudden) the country found choral music and loved it. It started in the late 1930’s. On the east coast, there was Fred Waring and The Pennsylvanians. He had a young assistant conductor that he found at Pomona College by the name of Robert Shaw, who would later become a renowned conductor. On the west coast there was Roger Wagner starting off with his men and boy’s choir and eventually the youth chorus and the Roger Wagner Chorale. Many other choirs including the Westminster Choir and the Saint Olaf Choir were touring. This is when Fred Waring and his choral group, The Pennsylvanians, first started broadcasting on the air in 1938. Later on, in the 50’s, on the prime Sunday night slot at 8 o’clock on CBS, the program was not  “Murder She Wrote” or whatever the programs were then. It was Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians singing choral music and the country listened! That is what causes it to be, in my mind, the Golden Age of choral music. The general public loved choral music and wanted to hear it. Try to find it today. You will not find it on television. You have to go look for it. So you see what I mean by the Golden Age. It was alive and well. Now that does not mean that it was performed magnificently. We perform it better today because we have had these teachers ahead of us from which to learn. Those choirs were not that great in the early years. They got better because their conductors got better. Those of us who came after developed the fruits of their labors.”