At St. Olaf

Last week 8,000 stolid Scandinavian-Americans converged in cars and busses on the little hilltop college town of Northfield, Minn. Only the first 4,000 jammed their way into the red brick gymnasium of St. Olaf Lutheran College. The rest sprawled on the surrounding lawns. What drew all these people to St. Olaf's gymnasium was a two-day festival of choral music. Delegations of husky Lutheran choristers from all the surrounding States had come to St. Olaf to sing. Together they made a huge chorus of 1,400 voices. When that chorus boomed forth its repertory of old German chorals, it was something to hear.

But what really made the visitors cup their ears was the singing of 65 straw-haired youngsters who compose St. Olaf's own Lutheran Choir. This choir has been rated by many a connoisseur as the finest of its type in the U. S., perhaps even in the world.

At most colleges it is the football team; at St. Olaf it is the choir. Each year between 200 and 300 of St. Olaf's 1,000-odd muscular youths and placid maidens try out. The few who are picked have something to write home about. St. Olaf's choristers are held to their musical tasks with religious rigor. To be dropped from the choir is the greatest disgrace than can befall a St. Olaf student.

St. Olaf's choristers always sing unaccompanied. Their sense of pitch is so accurate that their director, squat, white-haired Dr. Frederick Melius Christiansen, never even peeps a pitch pipe to give them the key. And their singing has the precision and shading of a crack symphony orchestra. Every year they pack up and pile into a chartered bus for at least one big tour. For St. Olaf, these tours earn substantial sums. The grey stone, $140,000 music building that is the pride of St. Olaf s campus was paid for mostly out of the choir's profits.

The man who made St. Olaf's choir what it is is genial, 68-year-old Dr. Christiansen. The violinist son of a Norwegian blacksmith, Dr. Christiansen came to the U. S. from Larvik, Norway, went to St. Olaf College 26 years ago as head of the music department. Since then he has become the college's most respected figure, and though St. Olaf's youngsters call him "Christy" behind his back, they would never dare address him as anything but Dr. Christiansen.

"Christy" has been a U. S. citizen for the past 50 years, but his broad Norwegian accent, his preferences for rye bread and prim, batwing collars, stamp him unmistakably as an old-worldling. So, perhaps, does the self-effacing devotion to music that makes St. Olaf's lusty youngsters hang on his every word and glance. Critics have often asked him how he manages to get such results with a constantly changing group of college students. Says he, grinning good-naturedly: "Character is what counts. ... If it comes to a choice between character and exceptional voice, I choose character. . . . The boy who whistles at his work. The girl who sings as she wipes the dishes. These people make good choir material. . . . How much, or how little, they know about music doesn't matter much."

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