Finn's Jennies

Music is an old, sweet story to nuns of the Roman Catholic Church. For some eighteen centuries they have been chanting matins and vespers in their convent chapels. Last week, in Chicago's austere Orchestra Hall, a choir of 80 nuns sang on a public stage, for the first time in history.

The daring idea was a man's--husky, grey-haired Father William J. Finn (TIME, July 24), onetime choirmaster of Manhattan's Church of St. Paul the Apostle, who trained and directed his singers as a "demonstration" in his lifelong fight to revive Renaissance music. Irreverent observers (who nonetheless have a wholesome respect for Father Finn's showmanship) promptly dubbed the choir "Finn's Jennies." The talkative, 63-year-old conductor called them "esthetically aware."

Father Finn had qualms about his two-hour concert of classic sacred music (Palestrina, Vittoria, Brahms, Mendelssohn); he thought it might be "a little on the gay side." To rehearse the sisters he had to modify the hardy rehearsal technique he had developed during 40 years with boys' choirs (stretching the singers out on table and piano tops for breathing exercises): "Of course, in the case of the sisters that just isn't done. . . . [They] are dedicated to an unworldly life. No Delilah business, you know."

The sweet, soft voice texture which stirred and delighted Chicagoans, Father Finn achieved by instructing high sopranos to sing moo; low sopranos, mee; first altos, mah; second altos, maw. "When you hear them mooing and making and everything, it's like listening to a lot of flutes."

Now that the ice is broken, "Finn's Jennies" will go on making Chicago appearances, but Father Finn can't visualize a road tour: "I've done so much barnstorming myself, I'm as bad as Ethel Barrymore. But you can't have the sisters singing one-night stands. . . ."

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