Bishop's Dinner keynote speaker was a driving force behind The Madeleine Choir School

Friday, Sep. 02, 2016

We Catholics are always celebrating anniversaries.  Almost every day we can celebrate a feast day or memorial of some great saint or event in Church history. I admit to a heightened interest in anniversaries lately because my wife and I celebrated our 10th in August, but one needn’t look far to find other anniversaries we should all be celebrating: St. James the Just parish in Ogden is celebrating its 50th, and the original class of permanent deacons is celebrating its 40th.  But the one I want to focus on this month is The Madeleine Choir School, which is celebrating its 20th. Choir School founder and director Gregory Glenn will be the keynote speaker at the Bishop’s Dinner on Sept. 15; here is a brief summary of the school’s history gleaned from an interview I did with him in 2009.

After completing his graduate work at Catholic University in 1988, Glenn took the position of the Diocese of Salt Lake City’s Director of Liturgy, but he gradually migrated to the Cathedral of the Madeleine staff by 1991 as the great renovation project was getting under way. 

The choir school began in 1990 as an after-school program for musically talented children from parishes in the Salt Lake City area. It was immensely popular from the beginning, with 70 students divided into a Boy Choir and a Girl Choir. Because the cathedral was closed at the time, the students rehearsed in the basement of St. Ann School, moving to the cathedral on Sept. 31, 1992.

With the reopening of the cathedral, the choir program began to flourish, and some parents began floating the idea of creating a true choir school on the model of European cathedrals. The idea had actually been in Glenn’s mind for some time, and some architectural modifications to the basement of the cathedral had been designed with that in mind. To be sure, that parental enthusiasm was met by a corresponding negative reaction among other members of the Catholic community who felt that we did not need another Catholic school. Glenn countered that by pointing out that while we probably did not need another Catholic school, we did need a choir school. A 1995 feasibility study led to Bishop George H. Niederauer’s approval of the Choir School on May 25, 1996.  By the next day, registrations had filled every slot in the fourth through seventh grades. By the time school opened, importunities from students and parents forced the addition of an eighth grade as well. The first student body consisted of 110 students.

A vitally important step in creating the Choir School was that Glenn was able to spend two months in London studying the choir school at Westminster Cathedral. 

“That time for me was invaluable,” he said. “In fact, I’m always amused – I think I learned more in that two months about some aspects of church music than I did in many of my courses in my undergraduate and graduate work.”

Gaining approval and recruiting students was one thing; actually getting a school going was quite another.  

“We had no teachers, no principal, no desks, no books, nothing,” Glenn recalled.  

Besides, parents were facing the necessity of pulling their children out of often hard-to-get slots in the student bodies of other Catholic schools, on the gamble that the Choir School would succeed.  

“I have to credit those parents because they were taking an enormous risk,” Glenn continued. “. . . They were tremendous pioneers in getting this off the ground, and I am still very grateful to them.”

Of course the Choir School not only survived, but thrived. In 2002 the second and third grades were added, then in 2003 the first grade and kindergarten. Today the school has pre-kindergarten through eighth grades with about 240 students.

Finding an adequate facility was a final problem: space was at a premium in the cathedral basement and there was no playground. Providentially, in 2002 Rowland Hall-St. Mark’s School offered their property across First Avenue from the cathedral and by dint of a gargantuan fund-raising program the diocese was able to purchase it. At this writing, renovations on parts of the severely run-down campus are still underway.

The Choir School has been such a success that even its skeptics have been won over. The Most Rev. William K. Weigand, seventh Bishop of Salt Lake City, said to Glenn after the choir’s virtuosic performance, at the funeral of Bishop Joseph L. Federal, of Maurice Durufly’s Requiem – a very difficult piece that the children had learned in only five days: “You know, Greg, if you had come to me and asked me for the approval of the Choir School, I would have said no . . . and it would have been a terrible mistake.”