Beginning June 21, PBS will spread that story nationwide when Kiki Wilson’s Robert Shaw: Man of Many Voices appears nationwide as part in the American Masters series.
After the monumental effort she and others put forth to create the tribute, “I get little tears in my throat” thinking about the film’s television debut, Wilson said.
She and “an intimate little group” who worked on the project will gather that night for a celebration, one “I think will be pretty emotional,” Wilson said.
Born Kiki Follrath, she grew up in Springfield as the granddaughter of one of the community’s leading musical figures, Philo Botsford, director of high school band programs. At his retirement, she recalls proudly playing the piccolo part in “Stars and Stripes Forever,” his favorite tune.
She also benefitted from years in a musical scene in Springfield that featured solid church choirs, outstanding public school directors and an arts infrastructure that fostered talent in the community.
Graduating from Springfield North High School in 1970, she majored in music at Washington University in St. Louis and earned a master’s in conducting at the Northwestern University school of music before finding work on the Chicago music scene.
She met and fell in love with Atlantan Frank Wilson while the two were visiting China; and when he proposed moving to Atlanta once they married, she asked why she should give up Chicago.
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“Because we have Robert Shaw,” he said.
“I would have followed him to Timbuktu,” Wilson said; nonetheless, Shaw was definitely a draw.
Like most people in the nation, Wilson knew of his reputation as an unparalleled conductor. She also had heard whispers about and would learn about the drinking, philandering and out-of-control way in which he conducted his personal life.
A California-born minister’s son who rose to popularity in the 1930s directing the glee club for band leader Fred Waring’s NBC radio show, Shaw became a controversial figure as a World War II conscientious objector.
Early on he also showed his resolve in insisting that his choirs would always include the best singers regardless of their race or religion. Told that Pastor Norman Vincent Peale said he wanted neither blacks or Jews in the 200-member College Chorale that performed there, Shaw walked out on the job. Years later, he would challenge racism throughout the South by taking his racially mixed chorus on the road.
Before that happened, the man who had gained a national reputation doing popular music had to fight for respect in the world of classical music. Among his much-needed allies were two distinguished conductors.
One was Arturo Toscanini, who hired Shaw to direct the NBC Chorus in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth, saying “finally, I found the maestro I have been looking for.”
The other was George Szell, conductor of the world class Cleveland Orchestra, who hired Shaw as an assistant. His work under Szell solidified his musical pedigree, and after a June 3, 1962, Paris plane crash killed many core leaders of Atlanta’s cultural elite, the city decided to rebuild its orchestra and a new hall around Shaw.
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He was a fixture there by 1981, when the new Mrs. Wilson arrived, joined the chorus, and was tapped to lead rehearsals when the maestro was out of town. More often she was a second alto snugged up to the tenors as Shaw was putting the chorus through its paces. He first had his singers master the rhythm of the music, only then adding the pitches of the notes and working to meld the two into a musical whole. It was a method he insisted on, whether the music at hand was Amazing Grace or Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.
A “formidable” character, who could be “dictatorially demanding,” Wilson said Shaw was adored by his all-volunteer chorus because of “the depth of experience he brought to them.”
One of Wilson’s mountaintop moments came in a concert hall in East Berlin in 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall fell. Contrary to suggestions for a program of American music, Shaw chose a performance of all European music.
At a historical moment as resonant as the hall interior, Shaw led his musicians through a demanding piece of music at the core of German music tradition and won over an initially skeptical audience whose depth of appreciation was apparent from the extraordinary length of the standing ovation.
Wilson left the performance with the conviction that someone, someday should document what Shaw had done. She had no notion that 20 years later, with her dear husband gone and herself recently retired from a career in IT, the task would fall to her.
How she did so is a story for another day and involves an anecdote to go with every credit line shown at film’s end. But the story’s final chapter would involve a last minute scramble to, in two weeks, trim 19 minutes out of the 71-minute documentary that had been years in the making.
The cutting was required to fit the American Masters time limitations and was done, of course, by the same people who had “fought over every word” in the lengthier original product.
Those cuts were made easier by the early consensus reached early on by Wilson, directors Pam Roberts and Peter Miller, and Amy Linton, who had helped form the team early on.
While some nuance was inevitably lost, “I think, artistically, we did a good, maybe great job,” Wilson said, “and the story is compelling.”
More than that, it’s likely to have a wide audience not only this month, but through the years.
The connection with PBS Distribution that came with the American Masters airing will accomplish something Wilson and her team had tried to tackle but were unable to: Getting the documentary she had once hoped would sit in the Atlanta Symphony offices into libraries and universities across the nation.
Bravo!
How to watch
What: ‘Kiki Wilson’s Robert Shaw: Man of Many Voices’
Where: American Masters, PBS
ThinkTV 16.1 Dayton - 1:30 a.m. June 22; 1 p.m. June 23
ThinkTV 16.4 or Spectrum 985 - 9 p.m. June 23
CET 48.1 Cincinnati - 9 p.m. June 21
CET 48.3 (CETArts channel) - 9 p.m. June 23; 2 and 6 p.m. June 24
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