Director of Choral Activities Defends Christmas Vespers Against Controversy
May 3, 2015
Rochelle Malter

Christmas Vespers 2014 by Rochelle Malter

Since 1971, Christmas Vespers has been a cherished Mount Holyoke College tradition. Every December, students and community members come together to escape the cold and listen to beautiful, meticulously rehearsed music. As the choral ensembles walk into a darkened Abbey Chapel, the site of Vespers on campus, each participant holds a lit candle. Light shines through the center stained glass window from above, creating an atmosphere of peace and reverence.

In recent years, however, Christmas Vespers become the subject of controversy within the Mount Holyoke Community. As Lindsay Pope, the Director of Choral Activities and a Lecturer in Music at Mount Holyoke, asks “Is our performance of Vespers still relevant today?”

Pope’s question is echoed by a community that prides itself on diversity of all sorts, including religion and faith. While the modern Vespers concert does not solely contain religious music, it is still clearly closely tied to Christianity. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops defines Vespers as an evening prayer service, and the event at Mount Holyoke is officially titled “Christmas Vespers.” The songs that are used to transition from piece to piece, which the audience are invited to participate in, are according to Pope of “the English carol tradition”. These carols are Christian in nature. It is understandable that members of a community representing faith groups, including but not limited to Judaism, Hinduism, and Paganism, might challenge a service that Pope said is “representing our college and also representing Christianity.”

Pope, an alum who graduated in 2007, conducts Chorale, the Glee Club, and Chamber Singers. She is responsible for the selection of the choral music for Vespers. She said that she has carefully selected songs for the Vespers program. “In my four years, I’ve definitely programmed less and less Christian music,” she commented. “I consciously select music that, even if it is Christian, can connect to many different people.” Pope also noted that the Mount Holyoke Vespers service is significantly less religious than Smith College’s Christmas Vespers, as “the event [at Smith] is funded by the Office of Religious Life [and it is] unapologetically about the birth of Christ.”

However, Pope has concerns about modifying or cancelling Vespers completely. She fears presenting a concert that tokenizes different faith groups, and comments that her “other conflict as a director is that I don’t want to present a watered down holiday concert that tries to include all these faiths because I think that does these faiths a disservice.” In her view, modifying the concert to include more faith traditions could potentially be more disrespectful than keeping it the way it is.

Pope also strongly feels that canceling Vespers would have negative consequences. “I think if we were to stop doing it we’d get a lot of feedback from alumnae,” she said, adding that alums want to see the “quintessential Vespers,” a concert that is familiar to what they would have seen as students.

Catharine Melhorn, Mount Holyoke Professor Emeritus of Music, is credited with creating Vespers in its modern form with former associate choral director Donald Chen. The first Christmas Vespers, performed on December 5, 1971, included classical choral pieces such as O Come, O Come Emmanuel and Silent Night. Melhorn, who retired in 2006, was quoted as calling Vespers “a warm and inclusive event cherished by the community and alumnae alike” on a now-outdated web page from 1996.

Billed by the College’s website as an “annual holiday-inspired concert”, Mount Holyoke’s Christmas Vespers today is performed at both St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City and in Abbey Chapel on campus. In 2014, seven Mount Holyoke ensembles, comprised of over 100 students, participated in Vespers: Chorale, the Glee Club, Chamber Singers, the Jazz ensembles, the Symphony Orchestra, the English Handbells group, and the Flute choir. The program included works by J. S. Bach, Maria Cozzolani, and Peter Tchaikovsky, as well as folk songs. The performance at Abbey Chapel was, as it has been in the past, free and open to the general public as well as students, faculty, staff, and alumnae.

According to Pope, “it is a very successful event,” attended by over 2,000 people. The Vespers performance at St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York City requires tickets purchased from the Mount Holyoke Club of NYC, with the most expensive tickets sold at $459.25 (these tickets, sold in a package of four costing $1,837, include a pre-concert reception and reserved premium seating). As an alum of the College, Pope is aware of the strong emotional connection many former students have to Vespers. “I think it would be silly to take away the event. It is so successful, it makes a lot of money for the college, and it is near and dear to many students,” she said.

The controversy over how to modify Vespers so that it best represents the Mount Holyoke community is not an isolated incident. Colleges around the country are struggling to embrace religious diversity, as questions of pluralism fuel conversations on campuses from Massachusetts to California. This past January, Duke University in Durham, North Carolina reversed a decision to allow Muslim students to observe the call to prayer from a campus chapel bell tower. According to Duke’s vice president of public affairs, Michael J. Schoenfeld, the administration had received threats that posed a security concern, prompting them to cancel the plan. Weekly prayer services have been held in the basement of the Duke Chapel, but the plan would have implemented the chanting of the call to prayer audibly for the entire community. While some have praised the administration’s reversal of the decision, others, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), have criticized it. “It is unfortunate that a prestigious institution like Duke University ultimately bowed to intimidation by anti-Muslim bigots,” CAIR said in a statement released regarding the decision.

While the conversation surrounding Christmas Vespers at Mount Holyoke has yet to garner the national attention attracted by the Duke decision, and is vastly different in many ways, community members like Pope are still very aware of need to include music from a diverse selection of religious traditions. “Christianity is the religion of privilege at Mount Holyoke,” Pope said. “We want to make sure we’re including different perspectives.”