Layne Miller still lives with the distinct childhood memory of sliding down a scrubby hill near Red Rocks Amphitheatre — and right into a cactus. It’s one of those lasting, funny childhood recollections that’s easier to talk about now, more than 40 years later.
“A few memories from my time living in Colorado are painful,” Miller said from his Provo, Utah, office last week, “but most of them are wonderful.”
Miller will revisit many of those memories — without the cactus — when he returns to Red Rocks on June 29 as a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. The concert is a fundraiser benefiting the National Sports Center for the Disabled.
For the choir, the appearance is a rare return to the road, one of six non-Salt Lake City dates it will perform in the next two years. For the 500-plus singers, musicians and crew who travel with the show, it is a spiritual pilgrimage that is part outreach, part beautification, part responsibility.
Miller, a 51-year-old baritone, spent his preschool through middle school years in Arvada before his family moved back to Utah. His relationship with the choir began a few years after he returned west, when he was a 19-year-old missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints living in Mexico.
“My mother would send me recordings of the choir,” Miller recalled. “It was a wonderful time for me, but there was a lot of homesickness that went along with that experience, too — and their music reminded me that I had a responsibility to be an ambassador for the church to the world. I knew then that I wanted to be a member.”
The 360-member Mormon Tabernacle Choir, nicknamed “America’s choir” by President Ronald Reagan, is the most prominent manifestation of the Mormon faith in mainstream American culture. But the Emmy- and Grammy-winning choir transcends religion with its massive appeal and impressive reach.
The group’s 30-minute weekly radio program, “Music and the Spoken Word,” is on more than 2,000 radio and TV stations and is the world’s longest continuously running network broadcast. And you’d be surprised at how many folks the world over have heard of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir — even if they’ve never heard of the Mormon faith.
A chorus of volunteers
Outside of the broadcast, the weekly public rehearsals and the seasonal concerts, the choir also tours every other year. In 2005 it played the Pepsi Center, and after skipping Colorado in 2007, it’s back this year for its first Red Rocks show since 1984. Joining the choir on this tour are 65 members of the Orchestra at Temple Square — and the large crew you would expect from such a mammoth production.
Amazingly, only 11 of the 500-plus people who are touring with the choir this summer are paid employees. The rest are volunteers, according to choir president Mac Christensen.
“We have quite a few teachers in high schools and universities, and they’re all volunteers,” said Christensen, who has served as choir president for nearly nine years. “We have doctors and dentists and salesmen and homemakers. About 90 percent of our choir members take their vacations to tour.”
The choir members obviously take great pride in their work. But are they a prideful bunch?
“I would say it’s a humble pride,” Christensen said. “These are very great people. They have great talent that they share. But the eyes of the world are upon them, so they’re very special people. They’re great dads and mothers and good people.”
Miller works for the bookstore at Brigham Young University’s main campus in Provo, an hour’s drive from choir hub Salt Lake City. He has actually served two stints in the choir — for three and a half years in the early 1990s and this time for a year.
“I needed to be closer to my family and raise my kids,” Miller said of his 12-year break from the choir. “I took time to be with my children, and now that they’re raised, I have the privilege to come back. I originally wanted to take off just a couple years, but things happened.”
Now that he’s back in the swing of things with a couple more recordings under his belt — “Praise to the Man” and “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing: American Folk Hymns and Spirituals” — he feels lucky and blessed to be singing with the choir again.
“I pinch myself a lot,” Miller said. “I pinch myself to make sure that it’s happening. It’s a humbling experience. I’m a part of an icon.”
The choir’s audition process is rigorous. In addition to meeting basic musical requirements, singers must be LDS members and recommended by their bishop, live within 100 miles of Temple Square and be 25 to 55 years old.
After 20 years in the choir, or reaching age 60, members retire, and others are brought in. This spring, 34 members retired, mostly because of the 20-year rule.
The enormity of the choir is a financial weight on the church — though not as much as in previous years.
“It’s a huge financial obligation, and there are many costs involved,” said Christensen. “The choir is not quite self-sustaining at this point, but we’re boosted through our sales of CDs and DVDs and the portfolio that’s been built over the last 40 to 50 years. In the past, the church has taken care of certain costs. And now the choir takes care of those costs, in addition to the majority of the day-to-day costs.
“But, yes, the president of the church would like it very much if we were self-sustaining.”
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com
Why this choir is different
The Robert Shaw Chorale and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir were arguably the best- known and most influential American choral ensembles of the 20th century.
Shaw disbanded his famous group in 1967, when he took over as music director of the Atlanta Symphony, but the Tabernacle Choir has remained as active and nearly as prominent as ever.
The group gained recognition beginning in 1929 with its still-continuing national radio program, “Music and the Spoken Word,” and solidified its artistic reputation with a series of now-classic recordings in the 1950s and ’60s with the famed Philadelphia Orchestra.
If the Tabernacle Choir’s artistic reach has diminished with the rise of dozens of symphony choruses and other ensembles in recent decades, it remains a major force in the choral world.
Kyle MacMillan
