on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 17

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods, organist/choirmaster at the Church of St. John the Divine, Houston. See here for the entire series.

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After the Woods era

Dick was of the ‘Organist-Choirmaster’ vintage. The next generation was ‘Director of Music.’ Dick’s calling card actually displayed both titles, each on a separate line: Organist-Choirmaster / (Director of Music) [parentheses included]. About five months after Dick’s death, his successor John Gearhart arrived from St. Paul’s Church in Mobile, Ala. In John and his wife Laurie, I found easy confidantes and a whole new set of lessons to learn. John is a good man and a conscientious and creative director of music. He was necessarily a bit of a shock to the choir – a man of wider smiles, more relaxed wardrobe, and louder living than Dick. He was as organized as Dick but also rather more passionately impulsive. It took me only a short while to learn how fast I would have to move to make things happen when John had an idea. Dick had his ideas months ahead; John seemed to have his just before bulletin printing deadlines! [Kidding.] But one is a fool who thinks John didn’t fit in. Rather, it was Dick who had over time become the outlier in that parish. John Gearhart quite satisfactorily and appropriately completed the public gleam of the parish that the rector and the congregation had in mind.

As the final word on matters of worship staff, rector Larry Hall hired and presented John to the choir, sight unseen. There was plenty of grumbling that the choir never had much of a say in the matter and therefore felt unappreciated. Some fallout and exodus were predictable and indeed occurred. Not everyone was willing to accept the new way, appropriate though the new way admittedly was for that parish. A sense of making a statement gnawed at me. The Woods era was over, and I felt like I was supposed to make some dramatic statement to that effect. I self-misguidedly chose resigning to make that statement, effective May 15, 1994. It wasn’t until much later as that date approached that I realized that it was one year to the day after Dick’s death.

For a number of years following, several choir members organized an annual choir reunion on the Saturday closest to Dick’s birthday, July 26. The group would gather at a gourmet Mexican restaurant in the Houston area, in homage to Dick’s preference for the original Ninfa’s Mexican restaurant on Navigation Boulevard. [It was at Ninfa’s with Dick where I learned everything there is to know about Tex-Mex. I also learned that Dick proudly knew how to ask for an ashtray in Spanish and that he drank his margaritas in the uncommon fashion of straight up with no salt. I think of Dick and the choir and of Ninfa’s and of life in Houston every time I go out for Mexican.] At these post-Woods-era gatherings, the choir would update their contact info with each other, tell stories, eat lunch, and sing one or two pieces together, usually the Doxology and the Mozart Ave verum, which is fitting, since we didn’t get to that one during Communion at the funeral. Previous assistant organists able to attend always added a level of remembrance from their perspectives that enriched the choir members’ recollections from theirs. This annual gathering was about the man as much as the experiences and training he provided.

One friend in the choir has stressed what it was about Dick to be able to create what he did, against so much headwind. When it came to music and its community-building component, Dick was genuine. He focused on tone, and the rest followed, including goodwill. [Paraphrased.] These annual re-gatherings were not hero worship; rather, we were still honoring the community Dick fostered within us all. As of this writing in 2025, we’re all getting older (and worse), and those gatherings are no longer annual, but they still occur here and there.

About six years after Dick died, the church campus was finally showing enough wear and tear that it had to be dealt with. And deal with it the parish did. They realized that the buildings had lasted fifty years and needed some help to continue into the future. The perfect committee was formed, coordinated by the perfect chair Mrs. Sally McCollum. They openly and honestly discussed and dealt with every inch of the physical plant. They retained leading professionals in liturgical design, infrastructure, roofing, fire suppression, landscaping, and a host of other fields. And yes, they dealt smartly and successfully (and finally) with matters of acoustics, chancel layout, seating, and floor covering in the main church. The entire room now has slate flooring and completely modular liturgical furniture and platforming for infinite versatility for services and concerts. What had previously been one of Houston’s more visually disagreeable rooms is now rather luminous, and what had previously been one of Houston’s driest acoustical spaces is now one of the warmest and most commanding. The architecture now serves the function of the space better, rather than being merely a perpetuation of the original architect’s adherence to his idol’s designs. All this, plus a five-manual pipe organ with two consoles, built by Orgues Létourneau, St. Hyacinthe, Quebec [their largest, at 144 ranks] to replace the 1954 Wicks rebuilt in 1970. The room, previously and deservedly shunned by all competent musicians, is now in constant use as a popular concert venue. The parish has enjoyed hosting such events and takes an active role in hospitality.

That renovation is a visible representation of the parish’s revolution toward smarter decisions on many matters. Dick’s successor John Gearhart reports that the conservatism toward the marginalized turned around, too, for which I offer congratulations to the parish and many thanks to God. John reports that all things were made new during the time following Dick’s death. Certainly overdue, but revolution toward a better church for God’s people made its way organically and peacefully into many lives there. John’s own successor Steve Newberry reports that things continue on that good track. The liturgy in the nave has remained faithful, even adding vergers, Anglican-chanted Psalms, and monthly Evensong. ‘Renewal music,’ now perhaps better known as ‘praise and worship,’ is still plentiful in its own services in another space on campus.

Next time: Some final observations

on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 16

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods, organist/choirmaster at the Church of St. John the Divine, Houston. See here for the entire series.

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The funeral

Mr. Bob Jones, then president of Geo. H. Lewis & Sons Funeral Directors, was a dear friend of Dick’s, and he stood ready to assist when the inevitable occurred. I thank him, God rest his soul, for that service in friendship. Aside: Over the years, Bob also spearheaded a most welcome practice that nearly all other funeral homes in Houston still follow today – bringing a check to each funeral for the organist.

Dick’s funeral was May 22, 1993, at 1:00 pm at St. John’s. Bishop Sterling celebrated. Rector Larry Hall preached. My teacher Clyde Holloway played the Franck B-Minor Choral for the prelude, after which I added the Bach E-Flat Prelude and Fugue. The hymns were Engelberg, St. Columba, Melita, Down Ampney, and Land of Rest. And the choir completely filled the stalls with current and former members. (How I wished I had been around during the heyday of this choir with Dick.) There were surprisingly few other people in attendance – maybe fifty or so – a final insult, I felt, from a parish of some 4000 members, for a fellow who had served among them for two decades.

The choir sang three anthems at the Offertory: Duruflé Ubi caritas, Mendelssohn ‘He that shall endure,’ and Vaughan Williams ‘O how amiable.’ Even today, I still weep openly upon hearing the Vaughan Williams. For whatever reason, my myriad emotions converged around this piece during this time, and I remember Dick and everything he stood for, every time I hear it. Communion motets were Tallis ‘If ye love me’ and Mozart Ave verum. I recall running out of communicants before we ran out of music, and just as Dick would have done, we ended the music and did not get to the Mozart.

Bishop Benitez (previously the rector) could not attend the funeral and wrote an address of sorts to be read aloud. I was keen to hear what final words he might offer for this fellow he openly admired. To my disappointment, the letter was full of platitudes and clichés. It was all smiles and read like a merry biographical sketch intended for a retirement party. I was deeply disappointed that the bishop didn’t make better use of the opportunity for a Christian teaching moment. There was no mention of the tragedy of this death, no mention of the unnecessary stigma that came with AIDS in those days, no reprimand of this parish or the Church at large – an institution that should have been there for sick people who often unnecessarily lost their dignity and friends and family as well as their lives with this disease, no mention of the HIV learning curve the whole thing put some of us on and should have put everyone on, no call for better education and better treatment of each other. I seem to be the only person who remembers the address at all, and although I can’t recall if it was read aloud or if the bishop had pre-recorded it himself it to be played back at the service, I know I’m not making it up. I have tried to get a copy of it from the archivist at the diocese, but the backlog on the digitization of previous bishops' documents is understandably formidable.

Credit is due Bishop Benitez, however, for his unwavering and demonstrated admiration of Dick from the day they met to the day Dick died. He always called Dick ‘maestro.’ I remember his graciously attending a birthday party for Dick in 1991 and uttering a most sincere prayer to God, some of the words I remember as, “… for your servant Dick … that as his days increase …” The bishop even visited Dick on his death bed at home. Dick’s inner circle has never forgotten that gesture from the bishop nor the absence of the same gesture from the rector and others.

Dick’s ashes were interred in the columbarium at the church. As one enters the gate, his niche is on the left-hand side, in the first bend of the columbarium’s cruciform layout. Dick is interred directly next to Mr. Collis Woods, Sr., a Black gentleman who served St. John’s for decades as sexton. The two of them had arranged to be interred next to each other so that visitors might assume they were brothers. Dick always chuckled like a sly villain whenever he told anyone of those plans. The whole thing is a perfect representation of his wry, sneaky humor, and it is quietly hiding in plain, perpetual sight right there in the church columbarium.

Next time: After the Woods era

on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 15

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods, organist/choirmaster at the Church of St. John the Divine, Houston. See here for the entire series.

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The inevitable

After he got out of the hospital, Dick said strange things and had trouble following conversations. That was to be expected for what his brain had just endured and was now up against, but he needed to save as much face as possible. He wisely stayed off the organ bench during church now. I started taking up more bureaucratic slack, most of which involved finding ways to keep him off the phone. He couldn’t carry on much of a conversation, and most of the folks he was talking to were uninformed about what was going on. Furthermore, there was no voicemail in those days; phone messages existed only on pink slips from the receptionist’s office. Dick would return a call from a pink-slip message, get no answer, and then just throw the slip away and declare the matter ended. He wouldn’t [couldn’t] even leave messages on answering machines. Complaints began to mount. I began to go in after he left each day, retrieve messages from the trash can, and return calls. Of course, e-mail didn’t exist yet.

And so it went for a few months. That Christmas 1992 was touch-and-go. Dick’s brain couldn’t keep up with appropriate tempos in rehearsals. I took it upon myself to practice playing and conducting just in case I needed to, and I had to practice those during times Dick was not going to be within earshot. I had to work out in my mind where the orchestra might re-set to see me, should Dick not be able to conduct. And I worked out any spots where I might gently drive tempos ahead at the organ without losing the orchestra, whether Dick was conducting or not. He was determined to remain in charge, and his inner circle was determined to help him. Even though it was my job to be prepared, ironically I had to think through all these things and be ready without anyone knowing. Fortunately, those secret plans weren’t necessary, and I have never shared them with anyone until now. We made it through that night. Dick even managed to rally for the evening with higher energy and better tempos. But he was exhausted afterward, of course, and he never rallied back to that level again.

We all knew there would certainly be no post-Christmas-Eve party at Dick’s that year. Those were always epic in previous years. Church would be over around midnight on Christmas morning, and many choir members and other friends would gather at Dick’s and party well into the night. Dick always invited the Diocesan Music Commission and his good friend Bruce Power. The party would last until at least 4:00 am. I would go and stay for only a short while, because I had Christmas morning duties. It was one of the most joyous times of year for me. Since I couldn’t get home to North Carolina for Christmas, I could enjoy my dear friends in the choir, celebrate a [big] job well done at church, and get in the habit of being in church on high holy days, a foreign concept in my childhood but a necessity for me now.

Soon after that Christmas 1992, we moved out of the church into the gym for services during nave renovation. Then Dick announced his retirement, to take effect after a couple months’ vacation he had accrued. I officially took over as Interim. I didn’t see him for a while, during which time he lost half his weight and began wasting away. He arrived in a wheelchair for his farewell Sunday, during which he received a lengthy standing ovation. Dick managed to stand his poor, emaciated self up and accept it.

Once Dick’s retirement was effective, no one in the music department knew what was next, and a sense of threat loomed. We were all waiting for some sort of bomb to be dropped – choir disbandment in favor of the contemporary service, choir scattering out of frustration, choir scattering because they realized that Dick was the only glue holding them all together. I just wanted to hand them off intact to Dick’s successor, whoever that was going to be. And Holy Week was now around the corner.

Meanwhile, the search for Dick’s successor was now on. A search committee was formed, but when Episcopal policy gives the rector the final say over matters of worship and therefore worship staff, this was going to be under the hood a quiet, intensive, one-man search. This was rector Larry Hall’s chance.

Saturday, May 15, 1993: Dick was on his deathbed at home, under Hospice care. Here I should thank a gracious and dear lady, ‘Pearl,’ assigned to his care. I had stopped by to speak what few words I had in my feeble, uninformed vocabulary for such a time as that. Not having experienced this before, I was horrified at how emaciated Dick had become, and I was unfamiliar with the short gasps of breath that are the typical death rattle. I wanted to stay but had to head to church for a wedding. A few minutes before I began the prelude, rector Larry handed me the note that Dick had died; he was two months and eleven days shy of age 64.

Next time: The funeral

on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 14

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods, organist/choirmaster at the Church of St. John the Divine, Houston. See here for the entire series.

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The tragic surprise

By the spring of 1992, Dick’s skin had developed a grayness. His lips were coated with a pasty, white residue, and he had little appetite for food and had lost the energy to clean his house or wash his dishes. Heavy smoker that he was, I thought he had emphysema or cancer. I had no idea what he thought or knew about his condition, other than that quitting smoking cold-turkey – which he did – might help. Several people had other suspicions, and they feel that Dick did at that time, too. By the time he finally went to a doctor just after Easter 1992, he was diagnosed not only HIV-positive but also with full-blown AIDS, manifested via pneumocystis pneumonia. He was immediately admitted to Park Plaza Hospital and remained there for three months. Here I must acknowledge most gratefully the heroic efforts of Didier Piot, M.D., and the entire Park Plaza team. Dr. Piot was a pioneer in the U.S. for HIV/AIDS care, and he was the founding physician of what eventually became the AIDS Foundation Houston. The Park Plaza team worked several miracles on Dick, and he was able to return to work a few months later, if only for a short time. His illness was too far along for him to work meaningfully for much longer.

A diagnosis of HIV or AIDS in those days was a death sentence in most cases, not only to one’s body but also to one’s employment and/or status. HIPAA protection was still four years away, and there were no mechanisms in place at St. John the Divine for continuing nor suspending the compensation of a sick staff member, especially one with a sickness suspected to result from a ‘lifestyle’ of which the parish so often vocally disapproved. Dick did not disclose his diagnosis outright to rector Larry Hall for quite a while. (Although that secret was of course particularly sensitive, Dick was always keeping secrets, anyway, thanks to the mistreatment he endured at places like St. James in Wichita and St. David’s in Austin and here at St. John the Divine, Houston.) The rector inferred Dick’s diagnosis from the location of his hospital room on the AIDS floor at Park Plaza, but he could not get confirmation from Dick nor Dick’s inner circle. That had to have been frustrating. I knew it wasn’t my place to reveal information like that. I also didn’t know the law nor which of these men was more within his rights. I can understand Dick’s unwillingness to trust Larry with that information, and I can understand the rector’s frustration as a boss being strung along without much recourse.

Once Dick was stabilized enough to sit up and talk more or less coherently, I would haul service planning materials to the hospital so we could work. I did that to keep him occupied, to encourage him, to help him show the administration that he was still working, and to keep him from otherwise losing face. But I also knew I was engaging in a certain amount of codependency, which was draining my own energy. I mitigated it all as much as I could. I’d certainly not work so hard today.

While I was doing the work of two, it was a little annoying to have to point out to the administration that increased salary for it would be nice. But Dick, ever the threatened one, then wondered if he was to receive some sort of docking or if I was now to be doing twice the work in other capacities. None of that was going to happen. Dick’s salary continued throughout his hospital stay, and my pay situation quickly improved, for which I was most grateful.

Things were chaotic under the surface for a time. The situation never boiled over, but the amount of scrambling and face-saving was near-epic. Dick was naturally withdrawing from his earthly authorities, even as his body was withdrawing from functionality. I’m sorry to report that he was also withdrawing from some dear friends, who would have moved heaven and earth for him. I was fielding questions I had no business fielding, from people who had no business asking. I was fielding phone calls from debt collectors. I learned very well how to say, “You’ll need to speak with Dr. Woods’s attorney. You know how this works. Here are his name and number.” Meanwhile, I was managing the program with the scant two years’ experience I had as an Episcopal musician up to that point, while the rector was wrestling with his own opinions of what to do, especially regarding exercising a Christian response to an evil disease that most people in those days were all too quick to blame the victims for. Anecdotal evidence from others suggests that the rector wanted to fire Dick outright but was eventually talked down from that particular ledge – by whom, no one seems to know. Dick had few allies outside the choir, and so it is reasonable to assume that whoever it was, they had either money or diocesan authority. At any rate, it was high drama as AIDS had finally arrived in posh River Oaks.

Dick eventually came clean with rector Larry, who to his own credit then organized an HIV/AIDS training session for the staff with a guest clinician. It was time, and it was important. So many people were uninformed or ill-informed in those days, and I was grateful to learn the language of the illness much better. I don’t recall us receiving much Christian sympathy/empathy training, but at least we learned some nuts and bolts about the terminology. There was mild grumbling about Dick’s privacy, and there was mild [uninformed] panic about catching HIV from him, but for the most part, heads were pulled from the sand, and we began to deal with the reality that was now upon us.

However, toward the end of Dick’s life, I remember a staff meeting during which a status report on him was requested. After a tick of silence, one clergyperson said, “I think he looks good. I saw him yesterday.” I asked, “Are we talking about the same fellow? He doesn’t look ‘good.’ He looks lousy; he is dying.” [I nearly added, “You idiot.” Dick had always thought that person was stupid, anyway.] The aftershocks of denial were still rumbling following the earthquake of the flagship River Oaks church learning that it had employed not only a gay man all this time but also one now dying of the gay man’s curse in those days.

I should add as I have before in this series that this parish eventually and largely cleaned up its act, and it is a much more Christlike place to be today. History is history, but I would be remiss to continue to leave the dear Reader with an unfavorable impression of a parish that no longer deserves it. I'll address that more directly in three more installments here.

Next time: The inevitable

on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 13

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods. See here for the entire series.

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A bit of fun

Any discussion of Dick’s influence naturally includes his command of his work and his welcoming others into it. But a discussion must also include his sense of humor. Although he felt increasingly slighted and irrelevant at St. John the Divine, Houston, he always maintained a wry sense of humor just under the surface, and he was always grateful when he found himself in company where he could unleash that humor freely (which he did). The apex I witnessed of his ability to shed work and enjoy life was a short trip he, Bruce Power, Richard Rhoads and I made to New Orleans beginning on Christmas Day 1991. Just four busy church musicians enjoying a few days off, with Dick leading the pack. We ate at the Camellia Grill one day and playfully concluded as a group that ‘Camellia’ was probably Dick’s drag name at Tulane. He went along with the gag.

Whenever he said something sarcastic or off-color, Dick would follow it with a smirk, a raised shoulder and raised eyebrows, or he would smile and tuck his chin in a demure pose of look-at-me-I-made-a-funny. He had a twinkle in his eye and a childlike smile. He never laughed out loud but rather grinned it out under a bulky caterpillar mustache I never saw shaved off.

He and I and several friendlies on the church support staff would giggle at the sincere but tragically all-too-frequent spelling ‘St. John the Devine.’ We snickered as we visualized champagne bottles and prows of ships when we heard of new parents asking to have their babies ‘christened.’ And we would snort at the strings of fashionable last names being given to babies for their full names; we imagined the future chaos when these children would be told to ‘print last name first’ and then an unsuspecting reader would have to recalculate which of all those last names was the real one.

Dick and I would always pass the Peace at the appropriate time and in quiet reverence, complete with handshake and the full exchange, “The Peace of the Lord be with you. / And also with you.” Then he would immediately exit that mood and make some characteristically Dick comment: “Where the hell is the choir today? This is going to be terrible.” … “Where would we like to go for lunch today?” … “Boy, that was some sermon. I should have gone to feed the doggies during it.” [‘Feed the doggies’ was code for ‘smoke a cigarette.’ Dick was a heavy smoker. When my non-smoking, teetotaling parents first visited me in Houston, we went to Dick’s one evening for dinner. Rather than smoke in front of them, Dick stepped outside several times, claiming he needed to check on or feed the doggies. That wasn’t entirely contrived: he had two small dogs that were quite the entertainment. ‘Ralph’ was an assertive, black, short-haired miniature Dachshund, and ‘Butch’ was an exceedingly lovable and gassy English pug.]

If Dick and I were planning a service and discovered we needed something from outside arm’s reach, I would ask, “Am I supposed to go get it?” And he would say, “No, I’ll get it. You just sit there, drawing salary.” I still use that line today in banter with colleagues.

As soon as dinner would be delivered at a restaurant, Dick would ask the table, “Well, you ready to go?” Or, “Well, I’ll see you in the car.”

Dick once accused a too-loud tenor of sounding like a braying donkey. He accused one person’s sudden vibrato of sounding like an English horn in a string ensemble. When a section of the choir would launch too loudly into a phrase or when a women’s section began to allow too much vibrato in, Dick would yell, “No, you can’t do it that way – you’ll scare the children!” He always said such things only to old friends and knew that they would take it in the banter from which it was intended, but I’m sure he would get quite the shock if he said any of that to anyone at all today. [By the way, ‘You’ll scare the children!’ was very briefly a contender for subtitle of this would-be published biography of Dick. I quickly decided against it, knowing that only insiders would get it, while other readers would think God-knows-what from it.]

Dick drove a white 1989 Chrysler le Baron with a black cloth convertible top. He looked quite the part in it, with a ball cap and sunglasses. He always wanted a fluorescent light frame around the rear license plate. Those things were still novelties back then, and whenever he’d see one on a souped-up car, he’d endearingly get so excited he couldn’t sit still. So I got him one for Christmas one year, but then one thing in life led to another, and it never got installed.

We had some fun with a little fiefdom cropping up in the receptionist’s office. The receptionist began to require staff members to mark themselves present or absent on a magnetic board in her office. For us, that meant a trip to another building and upstairs, just to slide a little magnet left or right. She insisted everyone play along, but she was endearingly quite appreciative of anyone who did. So we would just call her with our status, which was fine with her. A few times, Dick called to tell her that he was heading to the restroom and that he would let her know when he was finished. Not only was the overkill of that lost on her, but also a tiny, private restroom was located right next to Dick’s office, not eight feet from his desk. He could have carried the hard-wired landline phone in there with him, if it meant that much to him. (And it didn’t, of course.)

Dick hated having to answer to more and more people in his work, a growing percentage of whom had no idea how to do that work. So he understandably resisted being required to sign in and out of campus, as if his hours were being tallied. But the bit of fun he had with the receptionist was surely an entertaining (if admittedly passive-aggressive yet equally futile) protest of increasing encroachment on our professional privacy.

Dick didn’t like the tidal wave of paperwork beginning to invade. Purchase orders, work orders, pre-purchase approvals and all other manner of paperwork made their appearance in churches everywhere during this time. Dick nominally worked at the pleasure of the rector, but now we all – including the rector at times – were beginning to work at the pleasure of the church administrator. When Dick suddenly had to justify every expense as if it were a first-time expenditure, he tried very hard to stay cool on the outside even as he railed in private against this new management style. I, too, hated it and felt that artists were going to have to begin operating like oil companies just to get pianos tuned and music ordered. [That’s life in the modern world, of course. The paperwork I am now responsible for in my university teaching is staggering, and it makes a few handwritten triplicate purchase orders at St. John the Divine look like a dream job – or dream vacation.] We found the whole thing silly and trendy, IRS bullying aside. We were annoyed all over again when we learned that church administrators’ salaries everywhere were beginning to eclipse those of the clergy for whom they worked.

The Rt. Rev. William E. Sterling (1927-2005) served as Bishop Suffragan of Texas 1989-1999. He previously served as rector in several churches in the Houston area. And he was a good friend of Dick’s. When he would visit St. John the Divine on official duty, he didn’t hang out with the clergy between services. Rather, he and Dick hung out in Dick’s office, smoking. Bishop Sterling confirmed me at St. John the Divine in the fall of 1990. Dick told him to give me “an extra-special blessing,” which the bishop dispensed by doing a near-complete handstand of his entire 200+-pound weight on my bowed head. The short prayer uttered over each confirmand was never so long than when he uttered it over my head that day. But my neck and I survived, and Dick and Bishop Sterling had a little fun.

To my ears, Dick’s favorite story to tell was of a service of healing and Eucharist one of us would play every Friday in the chapel. Dick loved telling this story, and he would chortle at the punchline every time, as if he were telling it for the first time:

One Friday, I was playing … just … the dreariest, most depressing music for communion for that service. And one of those old ladies passed by and patted me on the shoulder and whispered, “Your music really makes this place come alive!” I could hardly keep playing for laughing!

Bruce Power, one of Dick’s true friends, still giggles at that story today. One day, when Bruce learned I was going to play a special concert with the choir at First Methodist in Houston, he instructed a buddy of his in that choir to come up to me during rehearsal break and say, “Your music really makes this place come alive.” That was the kind of thing Dick would have done. 

Next time: The tragic surprise

on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 12

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods. See here for the entire series.

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Dick’s complaints

One of the clergy at St. John the Divine, Houston, was always driving the congregation’s spoken texts by staying ahead of the assembly – loudly and at high speed – under the guise of ‘leading’ them. He was always out ahead of the congregation in everything: the Gloria, the Creed, the Confession, the Lord’s Prayer, every Amen. Yelling one’s way through the liturgy to ‘lead’ the congregation is the spoken equivalent of blasting full organ at them during every stanza of every hymn. The yelling (Dick’s word) drove Dick crazy, week after week. He once addressed it during a weekly Tuesday staff devotional, warning that dragging the congregation that way through their parts of the liturgy turns too much attention to the ‘yeller’ and away from the congregation’s leitourgia. In that same staff session, Dick also tried to correct a sexton, whose style of increasingly heated-up extemporaneous praying the previous week Dick labeled ‘conjuring up God.’ Dick did not share with me what he was going to say that day, and I was alarmed at the risk he took in saying those things to the entire staff, with both offending people present. But I was riveted by his knowledge and authority in addressing those matters, even as I knew he might not have felt so authoritative by then in his life. He was well trained in congregational worship matters, but his expertise was on the way out from the mainstream, and I had to discern his expertise more often in his practice than in his instruction.

Dick hated to see liturgy repurposed on a whim; he always wanted liturgy to speak for itself. He would even raise an eyebrow if Holy Eucharist began with a direction to the page number in the Prayer Book rather than directly with the opening acclamation. After all, the page number was in the bulletin, and to verbally call attention to it was the equivalent of reading the bulletin aloud to the congregation, something else Dick hated. Nowadays at St. John’s, depending on the celebrant, a quick ‘good morning’ and welcome may follow the opening acclamation, during which the congregation is sometimes promised a ‘powerful worship experience.’ Dick insisted that liturgy is inherently powerful but that to literally interrupt it to label it in such obvious, pedestrian language immediately lessens the very power it could wield on its own. But so it goes. Fortunately, the celebrants at St. John’s these days don’t wait for a response to ‘Good morning;’ rather, they move straight through it: “Good morning, and welcome to the Church of St. John the Divine …” Gotta give them that.

Anyway, Dick despised how liturgy was being increasingly customized for the contemporary service, and he trusted no one who embraced it. As a proponent of the latest edition of the Prayer Book, he had invested some of himself in it and didn’t appreciate its erosion so soon after its publication. He suffered a double loss of liturgical conservatism and of self that came with so much modern liturgical overhaul without his input or blessing as the ‘chief liturgist.’ [Aside: Dick was never titled ‘chief liturgist’ and was never acknowledged as such, from my observations. But he was definitely most knowledgeable about liturgy, as parish musicians usually are, often far more so than the clergy. Although an Episcopal rector is the final word on liturgical matters, the parish musician is most often the more knowledgeable. (We need not venerate our musicians for that so much as we should impugn our seminaries for not training our clergy better in such matters.) As the scope of his influence allowed, Dick planned liturgy, conducted the choir, and cued the crucifer with great authority. My first time to witness it, I saw Dick truly in his element. Not only did I see a true ‘boss’ in him in that moment, but I also realized that for those of us paying attention, we were all part of something far bigger than any one or two of us. But the title of ‘liturgist’ was not bestowed on a musician in this parish until ten years into the tenure of Dick’s successor John Gearhart.]

A ‘Music Committee’ was formed in the mid- to late 1980s or so. I never went to those meetings, but according to Dick and his circle, it was merely another antagonistic tool to use against him, and since then, no one I have talked to can recall what its charge was or what it accomplished for the greater good. Its formation was probably a placating gesture toward the pushier renewal music contingent of the parish. Dick would go to meetings and listen and understand, but he had no intention of increasing the renewal music component of the services under his direct management. He already included at least one such song each Sunday during communion, sometimes even dipping into the more casual hymnal supplement Songs for Celebration. He tended to fill communion with congregational singing anyway, rather than choral motets, which was probably as much compromise as he was willing to allow. A friend of mine from the Cathedral, who would visit occasionally would complain to me that St. John’s sang far too many hymns and that the choir didn’t have enough to do. At any rate, Dick’s quiet, unadvertised refusal to increase the ‘renewal music’ component to Sunday mornings didn’t relieve the inner stress he felt from the redundant Music Committee and the tenuous reasons for its formation. That committee lasted only a handful of years after Dick’s retirement, confirming its dual callousness to him and pointlessness to the parish.

Dick’s mistrust of most of the parish and its managers was deep-seated by the time I arrived on staff. I didn’t mind being some sort of bridge between him and them, but he wouldn’t have it. When I offered to play the piano for a certain Sunday School class, he said, “No! You can’t do that! Once you start that, you’ll be playing that stuff for the rest of your LIFE!” I might have tried harder to bridge gaps, but I didn’t create them, and I didn’t know what I was doing, and I always had him in one ear, warning me that I’d never be let out of the fluff-piano-playing box once I stepped into it. Perhaps Dick should never have hired an assistant so young and inexperienced. Perhaps he really needed an assistant more like himself at that point. All this sailed right over my head in those days. I would like to have been able to visit with him over that and a host of other matters, lo these many years later. The learning experience I was in was rich, but other learning experiences I let slip by were surely abundant.

Dick enjoyed the respect of his counterparts all over the country. He was well-liked in the American Guild of Organists, Association of Anglican Musicians, and the Association of Diocesan Liturgical and Music Commissions [now the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions], and he played, conducted, and lectured magnificently for their various programs. But he and I would also garner unsolicited sympathy from counterparts. We would introduce ourselves to fellow musicians, but when they learned where we worked, they would usually say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” rather than, “Hey, that’s a great church.”

A fighter Dick was not. Fully peaceful on the outside, he deferred to authority 100% of the times I witnessed. He would then internalize any pain, betrayal, annoyance, or injustice. He would complain bitterly in private about it, but only if asked, and always without raising that swallowed, medium-high-pitched Pennsylvania-Dutch voice of his. Perhaps a drink or some dinner would boost his spirits, and the next day he’d be fine. He once told me that I could say absolutely anything to him, that he was the most resilient person I would ever meet. He was right about that, at least from day to day, but I’ll bet the cumulative effect of it all just made him tired and immunocompromised.

Next time: A bit of fun

on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 11

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods. See here for the entire series.

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Life with Dick

During my tenure at St. John the Divine in Houston, we did the Fauré Requiem one Good Friday. Dick had studied the work during his time in Paris with Fauré’s pupil Nadia Boulanger, and he told me that ever since then, he had had a perfect performance of it in his head. But he knew that a perfect performance was not to be had. He knew that he and the choir could only strive for perfection yet never achieve it, but I don’t think he ever gave himself permission to be human. Nowadays, accepting our limitations and simply doing our very best in the presence of God are standard fare in books on church music, but Dick never quite got there on the acceptance-of-our-limitations part.

Dick also had a ‘perfect’ Holy Eucharist in his imagination, from prelude all the way through the liturgy and the postlude, but he was always disappointed week after week when it never was achieved. He was always a little peeved after church. I once asked him how he felt each Sunday after having led hundreds of people in traditional Episcopal liturgy. He thought that was a ridiculous question and sarcastically answered that it made him “feel on top of the world.” Although I still sympathize with him on the elements he accused of marring a perfect Eucharist [and there were always plenty, a few of which included the celebrant using the wrong words or otherwise stumbling over the liturgy, the choir missing a cue, the organ having a cipher, one of us playing a wrong note, the sermon being useless, a microphone not being turned up in time, a small child screaming, an old lady coughing for fifteen minutes before finally leaving the room, the crucifer not holding the cross straight, a candle burning out, etc.], today I would disagree with Dick over this hypothetically perfect – and fully unattainable – Eucharist. I think he was howling at the moon and that it just made him unnecessarily tired.

While composing this biography, as I reflected on Dick’s stated desire for that elusive, perfect Eucharist, I realized that St. John the Divine was actually quite liturgically conservative in those days, just like Dick – perhaps more than he admitted. The clergy and servers took liturgy seriously; their movements and actions were well planned and smoothly executed. With very few exceptions, they were always vested and fully clothed underneath; long-sleeved shirts, ties, dresses, no jeans, no sandals. Celebrants celebrated with all the right words for the most part, usually missing only a word or two when they tried to recite liturgy from memory without having practiced first. Celebrants began Eucharist with the opening acclamation rather than with that most maddeningly human-centered and garden-party-oriented ‘Good morning.’ Even at the announcements following the Peace, rector Larry Hall never said, ‘Good morning.’ Rather, he always welcomed the assembly in the name of Jesus Christ. Neither did he use announcement time following the Peace to read out announcements that were already in print. He underscored the important ones, encouraged everyone to digest the others on their own time, and got back to the liturgy (exceptions noted at the end of this post). Upon reflection on those days, I truly appreciate that rector’s approach to liturgy. Everything was quite proper. Even the contemporary service, then just in its infancy, was faithful to every word of Rite II, with only the music, dress code, and sense of complete propriety relaxed.

Dick and I agreed that ‘Good morning’ betrays an unsettling willingness to interrupt timeless liturgy with temporal tripe. The first words out of the celebrant’s mouth, whether ‘Blessed be God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit,’ or, ‘Good morning!’ will set the tone for the rest of the hour, like it or not. Even the congregation of liturgically rock-solid Rite I Christ Church Cathedral in Houston in those days proved that just about any congregation may eventually go where it is consistently steered. During the 1990s, the Cathedral had gotten a new dean, who was into the ‘good morning’ nonsense. It wasn’t long before he began waiting for a response in kind – and got it. Before you know it, the Cathedral congregation was responding enthusiastically, “Good morning!” to begin Rite I each week, and never batting an eye. They also absorbed without a whimper that dean’s affinity for Rite II, which he not-so-subtly sneaked in the back door by celebrating Holy Baptism as often as possible, thereby forcing Holy Communion into Rite II on those Sundays. Dick would have blown a gasket to see liturgy turned into such a personal playground. Clyde Holloway and Bruce Power at the Cathedral fixed it for themselves by retiring/resigning, and one of them even returned after that dean was gone.

But I digress.

Another example of congregations being willingly misled is in the printing of hymn texts in service leaflets or projected onto screens, diabolical practices that started in the late 1990s in churches everywhere. Hymn texts alone were now printed or projected as some sort of perceived convenience. But musical notation and a multitude of additional information for each hymn were now absent, and congregations everywhere who followed this practice began to regress into the most musically ignorant in modern Christianity.

Dick would have lost his mind at all this, and I nearly have. I have maintained all along that musical ignorance aside, there is little that looks more ridiculous than a white-collar congregation singing sturdy hymns of the faith not from the sturdy repository of music called the hymnal but rather from a flimsy service pamphlet they are going to throw away upon exiting the building.

But I digress again.

Despite the propriety of the liturgy on a general level at St. John’s, the time of announcements following the Peace was often a cringeworthy wild card. We never knew what was coming, whether a small troupe doing a silly Rally Day skit or the Senior Warden singing a stylized rendition of Happy Birthday to the rector. [True story. In 1992, the Senior Warden sang ‘He’s turning 50 in the morning’ to the tune ‘Get me to the church on time.’] Apparently, we musicians were the only ones bothered by that shift in tone during otherwise fairly respectable liturgy. Since the liturgy was so dignified and the shenanigans so base, the contrast was that much more cringeworthy. I often wanted to slip out of the room or crawl under something. And both Dick and I felt extra-conspicuous to be observing all that silliness while vested. We felt like we had shown up at a crawfish boil in tuxedos.

Next time: Dick’s complaints

on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 10

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods. See here for the entire series.

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The Choir of St. John the Divine, Houston

My first experience with the choir was at my first regular Thursday evening rehearsal in 1990. From day one, I saw how dedicated they were to Dick. I saw how dedicated they were to great music. I saw how dedicated they were to fine liturgy. And I saw how dedicated they remained, even as ‘renewal music’ gained ground all around them. This choir was a collective workhorse, and their love for each other and for all that Dick taught them never flagged:

"[It was quite the] … impact that Richard Woods’s friendship, example, musicianship, and professionalism made on a 23-year-old fresh out of LSU grad school. It seems like yesterday. I’m always happy to share interactions about Dick Woods. He was a force!”

“What a talented, dedicated, humorous combination of a man he was. I miss him … and all of the individual choir members we were blessed to spend time with praising God, sharing beautiful music, and nurturing souls. … I am always saddened when I remember how sick and how heartbroken Dick was at the end. He gave so much and loved so much. … No one that was fortunate enough to know him can ever forget him. He shaped all of our lives, for the better, and made us all better musicians along the way. What beautiful music we made. I always felt like he deserved so much more than we were able to give him in return. I truly loved that man.”

“Dick was able to get more out of a choir, perhaps even beyond his own technical abilities. It was just the way he brought everyone together around the music.” 

The sextons always had coffee prepared for Thursday evening choir rehearsal. The choir would arrive early to chat and visit, and then Dick would call out, “Let’s go, please!” to begin rehearsal. [“Let’s go, please!” was going to be the subtitle of this biography, if published.] There was a break about midway through for more coffee and conversation, and then the second half. Dick was all business during rehearsal but was all in for the visiting before, in between, and following. Dinner with the inner circle often followed rehearsal. I was honored to have been invited.

Dick insisted on a clear, vibrato-free sound from his sopranos and altos. He also required a certain dress code when the choir processed in the aisle: black flat shoes for the women, no dangly earrings, and modest hairstyles. He put in writing these and other policies prescribing how to process, how to hold one’s folder, how much space to leave between pairs in procession, how to acknowledge the altar and turn into the stalls somewhat sharply, etc. I have followed suit with similar rules for my own choirs.

Dick and the choir stayed busy. They went on tours to England in 1982 and to Eastern Europe in 1990, the repertoire for each of which they recorded stateside. They also presented occasional Evensong at sister parishes in Houston and sang a major work every Good Friday. This choir embodied the fact that a church choir is probably going to be their director’s Sunday School – and this choir was that perfect Sunday School class. They embodied the importance of gathering in church with other human beings and to having fellowship one with another. Worshipping God was one thing, but doing so among kindred spirits was indispensable, and they knew that.

The choir was populated by many strong personalities who wasted no time making their approvals and disapprovals known to the rector. They didn’t care so much how the choir was treated, but they were quite the watchdogs for Dick’s treatment. They stood up for him, and I know he appreciated that. Thanks to Dick, they were also respectably well-versed in liturgical matters, and they deserved – as the tithing parishioners most of them were – to be heard as lay experts in such matters.

Dick and others of us would go out for dinner and drinks after Thursday rehearsals and for lunch after church on Sundays. I developed a ravenous craving not only for the food but also for that fellowship, and I have never stopped organizing similar small groups in my succeeding positions. Every time I go out with folks following a rehearsal or performance or service, I think of the St. John’s choir. Every time I go to a British pub or to get Mexican, I think of those days. That is no exaggeration.

Next time: Life with Dick

on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 9

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods. See here for the entire series.

*******************

Some writing on the wall

Dick succeeded Mr. G. Alex Kevan as Organist/Choirmaster for the parish. During my tenure, I discovered many photos of Mr. Kevan and many anthems and service pieces he had written. His music program for the parish appeared to be squarely grounded in the great American musico-liturgical heyday of the 1950s-1970s. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the Rev. Thomas A. Roberts, who hired Dick in 1972, was equally grounded in that liturgical heyday. But Father Roberts died suddenly and unexpectedly the following year and was succeeded by The Rev. Maurice “Ben” Benitez.

Fast-forward to 1993: rector Benitez was now Bishop Benitez. He was unable to attend Dick’s funeral. He prepared a letter to be read aloud during the funeral. In it, the bishop related the story of his and Dick’s first sit-down at St. John the Divine in 1974, during which he insisted Dick include ‘renewal music’ in services. He then reported that Dick sighed deeply and asked resignedly, “Well, do I have to do that every week?” That short anecdote reveals that when Dick took the post under Fr. Roberts, perhaps it was in the sort of environment that would feed his musical and liturgical soul. Perhaps based on the legacy of Alex Kevan and Fr. Roberts’s direct recruitment, Dick saw at St. John’s an opportunity to ply his trade unimpeded. But this story also bears out how easy it was – even in the 1970s – for St. John’s to drift into musical licentiousness, notwithstanding its ultra-conservatism otherwise. But Dick’s response in that story also suggests that he was accepting of where things were heading. As a former lecturer on church music at the Seminary and having served as the head musician at several parishes around the country, he knew very well the ‘renewal movement’ was on the rise, and perhaps he was increasingly resigned to the fact that the movement would probably catch up with him, no matter where. Although Benitez was demonstrably one of Dick’s biggest fans all the way to the end, that meeting was a turning point, a sort of writing on the wall, by my calculations. Dick soldiered on, and when rector Benitez became Bishop Benitez in 1980, the next rector, the Rev. Laurens A. “Larry” Hall embraced the same trend in music, yet to a much greater degree. Dick soldiered on.

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The annual parish hymn-sing each Thanksgiving Wednesday was a highlight. It was an evening of Thanksgiving dinner in the parish hall, followed by about an hour of hymn singing with piano and small orchestra. We did nothing else like it all year. It was always a full house, and I loved seeing everyone enjoying themselves outside of liturgy. In 1991, Dick was particularly inspired to compose arrangements for the orchestra for many of the hymns for the event. He had learned that rector Larry Hall could not attend that year, and so Dick felt freer to do his own thing and had a surge of creativity. The two of us stayed at the church one Friday evening until 4:00 am the next day, composing arrangements and making copies. We were nearly derailed by the rector, though, who had been insisting there be an element for children during the event. But Dick felt it wasn’t a children’s kind of event, and I felt the children would be just fine singing hymns along with everyone else, just like on Sundays. Larry announced in full staff meeting one week that since he was going to be away for it that year, he wouldn’t push the children thing; otherwise, he would have pulled rank. He seemed truly irritated.

Larry and Dick had worked together long before I arrived, but the meeting just described was the first time I sensed Larry losing patience with Dick, and I became uncomfortable with the realization that Dick and I might have been on thinner ice than I first thought. Things didn’t feel transparent. I began to wonder if Larry merely tolerated Dick since he ‘inherited’ Dick from one of Larry’s best friends and one of Dick’s biggest fans, former-rector-now-bishop Benitez. I woke up to the sense that Dick was somehow in the rector’s way and that I was likely guilty by association. I became manifestly ill at ease for the duration of my tenure there.

Next time: The Choir of St. John the Divine, Houston

on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 8

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods. See here for the entire series.

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The red sea, a.k.a. the sock drawer

[This post is a rant on how things were, not on how they currently are. Anyone familiar with the parish of St. John the Divine, Houston, will know that things are now much improved from the days (1990s) I am describing herein. But it’s where Dick Woods and I worked, and it warrants description]:

The original worship space for St. John the Divine, Houston, now still in regular use as its chapel, was completed in 1940. Other buildings, including the nave, were completed in 1954, designed by Karl Kamrath (1911-1988) a Houston-based devotee of Frank Lloyd Wright. The exterior of the church proper is striking, with its heavy limestone walls and high-pitched roof with low-hanging eaves. Faithful to its architectural style, it looks like it naturally, literally, organically ‘grew’ out of the earth. But this author never found the interior very beautiful nor very worshipful. Thanks to acoustical-paneled ceiling, cork flooring under the pews, and wood veneer everywhere, it looked less like a church and more like the attic of a high-end suburban house. The room seemed to call more attention to its severe architectural style than to God. Furthermore, there was thick, red carpet in all three aisles, in the side chapel, and throughout the chancel and sanctuary. I called the room ‘the red sea.’ Any reader familiar with the acoustic that results from all that carpet can also appreciate my bonus appellation ‘sock drawer.’

A renovation of sorts of the nave was slated to be rendered between Christmas 1992 and Easter 1993. During the renovation, Sunday services were moved into the gym. I played a most interesting digital organ that could say things like ‘Hey!’ and ‘Yeah!’ and make the sound of dentist drills. I never discovered a suitable use for such sounds during Rite II, but I would have enjoyed it, and the choir would have welcomed the diversion. Anyway, the nave renovation was not intended to make any major changes but rather to spruce up what was already there. The carpet was to be replaced, and so I threw a Hail Mary and spoke up about this chance to improve the acoustics. But not only were acoustics not on the table and we were wasting our time resisting it, Dick and I would also have been painfully incompetent bulls in that particular china shop, anyway. Neither he nor I had the vocabulary nor the finesse nor enough time to educate the parish with any degree of success in matters of acoustics and worship. Furthermore, he was very sick and in the final weeks of his work, and so I was sounding the carpet alarm alone and in vain.

The 1992-1993 renovation transformed the narthex and hallways outside the nave into much more useful spaces, but it left the nave proper unchanged in all ways except cosmetically. The red carpet (which had faded over time to near-orange) was replaced by new, lower-pile red carpet. [It can’t be ignored that a longtime Vestryman, who always had the ear of the rector, made his millions … selling carpet.] The ugly wood veneer throughout the room was replaced by new, equally ugly wood veneer. The trusses and ceiling were re-treated and achieved a modicum of aesthetic and acoustical improvement. A not-so-heavenly host of spotlights was added. The rector wanted those lights and got those lights and at the very first services held in the renovated space, Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday 1993, announced, “These are my lights.” That was kind of endearing: not only did it elicit some snickers as to how those new bright lights got there, but it also let everyone know to whom they could complain – and that he wouldn’t be listening. Nowadays, bright lights in church are normal, but that was everyone’s first experience with them in those days, and they were quite jarring to behold the first time. Some choir members wore sunglasses in protest during rehearsals held in the chancel.

Furthermore, I swear I saw hearing aids on the fellow selling and installing the new sound system. And since another old fellow who was going to be operating sound each week was also hearing impaired, I was not encouraged by that particular ‘renovation.’ [I was right. The sound and lights systems became nightmarish places of steep learning curves, usually during Sunday preludes (lights) and sermons (sound). Even the rector called out during more than one sermon and told the technician to just disable the wireless mic and switch to the pulpit mic to avoid the constant, shrieking feedback.] But oh, you should have heard that room while the old carpet was out. For one glorious week between the completion of work and the installation of the new carpet, it was heaven on earth during practice time. No one knew it at the time, but that carpet-free sound was a preview of another, future renovation finally done right. I’ll get the dear Reader there eventually.

Next time: Some writing on the wall