New bio ‘Unsung Pioneer’ celebrates the legacy of choral icon Margaret Hillis

Margaret Hillis (1921-1998) remains widely admired among Chicago Symphony Orchestra followers as the founder and longtime director of its chorus, which she built into a top-drawer ensemble worthy of its instrumental counterpart. 

But her reach went much further than that. By her own example and through her teaching and advocacy, she was a major force for developing the professional chorus movement across the United States. In 1954, she founded the American Choral Foundation, which provided scholarly support and other resources to choral conductors nationwide.

In 1977, she was part of a small group of conductors led by Michael Korn, music director of the Philadelphia Singers, who established the Association for Professional Vocal Ensembles. It later became known as Chorus America, which stands as the leading support and advocacy group for the field.

“None of these types of organizations existed, and she created them out of nothing,” said Cheryl Frazes Hill, associate director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, director of choral activities at Roosevelt University and director of the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus. “She changed a lot of lives, and she certainly changed this industry. So I would say that she was one the pillars of what we know today as the choral movement in America.”

The famed conductor’s life and work is celebrated in Margaret Hillis: Unsung Pioneer, a new biography by Frazes Hill, now marking her 45th season with the Chicago Symphony Chorus. She began as a singer, and Hillis named her an assistant conductor in 1987 and promoted her to associate conductor three years later.

Hillis amassed a large archive of correspondence, reviews, articles, photos and other memorabilia related to her career, and she bequeathed the collection to the Rosenthal Archives of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association. As a longtime member of the archives staff and director since 2014, Frank Villella, a former chorus member, oversaw the acquisition and organization of the collection. Eight years ago, he invited Frazes Hill to his office, and asked if she would be interested in writing a book about the choral leader, and the Hillis protégé jumped at the chance.

“It’s taken this long to interview many people and to gather the incredible amount of detail that told me a story that was much bigger than I anticipated,” Frazes Hill said.

Thwarted in her goal to become an orchestral conductor because she was a woman, Hillis turned to choral conducting, studying with renowned choral conductor Robert Shaw at the Juilliard School. In 1950, she founded what became known as the New York Concert Choir and Orchestra, which quickly became a respected ensemble that Igor Stravinsky often employed for U.S. debuts of his works.

Fritz Reiner, music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1953 to 1962, brought Hillis’ choir to sing with the CSO twice and then asked her in 1957 to form a symphony chorus in Chicago. The new ensemble debuted in March 1958 in Mozart’s Requiem with guest conductor Bruno Walter, and Hillis went on to serve as its director through 1994.

She was a pioneering conductor, becoming the first woman to lead the Chicago Symphony during a pair of December concerts in 1957 that featured Arthur Honegger’s A Christmas Cantata. In 1977, she gained national attention when she conducted the Orchestra and Chorus in Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 at Carnegie Hall, replacing then-music director Sir Georg Solti who was injured and unable to conduct. “That’s where her career really took off, and she started conducting all over the country,” Frazes Hill said.

While the Hillis biography will not be sold through Amazon and local bookstores until May 1, it will be available in late January at the Symphony Store, the CSO’s gift shop at 67 E. Adams. It also may be preordered from GIA Publications at giamusic.com.

In advance of the book’s release, Frazes Hill spoke about the biography Hillis’ many accomplishments: 

What prompted you to write a book on Hillis?

People who are music lovers in Chicago probably know her as the founder and first conductor of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, but she did a tremendous amount for the choral industry that people do not realize, and I did not realize. I wanted to write a book about her because she had an incredibly interesting life, and she would often talk to me in bits and pieces about things she had accomplished and encountered throughout her life. I would say, “Margaret, you really need to write a book.” And she would say, “Nah, I’m not going to write a book about myself. I’m going to write a book about pedagogy.” Because that is all she cared about, passing on her knowledge.

What qualities made her such a good conductor?

Everything was very well planned. She would come up with a chart, and she would mark every rehearsal she had coming up, and what she would cover in each of those rehearsals. As an assistant, it was glorious, because she would hand you a study chart and a score, and through her process, everybody was in the same place for how we would prepare the chorus. Everything she did was so efficient, and she was extremely consistent in her approach and in her preparation. And there were other characteristics — the generosity and respect with which she would treat everybody. She was truly in it for the right reasons. It was never about her. It was always about the music.

What was the biggest revelation about Hillis?

There are a number of revelations. The first one was that she had to be so focused and thick-skinned, because when she first embarked upon her career in New York, it was shortly after she had left Juilliard and put together this group of professional singers. She immediately threw them into the fish bowl by underwriting this Town Hall concert series, which meant her concerts were going to be reviewed by all the reviewers in New York City. I read those reviews. And the very first reviews she received, though they were deferential to the fact that it was very brave of a woman to be doing this kind of work with a chorus and orchestra, there were a lot of criticisms along the way. Keep in mind that she had been an orchestra player, and she had trained with orchestral music. Choral music was completely foreign to her, so it was only those few years at Juilliard with Robert Shaw where she was learning how the voice worked, how choral rehearsals work and how to put together a choir. Now she’s learning in front of New York City patrons and critics how to do this, and she had to take those slings and arrows. And instead of taking them personally, you could see how things improved little by little as she worked.

The other thing she had to be cognizant of is that women could not look like women on the podium, so it really restricted the way she could move and the way she could express herself. You couldn’t look too feminine, and you couldn’t look too masculine. She had all these constraints. She said she often felt like a three-headed calf when she’d get on the stage, that people might come just to see what it would be like for a woman to conduct. So there was bravery there. Though I appreciated it as I knew her, I did not understand completely how difficult that journey was for her.

And then there was the idea that she created so much support for conductors where nothing of its kind had existed before. It becomes all the more impressive. I always knew about the American Choral Foundation and I knew about her work with APVE [Association of Professional Vocal Ensembles], but when you think back, and you see that she actually created this when there was nothing like it before, it becomes all the more impressive. She also created these choral institutes, summer workshops where choral conductors could come in and learn with a live orchestra and chorus how to prepare, rehearse and conduct choral orchestral works. And, of course, that model is all over the place now. Her bravery, ingenuity, dedication and generosity went well beyond anything I could have imagined.

In which ways was she misunderstood?

In the early days of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, she was much more accessible, and then she realized that there were going to be people who weren’t necessarily trustworthy and were not honest. She put up a very thick wall, but if you could get past that wall and very few did — I did not consider myself a friend, but I was as close to her as somebody in my position could be — you saw a tremendous sense of humor and a tremendous warmth. For example, she loved animals. She had dogs and cats, and they were kind of like her family. She didn’t have time for a lot of friends and socializing.

But she had a marvelous sense of humor, and every once in a while, it would peek through. We would sit in an audition, and she would pass me a note that would be absolutely hilarious after 5-6 hours of listening to singers. She would crack a joke, and I would have to pretend I dropped something under the table, because I was laughing so hard. She was very warm and very sensitive, but you would not know that if you had met her and only worked with her as a singer or orchestral player. People were afraid of her. I will never forget my first audition [as a singer]. She was very intimidating.

More from Frazes Hill on Hillis as a role model and other aspects of the conductor:

Family background: "She came from a very small town — Kokomo, Ind. Her grandfather [Elwood Haynes] co-invented stainless steel and designed one of the first automobiles. Her father [Glenn Hillis] almost won the governorship of Indiana [in 1940], and her brother was a longtime United States congressman. Her mother had a degree in chemistry. This is incredible stuff.”

Choral workshops: “She realized it’s not good enough if ’I just do it and I alone achieve these goals. I need to pass my choral methods along to others so this will become the standard in this country.’ And so she started providing choral workshops. There were no such things in the late ’50s. And from those workshops and the American Choral Federation, she promoted her pedagogy and standards that would professionalize choral singing throughout the country.”

Respectable wages: “She was a very staunch advocate for paying singers a respectable wage, which she also felt would raise the level of choral singing. Professional singers pursuing opera were more likely to make a living than choral singers. So she became active with the National Endowment for the Arts to advocate for resources to help budding choral ensembles, now emerging all over the country, to pay their singers a respectable wage.” 

A role model: “This is a very high-pressure job for anybody, but for women in particular, you are really under a magnifying glass. And I watched her deftly deal with some of the snarky attitudes and some of the difficulties and challenges she confronted. She always kept her cool. As a mentor, she was very generous. She never kept her wisdom to herself. She always wanted to share what she knew, offering sage advice when asked. She was always dignified and respectful. She was extremely organized, always prepared. She was supportive of launching people’s careers, and she was certainly generous in promoting her singers and assistants whenever she could. She set a real example. She was a true pioneer for the field of choral music and for women on the podium.”