CSUN University News Clippings

After a lifetime of composing, Portland man, music alum Robert Behrens, gets performance as a birthday gift

(October 19, 2009)

By Nancy Haught, The Oregonian

October 17, 2009, 6:15AM

Motoya Nakamura/The OregonianComposer Robert Behrens sits at the piano as Tracey Edson directs the choir in rehearsal for Sunday’s concert.
Robert Behrens will celebrate his 72nd birthday on Sunday and get the gift of his lifetime: the chance to hear his music performed.

Behrens has composed hundreds of pieces of sacred choral music, but has never heard it sung or played by professional musicians.

“I plan to take a tone bath in it,” he says. Anticipation strengthens his soft, almost breathless voice. “I want to let it wash over me.”

Behrens, who was born in Crete, Ill., a town he describes as “2,000 people surrounded by cornfields,” has been composing since he was 6. Mostly, he wrote secular choir music, especially as an undergraduate student at Northwestern University and California State University at Northridge. But by the time he’d made it to graduate school for music education, he realized his melodies didn’t sound modern.

“I’m a romantic,” he says. “Melody is the soul of music.” He didn’t like what his professors presented as modern music, and he couldn’t see himself teaching it. “So, I thought, ‘Why bother?’”

Behrens left graduate school and found a creative outlet writing advertising copy. Sometime in his 40s — Behrens can’t remember exactly when — he rediscovered his Christian faith. Raised in a devout Lutheran home, he hadn’t attended church in years. When his uncle lay dying in a Chicago hospital, Behrens visited him.

“When I walked into that hospital room, he sat up and exclaimed, ‘Bob, how are you? I pray for you every night.’”

Years later, Behrens is still struck by the memory.

“And so I became religious.” He found his own spiritual home in the Orthodox Christian Church.

“It has something to do with the fullness of all of it,” he says of the ancient liturgy. “The Lutheran Church was founded in 1517, and everything that happened from the first century up to 1517 was left behind. The Orthodox Church has a wider view.” These days he attends St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Southwest Portland.

Behrens retired at age 62. His wife of 28 years, Sheila, encouraged him to write music in his spare time. At first he resisted the idea. Once he gave in, he made a discovery.

“I found my voice,” he says. The doubts and hesitations fell away as he set religious texts to romantic melodies without worrying about whether his music sounded modern. He worked on a small electronic keyboard, connected to a computer with a software program for composers.

“I was writing for an audience of two,” he says. He and Sheila listened to his pieces as the computer played them back, imagining voices singing the parts. And then, Behrens met two people who changed his life.

Geri Ethen is a professional organist who plays at St. Philip Neri and All Saints Roman Catholic churches and at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Portland. It’s a rare Sunday when she can attend her own church, St. Nicholas Orthodox. But about 18 months ago, she managed. Someone introduced her to Behrens, who told her he writes sacred choral music.

“I went to his apartment, sat in his little room and listened to his music,” she says. She has played countless choral works in all styles at dozens of churches, yet she was astounded by what she heard.

“Other people need to hear this,” she remembers thinking. She and Behrens talked to Tracey Edson, who directs the choir at St. Nicholas and works with several other choral groups in Portland. No one’s sure who first proposed the concert, but the work began in earnest last spring. They settled on a program of Behrens’ work: the “Lutheran Choral Mass,” which combines German hymns from the time of Martin Luther and traditional parts of the Catholic Mass, “Pray for the Air of Heaven,” based on an Egyptian Orthodox, or Coptic, prayer; and “It Was the Winter Wild,” with its text by poet John Milton. Behrens had about $1,700 to spend. He insisted on paying Ethen, Edson and the four soloists.

Edson began recruiting a volunteer choir. Ethen set to work learning the music, going over each piece with Behrens so she’d understand his auditory vision. When he called for the music to be soft, for example, did he want flute sounds or strings?

“There is a liveliness to his music,” Ethen says. “It’s exciting, full of verve. He takes on the big issues of spirituality.” She loves the way his “Lutheran Choral Mass” weaves biblical texts through the five parts of a traditional Mass. The “Sanctus,” usually sung, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” becomes a playful but majestic retelling of the prophet Isaiah’s description of God.

Weekly vocal rehearsals began in September. Edson played accompaniment on the piano and singers worked on the text. Behrens attended rehearsals and says he tried not to interfere in Edson’s work.

But Edson says the composer’s presence was invaluable. There were times when a word from Behrens about the intentions behind a particular chord opened up another layer of meaning in the work.

“It was nice to have him there,” says Edson, who understands that composers working outside of academic or church settings sometimes have trouble getting their compositions performed.

“Even with visual artists, it takes a certain amount of connection for their work to be seen,” he says. “For composers, it takes musicians willing to take the time on something that may not go any further.”

Edson is excited that Behrens finally will be able to hear the breadth and depth of his music.

“You hear it in your mind,” Edson says, “but a keyboard isn’t a choir. It’s not an orchestra either. It’s one thing to hear it in your living room and another to give it to living musicians.”

– Nancy Haught

Publication: The Oregonian