President Eisgruber ’83’s column on “Celebrating Religious Pluralism” (President’s Page, Sept. 12) mentioned Opening Exercises at the Chapel and the Chapel Choir without mentioning Penna Rose, the longtime director of chapel music, who has done a lot to foster the kind of religious pluralism he celebrates.
In the early ’90s, when Penna was new to Princeton, the choir sang enough Bach and enough old and new English church music to please the most traditional church music lovers. But she also focused on music that I think was new to the Chapel at the time. I recall the choir processing, or rather dancing, down the long nave singing the South African freedom song “Siyahamba,” with colorful banners waving and drums beating. I remember how we struggled to learn the meaty vowels of Church Slavonic but were richly rewarded when we mastered Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers.”
There has always been a lively trade in Jewish musicians singing in church, but my freshman year in the choir was my first experience in a church service.
But we Jews in the choir — there were more than a few — got to share some of our own music with the Chapel community. I remember singing Dave Brubeck’s very jazzy “Gates of Justice.” Penna managed to book Dave himself on piano and Cantor Alberto Mizrahi as soloist. We also sang Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms,” whose Hebrew text must at first have seemed like Church Slavonic to most of our fellow choristers.
Any account of religious pluralism at Princeton in the last 20 years should make note of Penna’s remarkable contribution. She brings to the Chapel the spirit of the last words Bernstein set to music in his “Psalms”: “How good and how pleasant it is that brothers dwell together.”