Choir veteran recalls musical years

"Awesome!"

That was the final word of praise for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Saturday night from the oldest living former choir member, 97-year-old Margarete Stahl Hicken, who was presented a plaque by conductor Craig Jessop before the closing numbers of the award-winning choir's 75th anniversary celebration in the Conference Center.

The choir's first radio broadcast in July 1929 came just a few months before Hicken — then a young, single LDS immigrant — was urged by a choir-member friend to attend a rehearsal in November 1929.

"I was living in the Beehive House at the time," she said. Brigham Young's former residence rented rooms to young women who came to Salt Lake City looking for work. Room and board for her third floor accommodations was $5 per week.

She went to the Tabernacle on Temple Square with her roommate, and choir director Anthon Lund asked her to sing the musical scale, "do, re, mi, like that, and then he said, 'OK' and I got in" as the choir's newest member. "Many of them just sang by ear, but I could read music because I played the violin," she remembers.

Assigned to the alto section, she sat in front of the organ, "second seat in," and remembers performing behind large, velvet curtains that sectioned the front of the Tabernacle off from the rest of the large auditorium, likely to facilitate better sound for the early radio broadcasts.

Sunday rehearsals began before the 10 a.m. broadcast, which was always followed by a 2 p.m. meeting for choir members that included a sermon by an LDS general authority. That meeting was followed by another at 6 p.m., so Sundays "were very busy." Thursday night rehearsals were also a must then as they are today.

Richard L. Evans was the voice for "Music and the Spoken Word" during her time in the choir, which was much smaller than it is today. "There were empty seats near the top" of the Tabernacle's choir section, she remembers, noting, "I wouldn't make it" if she had to audition with today's exacting standards for choir members.

Born in 1906 in Pforzheim, Germany, Hicken is now 97 but remembers vividly much of the music she sang with the choir during the Jubilee celebration marking the LDS Church's first 100 years, on April 6, 1930. "We wore white dresses and carried little white handkerchiefs, and every time we sang 'hosannah' " as part of the LDS hymn, "The Spirit of God," they would wave the hankies in the air.