Early life Robert Lawson Shaw was born in
Red Bluff, California. was a minister, and his mother was a concert singer. He had four siblings, one of whom was singer
Hollace Shaw. Shaw attended
Eagle Rock High School in the early 1930s where he sang in the choirs directed by
Howard Swan, a man who would later have a lengthy career as an internationally renowned choral director at
Occidental College from 1934 through 1971, and whose career and writings on choral music were the subject of a symposium at the national conference of the
American Choral Directors Association in 1987. Shaw graduated from
Pomona College in the class of 1938. Shortly afterward, Shaw was hired by popular band leader
Fred Waring to recruit and train a glee club that would sing with the band.
Career In 1941, Shaw founded the
Collegiate Chorale, a group notable in its day for its
racial integration. Shaw continued to prepare choirs for Toscanini until March 1954, when they sang in
Te Deum by
Verdi and the prologue to
Mefistofele by
Boito. Shaw's choirs participated in the NBC broadcast performances of three Verdi operas:
Aida,
Falstaff and
A Masked Ball, all conducted by Toscanini, with soprano
Herva Nelli. They can be seen on the home videos of the telecasts of
Aida (from 1949) and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (from April 1948), also conducted by Toscanini. As the video shows, Toscanini refused to take a bow until he went backstage and brought an apparently reluctant Shaw out to take a joint bow at the end of the Beethoven telecast. In 1946, he conducted the
Naumburg Orchestral Concerts, in the Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park, in the summer series. Shaw was also
Charles F. Shaw's second cousin and often vacationed at his winery in Napa Valley. He went on to found the
Robert Shaw Chorale in 1948, a group which produced numerous recordings on
RCA Victor up until his appointment in Atlanta. The Chorale visited 30 countries in tours sponsored by the
U.S. State Department. In 1952 he was choral director for the Broadway musical, ''
My Darlin' Aida''. Shaw was named music director of the
San Diego Symphony in 1953 and served in that post for four years. Following his San Diego tenure, Shaw joined
George Szell, one of his prior teachers at Mannes School of Music in New York, to work with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1956. He served as the assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra for eleven seasons until 1967. He also took over the fledgling Cleveland Orchestra Chorus (started in 1952) and fine-tuned it into one of the finest all-volunteer choral ensembles sponsored by an American symphony orchestra - an ensemble that continues to this day. While in Cleveland, Shaw was also the choral director at the First Unitarian Church of Cleveland where he led a community music program. From 1967 to 1988 Shaw was
music director and conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. to perform at the
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York after a two-week concert tour of USA university campuses. A recording was made of the festival concert. During their tour, on the eve of the breaking of the
Watergate Scandal, the choirs also performed before
First Lady Pat Nixon, at the
White House, the
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the
United Nations. After stepping down from his Atlanta post in 1988, Shaw continued to conduct the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra as its Music Director Emeritus and Conductor Laureate, was a regular guest conductor with other orchestras including Cleveland, and taught in a series of summer festivals and week-long
Carnegie Hall workshops for choral
conductors and singers. He can be seen again conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus in footage of the 1996 Olympic Ceremonies. He died in 1999, in
New Haven, Connecticut following a stroke, aged 82. Although his formative years and much of his work occurred before the rise of mainstream interest in informed historic performance practice, his recordings, reflecting his insistence that clearly projected texts serve as the foundation for musical interpretation, do not sound dated in comparison to more modern efforts by frequently smaller forces. He created techniques and approaches still in use today. Shaw was a champion of modern music from the beginning of his career. He commissioned a requiem for
Franklin D. Roosevelt from the newly naturalized German-born composer
Paul Hindemith, who responded with ''
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd'', a setting of
Walt Whitman's poem commemorating the death of
Abraham Lincoln. Shaw led the premiere of the work in 1946 with the Collegiate Chorale and continued to champion the work well into the last decade of his life; in 1996 he conducted a 50th anniversary performance at
Yale University, where Hindemith was a professor when he wrote the work. In 1998 Yale also awarded Shaw an honorary doctorate. He was also a recipient of Yale's
Sanford Medal. Shaw also received the
University of Pennsylvania Glee Club Award of Merit in honor of his vast influence on male choral music. He was a National Patron of
Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity, and was an honorary initiate of
Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia (
Alpha Chi, University of Tulsa, 1945). ==Recordings==