Profile: Charlene Archibeque

Last month we celebrated the cycle of giving and receiving at the College’s Annual Donor Recognition Reception. Dr. Charlene Archibeque remains one individual who has been on the giving end of this cycle for decades—as a professor, choir conductor, and now the donor of a scholarship in her name. Fellow professor emeritus Nils Peterson has penned a work discussing her other gifts in his ode to Charlene.

Owed to Charlene
by Nils Peterson

Charlene Archibeque

A small group I put together was asked to sing at a wedding at the Santa Clara Mission a few weeks ago. The bride and groom wanted us to perform a sacred piece in addition to our more secular music. I suggested Sicut Cervus by Palestrina. So, we learned it and sang it, and as I sang I was remembering performing it another time.

I sang for about ten years with the San José State Concert Choir. It rehearsed four days a week at 11:00 a.m., and my schedule was such that I could make three rehearsals regularly. Occasionally I would come in for the fourth. When it was possible, I even went on small tours around the state and I sang in all of the concerts near home. For some years, I knew more music majors than English majors.

Charlene Archibeque was the conductor and she was wonderful to sing for– demanding, but she offered to us the reason for the demands, the consolations and rewards of great art. There is no place where a person of ordinary talent can go deeper into the greatnesses of human creation than by singing in a good chorus with a good conductor. I would tell my English classes, “If I could get you to work as hard for me as the Concert Choir works for Charlene, you’d all get A’s in my class and scholarships to Harvard.”

Each year, when doing my Valentine’s Day reading for the Poetry Center, I would ask Charlene’s special group, The Choraliers, to accompany me. They were marvelous. One year they were going off to an international choral competition in The Netherlands and asked me to come along on the tour Charlene had put together to sharpen their skills before the competition and to bind the group even closer together. Not to sing, mind, but to fill out the tour bus. And so I went. I describe something of my feeling in a poem of mine called “In Verona.” Here’s part:

I careen about Europe from monument
to monument in a bus filled with young people.
Though we stop regularly for diesel oil,
it is clear that Eros drives us all. The bodies
of the young quiver with it. I’ve watched
their eyes caught up in lust glaze over
and become as blank as the passionate marble
we so dutifully seek out each day.

We went that year to Venice and somehow Charlene arranged for the group to give an impromptu, informal concert at St. Marks, the great cathedral where Palestrina worked and wrote music specifically designed for that space. We did not stand before an audience, but, rather, went up to the balcony, which was fitted under the dome above the square of the sanctuary. The inside of the cathedral looks as if it had been carved out of a great block of gold. It is one of those sacred spaces where sound is magnified and beautified.

That year in Concert Choir we had sung Sicut Cervus and so I knew it by heart;  Charlene asked me if I’d like to join the Choraliers, and so I did with much gratitude. It was one of the great moments of my more than sixty years of singing. Our voices drifted down like a shimmering shower of gold notes upon the milling tourists below. The silence afterwards was golden too, as if the echoes of the notes were still resonating in the stones.

Two P.S.’s. At the end of my Valentine’s Day readings, Charlene and I would sing that great duet “Wunderbar” from Kiss Me Kate. The audience loved it and I loved it too. I would tell my non-San José friends that I end my reading by singing a duet with a gorgeous six-foot blond. My friends were either envious or unbelieving. At Charlene’s retirement dinner, her students asked us to sing it again, and so we did for the last time.

The second P.S. is that I’m now singing with the Symphony Silicon Valley Chorale, which began as an alumni choir started by Charlene. And so my gratitude goes on.

Oh well, a third P.S. Charlene’s students asked me if I could write a poem to celebrate her at her retirement. Here it is.

“For Charlene”

Those ancients who heard the sweet sounds
of the planets’ swing beyond the changing moon,
and the poet who wrote,
“From harmony, from heavenly harmony
This universal frame began,”
knew something of music, how it surrounds us
impels us, how out of its cadences, something new
in us is born.  So, we humans come together to sing.
We would do our best, but are not wise enough
to know what best can be.

So, bring on the conductor with her magic wand.
Let her be tall and graceful, yet stern as fate.
Let her ear be tuned to the planets
and her mind to what the words are saying.
Let her make us turn aside from the seduction of the good enough.
Let her make us lose ourselves in the music.

Stand straight. Out she strides on stage.
The audience applauds. She turns to us,
smiles, raises an eyebrow, a baton. We begin.

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