On August 15, 2004, at the 11 a.m. service, a special ministry at St. Mark’s will be honored: the Compline Choir and its director, Peter Hallock. Alumni of the choir will join with current members to sing the music of the liturgy, which will feature an anthem commissioned by the choir for the occasion from outstanding choir alum and church musician, Richard Proulx. Fr. Ralph Carskadden, former Canon of St. Mark’s, and also alumnus of the choir, has been invited to preach the sermon that day. A reception will follow in Bloedel Hall.
It was about fifty years ago that a group of men, many of them University of Washington students, got together in the old wooden parish hall outside the Cathedral walls (Peter describes it as a “shed”) to sing chant and polyphonic sacred music both old and new. Once music was rehearsed, it was natural to sing it in the spacious cathedral acoustics for which it was written. Peter suggested that they sing it within the context of a prayer service, and Compline, the last of the day offices, was an appropriate choice; Peter had first encountered it as a youngster at Camp Houston and later sung it in the crypt at Canterbury Cathedral as a student at the Royal School of Church Music in 1950 (the Compline Choir sang also at Canterbury Cathedral in 2000 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of our “origin”).
The group of men, now called the “St. Augustine Singers”, began to meet on Sunday evenings to rehearse and then sing Compline in the empty nave, and from the beginning singing the office has been first and foremost a voluntary worship experience for the community of singers themselves. But, after several months of regular singing, an announcement appeared in the Nov. 8, 1956 Rubric:
“What is Compline? The announcement that the St. Augustine male choir under the direction of Peter Hallock will sing ‘Compline’ in the cathedral on Sunday evenings at 10:00 has made many ask ‘what is compline?’”
From then on the Compline service was listed in the weekly Rubric and in May of the following year the service was moved back to 9:30 p.m. and has been offered at that time every Sunday evening to the present day.
I joined the Compline Choir in October of 1964 and by then several major architectural changes had been made: Bloedel Hall and the west wings of the cathedral (including the brand-new choir room where we rehearsed) were dedicated in 1959, and thefaçade on the east side, containing the narthex and a cavernous space destined to contain the Flentrop organ, loomed above us as we sang the office in a dimly-lit cathedral to about 50 people. By then, the service was being broadcast on KING-FM over a leased phone line provided by the radio station (largely through the generosity of its owner, Dorothy Bullit).
Compline made a deep impression on this 18-year-old college freshman. I was not only discovering the great devotional music of the past, as well as brand-new pieces written for us by Peter and other members of the choir, but becoming part of a community that reached back more than a thousand years. At that time, the only other places in North America where Compline could be heard on a regular basis were monasteries and convents, but I enjoyed being a “once-a-week” monk, and began to feel the spirit of prayer and dedication, and the yearly cycle of ritual life.
In 1965, with the installation of the organ and impromptu recitals after Compline, other members of my generation began to find St. Mark’s a welcoming place to gather on Sunday evenings. More and more people in their teens and twenties came, and it is still the predominant age that attends Compline (although many are now children or grandchildren of my generation of the ‘60s). It has become for many a “way in”, an entry point into the Episcopal Church, as it was for me. But for others, it is their only communal spiritual experience of the week, and there is much in the mystical and meditative experience that transcends denomination and religious boundaries.
Word of the Compline service in Seattle began to spread throughout the religious community, and was largely responsible for the inclusion of revised offices in both the Lutheran Book of Worship and our Book of Common Prayer in 1978-79. Soon many groups doing Compline on a regular basis have sprung up throughout the United States and Canada. Today there is among many people a desire to gather at the end of the day to hear the ancient words and seek protection and solace as the night draws on. Please join us as we celebrate a half-century of Compline on August 15.
(by Kenneth Peterson, member of St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Compline Choir. Special thanks to Diane Wells, Archivist of the Diocese of Olympia, for her assistance)