Paul Hillier

In the I Am music we find Paul Hillier as conductor of pieces from Rachmaninov’s Vespers and his Six Psalms and Arvo Pärt’s composition of the Nunc dimittis. Both pieces are performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. We have had many Hillier pieces, in many services, throughout the years. If you listen to enough choral music, and you really LISTEN and HEAR, you will have no difficulty recognizing a choir that is being directed by Paul Hillier.

Hillier was born on February 9, 1949, in Dorchester, England. Not much is available on his early life other than during his teenage years, he was 

“…a devotee of pop music, deeply immersing himself in the weekly pop charts and listening to Radio Luxembourg under the bedcovers. He discovered the early music of Elvis Presley, whose fan club he joined around the time of Return to Sender. He won a dance competition doing the twist. He discovered the local poet, Thomas Hardy. He joined a folksong trio, who performed here and there and included the Beach Boys in their repertoire….”  

He was also a chorister in the St. Paul Cathedral choir in London. Here his world would change after discovering the music and worlds of William Byrd and Thomas Tallis; Hillier also credits T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” as that which changed his world. He was trained at the Guildhall School of Music. His professional career began when he served as vicar-scholar at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London from 1973-1974, and later as a member of the Queen's Chapel Royal at Windsor Castle.  Early choral music had become his passion. Together with a fellow vicar-scholar at St. Paul’s, Hillier co-founded the Hilliard Ensemble—an all-male quartet which is still famous for its Medieval and Renaissance repertoire. From 1974 to 1990, Hillier was the Ensemble’s director and was prominent in bringing the music of Arvo Pärt (no stranger to Christuman) and the American composer Steve Reich to our ears (you have to hear Reich’s interpretation of Vivaldi’s The Four Season!). During the 1980s and 1990s, Paul Hillier spent a great deal of time in the United States. He taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was a Fellow at Amherst College in Massachusetts. In 1990, he moved to the USA, where he was Professor of Music at the University of California at Davis until 1996, and where he formed a group called the Theatre of Voices, an ensemble of male and female singers specializing in both early and recent music. From 1996 to 2003, Hillier was Director of the Early Music Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington, as well as the principal conductor of the Indiana University Pro Arte Singers chamber choir.   

While teaching was a joy to him, Hillier longed for the world of conducting. In 1996, he was invited to conduct the Danish choral group, Ars Nova Copenhagen. Then, in 2001, he was named the principal conductor and artistic director of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, a position he held until 2007. Hillier’s time with the Estonians brought them international recognition with his three Baltic Voices CD’s and a Grammy for Da Pacem (which is the CD for the Nunc dimittis).  In 2003, he returned as chief conductor of Ars Nova Copenhagen, a position he still holds. In 2008, he became the chief conductor and artistic director of the Chamber Choir Ireland, another position he still holds today. During 2009/10, he was artist in residence at Yale University’s Institute for Sacred Music.

While early choral music is his first love, Hillier is comfortable with choral compositions of everything from Medieval to New Music. What a piece of marble or canvas is to some, human voice creating music is to Hillier, who is himself a very fine baritone soloist.     

When Hillier is not traveling and conducting major chamber choirs in concert halls or at music festivals all over the globe, he can be found in the recording studio (he has over 100 recordings under his direction, and he now has his own music publishing company), or at a computer writing poetry, literature, biographies, and scholarly essays on the pieces he has conducted over the years. When he is not doing these things, Paul Hillier can be found at his home in the U.S. or in the Danish countryside with his wife and three children.

In the message of the Mystery of the I Am service there is a line that reads, “You must be greater than you imagined you could be.” ­The spark for Hilliard’s ‘greater than’ journey was ignited with the songs of William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, and with Eliot’s Four Quartets. Over time, this simple spark became a raging bonfire as he devoted himself to his passion of making music. Paul Hillier has lived, and continues to live, a life chock full of the creative, the generative, the fire from his Origo.    

What is the point of this immense outline of Hillier’s accomplishments which can only give us a vague idea of the man? In Paul Hillier, I see the meaning of Christuman in action with divine gifts rushing out in creative force kept alive by soul-deep dedication to a vision. I see in him an Origo fueling like a bonfire, into creation. I see a vital and fully golden link in the Human Chain—his sheer energy pouring out as if there were no choice—which, of course, there isn’t.

I have been blessed and inspired with many fire starters in my life: the teachings of Bill Boast, Ben Sweet, Howard Thurman, and Teri Martin immediately come to my mind; the examples of taking life by the throat and Zander’s time in the Marines; my daughter Madeline and the person she has become; a four-year-old Pearl fighting and beating cancer. I have become a husband, a parent, a mentor, ordained. In fact, every one of these continue to fire up and inspire my creative, my generative, my Origo. The Golden Chain, so deep in Christumanity, is an essential fuel for our own Origos. The Chain runs through all of creation—people, events, prayer, a river, a tree or in the wind. Seek them relentlessly. Absorb them into your soul.

As it is written in the Enneanean:

Be true to the self you were created by God to be. It is the universe’s only chance to experience this one special truth as part of all truth. If you fail it, you will never have a chance to be you again. And the universe will never have had a chance to know you. 

A star is a world’s chance to be.