‘I get to sit right next to the choir’: Former Bush Cabinet secretary exults in his LDS Church job

Ronald Reagan called the Mormon Tabernacle Choir “America’s Choir.” The famed troupe of singers has performed at seven U.S. presidential inaugurations, 13 World Fairs, as well as the 2002 Winter Olympics, and toured in dozens of countries.

Organized just 29 days after Mormon pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, the choir has grown and evolved to the point its members are perhaps the most visible goodwill ambassadors for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Millions have heard the choir’s music via a weekly devotional radio program, “Music and the Spoken Word,” which started in 1929, making it the longest continuously running network broadcast in history.

In 2018, the choir changed its name to The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, and, in 2020, it was sidelined by the global pandemic.

Here are excerpts from The Salt Lake Tribune’s “Mormon Land” podcast with choir President Mike Leavitt, Utah’s ex-governor and former Health and Human Services secretary in the George W. Bush administration, who talks about how the choir navigated those changes, the challenges of logistics and diversity, and the group’s global mission:

Do you have a musical background?

People often say they didn’t know I was a singer, and the truth is I’m not. I do have a musical background. I played instruments, brass instruments, in orchestras and bands all the way through university. And I had ambitions that somehow that would continue, but it didn’t.

How did you get this assignment?

This is an ecclesiastical call that came from [church President] Russell M. Nelson, whom the choir reports to. And he jokingly said, “You’re probably wondering how long this will last. That choir is 175 years old, and there have been 10 presidents before you. I think you can do the math.” Then he laughed and gave me a more realistic view.

What does the choir president do?

I have responsibility — some responsibility — for almost 600 volunteers who serve in the choir, and it becomes their church service as it is mine. And because it’s a surprisingly complex organization, there’s a lot to do.

What are the most personally rewarding aspects of this assignment?

Just being exposed to the musicians and the music. Multiple times a week, I get to sit right next to the choir and hear the sound they emit, and it is inspiring and really very cathartic for me. Another thing is just the challenge of being able to take a symbol, an asset like this, and find ways that it can be utilized to expand a mission that I am devoted to. Then seeing people and the way they respond to it, people from literally all over the world every week.

For its rolling world tour, the choir has already gone to Mexico, the Philippines and the southeastern U.S. Next stop is Peru. What have been the highlights?

The highlight is, again, just the performance. Hearing the music and seeing people’s reaction. There is a group of people around the world who thrive on this music, and not all of them are Latter-day Saint, and they line up hours and hours before the performance, with the expectation of being able to hear it, and then they want to stay after, and they want to meet the musicians. … It’s also really rewarding to see people who volunteer. The average choir member volunteers somewhere between 800 and 1,000 hours a year. … That’s been inspiring.

What about the orchestra and all the instruments?

It surprises people to know that not only does it take two jet airplanes, it takes 18 large, 18-wheel trucks to carry our equipment and wardrobe and staging and so forth. It honestly is like moving a battalion. It’s a very well-refined organization.

Will the choir continue to feature some of the new hymns during General Conference and in other performances?

I got a call from my granddaughter, who asked, “Does the choir just do hymns?” I said, “We do a lot of different genres. Why are you asking?” She said, Well, there is a song that I and a lot of my friends really love, and I wish the choir could do that. It’s called “Gethsemane” [a children’s choir sang it at the just concluded conference] and it’s in the new hymnbook. That’s a reflection of the opportunity that’s there. One of the things we want to continue to do as a choir is to seek out new and younger audiences. It’s critical for any organization to do that. and having music like that in the hymnbook that has sacred and spiritual heritage and meaning is a good place to start.

What was it like managing the choir during the pandemic?

When I became president in 2021, they had not performed or rehearsed for over 18 months. We would use a new “Spoken Word” [presentation] and use music we had previously recorded. I had spent the previous year helping industries, like cruise lines, return to sailing, because of my public health background. A lot of the [same] tools, we deployed in being able to get the choir singing again. Now, the pandemic may be over, but the problem isn’t. We’re testing [for COVID] right now, actually, before every performance. It’s crucial because singing is such a high-risk activity for respiratory disease.

You were the nation’s Health and Human Services secretary. Did you find yourself during the pandemic thinking, “Boy, am I glad I don’t have that gig right now?”

Actually, during my period of time, there was a virus we thought was going to be a pandemic virus, and my discovery was that the country was very poorly prepared. And so almost three years of the four I spent in that role, I spent doing pandemic preparedness, developing a pandemic plan. … One of the things I knew intimately was there was going to be no victory over a pandemic for a secretary of Health and Human Services. So the answer to that is, I’m glad I knew all I knew about it, but I was glad I didn’t have [that job].

How do you plan to continue or enhance the choir’s showpiece reputation?

We have four objectives we’re working on right now that will accomplish that:

• Be more intentional about our mission and focusing on what it is we’re set out to do...

• Be more visible in the world...

• Reflect the worldwide membership and mission of the church...

• Use social media and digital tools…to spread [the choir’s music] around the world in a way that people can gain access to it.

Has the name change had any effect on its reputation or its visibility?

I would say, functionally, no, except for the transition in our intellectual property from the former name to the current name. That’s taken some time. So if you put in “Mormon Tabernacle Choir” [on a listening platform] it won’t take you to the new music.

What have you done to increase the ethnic diversity in the choir?

Our goal is to have the choir reflect the worldwide membership of the church, and we’re making progress where we’ve expanded the choir with a new component we call “global participants.” And that’s really about being able to have the choir reflect the membership around the world.

There are plenty of local ethnic singers, including the Bonner gospel choir with African American singers who are high quality, probably 200,000 Latino Latter-day Saints in Utah, and many thousands of Pacific Islanders. Why aren’t there more of them in the choir?

We want to have the best possible choir we can in the world. So we invite anyone who qualifies to apply. We’re working hard to make certain we have musicians who qualify. I’m happy to say we had almost twice the number of applicants this time as we’ve had before.

What are some plans for the choir’s future?

You’ll see a lot more use of digital technology where we can begin to appeal to and perform for larger groups of people in different segments of society without having to move a battalion across the planet. Also, we’ve begun to use a technique we refer to as “watch parties.” When we travel, we’ll put 15,000 people into an arena, but there are 200 to 300 locations throughout a region where people are coming to the church meetinghouse or a town center, or on a beach or somebody’s home, and they’re having a watch party with as many as 1,000 people. So we’re almost tripling our audiences in size. We refer to it as “anchor and radiate.” We want our sound to radiate through an entire region.

To hear the full podcast, go to sltrib.com/podcasts/mormonland. To receive full “Mormon Land” transcripts, along with our complete newsletter and access to all Tribune religion content, support us at Patreon.com/mormonland.

Correction • Oct. 15, 10:30 a.m.: This story has been updated to correct which choir sang “Gethsemane” at the latest General Conference.

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.