ENGLEWOOD, N.J.—Mark Trautman has served as Director of Music at St. Paul’s Church in Englewood since September 2010. He founded the St. Paul’s Choir School, an award-winning, community-based youth choir educational program in September 2012.
A professional church musician since his teens, Trautman has a broad range of experience building and strengthening music programs and developing congregational song. He is an award-winning organist, and has performed throughout the United States, England, and Germany.
Trautman has been described as a “clear and communicative conductor” by Classical New Jersey and he has conducted at the State Theatre and George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, and the Round Lake Auditorium in New York. He has also been a featured organist on CNN and New Jersey Public Television.
Trautman earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in organ performance and church music with honors and distinction from Towson University in Baltimore and Westminster Choir College of Rider University in Princeton. He also studied at the Hochschule fur Musik und Theater in Leipzig, Germany.
Prior to his appointment at St. Paul’s, Trautman served at Christ Church in New Brunswick for 17 years, and he is responsible for commissioning their unique Richards, Fowkes & Co. mechanical action pipe organ and developing a full time, multi-generational choral program and an award-winning concert series.
Trautman currently serves on the music faculty of the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He is also Region II Chair of the Association of Anglican Musicians. In addition to his ministry at St. Paul’s, he serves as Missioner for Music and the Arts of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark.
Trautman is in demand as a teacher, conductor, consultant, and guest lecturer, and has served as an adjudicator for events sponsored by the American Choral Directors’ Association, the American Guild of Organists, and the New Jersey Folk Festival.
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Hillary Viders: At St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Englewood, you play the organ while also conducting the choir. Isn’t it very difficult do both at the same time rather than just conduct or just play?
Mark Trautman: Conducting while playing is a skill that you learn and it involves good planning. Performing while conducting seems spontaneous and it is spontaneous in the sense that you’ve done the preparation.
HV: What are the most important skills that are required for a conductor?
MT: There are different kinds of conducting, orchestral and choral, etc. I have been a professional of both. For all of these, you need all of the technical skills, but the most important tool that a conductor must have is the ability to work well with people and get them to follow you. A good conductor is someone who treats people with dignity and love and respect.
HV: Who are your favorite conductors?
MT: Some of my favorite conductors have been people that I’ve worked with and for whom I have been able to sing and play, most notably Joseph Flummerfelt (who recently passed away), the principal conductor at Westminster Choir College where I got my master’s degree. I also sang with that choir under the baton of conductor Kurt Masur with the Philadelphia Philharmonic, who was a world renowned conductor.
What all great conductors have in common is their innate ability, through their personality and their gestures, to get great and beautiful sounds out of the ensembles that they conduct.
HV: This sounds like musical talent is genetic in nature. Do you have musicians in your family?
MT: Yes, I do. My great-great aunt, whose name was Anna Priscilla Risher, was a well-known conductor, pianist and composer at the beginning of the 20th century. She graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music and she composed many works that were published. I was recently interviewed by someone at the University of Washington who is writing a dissertation about her.
My great-grandmother was also a professional musician, and my mother was a professional singer. She instilled in me a love of music from a young age. I started singing at a young age, then played trumpet and studied piano. I was always interested in the organ, so I taught myself how to play it. I got my first job as an organist in the church when I was 16 years old.
HV: The organ has such a commanding presence. Where is the largest organ in this area?
MT: At St. Bartholomew Church on Park Avenue in New York City. There are actually many different kinds of organs and they date back to ancient times. The organ is even mentioned in the Bible (Psalms).
HV: When you audition someone to join your choir, what criteria do you look for other than being able to sing on tune?
MT: Everyone can sing. There is no such thing as tone deafness. So, what I’m looking for is someone who is willing to make a commitment to be part of the group and to take responsibility for being part of the ensemble, someone who will be there when we practice and rehearse and when we sing.
HV: What kind of instruction do your choir students receive?
MT: Our students have piano lessons with jazz musician Andrew Zhang, voice lessons with Guilia Utz and they learn music theory. We also have a student intern from Montclair State, Carolina Restrepo, who assists the children with learning voice and reading music.
HV: What is the age of your students?
MT: We have about 20 students ranging in age from 5 to 18 years old.
HV: Do you believe that music is therapeutic for children?
MT: Definitely! When I was in my 20s, for four years, I was a paraprofessional in a special education school in Maryland. I assisted the music teacher with children ages 3 to 21 who had various degrees of autism and handicaps. I saw that music reached them in a way that verbal communication could not. We are wired for music as human beings. Every civilization from Babylonia to the ancient Asian empires has had music.
HV: How does music enrich the lives of your choir students?
HV: Music making is physically, spiritually and emotionally uplifting. Choral music builds community spirit in a very specific way that not even team sports does, because the instrument that you are using is your body and it is related to breath, which is the building block of human being. Because choral music engages with texts, you internalize and absorb what you sing. This gives students a different world view that they would not have otherwise.
HV: Have any of your choir students performed professionally?
MT: Yes. Our choir has performed with a professional orchestra and we have sung at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City and at the Trinity Cathedral in Trenton. We’ve performed at the bergenPAC in Englewood and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. Five of our boys recorded a track for the HBO movie “Sharp Objects” that just came out this summer.
HV: What role does the St. Paul’s Choir play in the fabric of Englewood?
MT: Englewood has a long and distinguished history of making music. Many famous musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and the beginning of rap, all began in Englewood.
Being in the St. Paul’s choir is certainly about singing, but it’s about more than that. It’s about building and fostering community. In our choir, students here in Englewood and surrounding towns learn how to be about somebody more than yourself. In a choir you learn how to work as a team to make music and to be responsible for people around you.
Being part of our choir also gives children access to learning about other cultures and languages. We sing in German, Hebrew, French and Italian. We sing everything from Bach, gospel music and jazz to renaissance polyphony.
Most of all, music is about making community happen. One of the things that we are committed to at St. Paul’s Church is being an Englewood institution and that means having a life and a part of the street and making the community a better place.