Theodore Marier

Life and career

Marier once said he "got hooked on chant" as a college student in the 1930s when he heard a 78 rpm recording of the choir of the Abbey of Solesmes, France. "It was the most beautiful music I had ever heard", he said. He later studied at Solesmes under Dom Joseph Gajard.

A graduate of Boston College, he was director of band and music there from 1934 to 1942. In 1940 he received a master's degree from Harvard, and over the course of the years he was also choir director or lecturer at Emmanuel College, Newton College of the Sacred Heart, and Boston University.

In 1934, Marier began fifty-two years of musical service at The Church of St. Paul (Harvard Square) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, first as organist and from 1947 as choir director. In 1963, with Monsignor Augustine F. Hickey, he founded a choir school associated with the parish, St. Paul's Choir School, and directed it until his retirement in 1986. The school later became known as the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School, and the choir, the Boston Boy Choir, though as of April 2014, the school's original name has been reestablished.

In the 1950s, Marier was a faculty member of the Pius X School of Liturgical Music at Manhattanville College. In that capacity, he contributed to editing The Pius X Hymnal (1953).

In 1966 he was elected president of the Church Music Association of America, succeeding Rembert Weakland.

After his 1986 retirement from St. Paul's, Marier became Justine Bayard Ward Professor and faculty adviser of the doctoral program in liturgical music and Director of the Center for Ward Studies at The Catholic University of America. He was also a member of the board of directors of the Institut für Hymnologische und Musikethnologische Studien, Maria Laach, Germany; and a fellow of the American Guild of Organists.

Marier also studied at Cambridge University, England, and made recordings with the Boston Symphony under Seiji Ozawa. He edited two hymnals: Cantus Populi (1954) and Hymns, Psalms, and Spiritual Canticles (two editions, 1975 and 1983).

Honors

Marier received honorary doctorates in music from The Catholic University of America, the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, Rome, and Saint Anselm College. In 1984, in recognition of his fifty years of service to Saint Paul's and the Catholic Church at large, Pope John Paul II named Marier a Knight Commander of Saint Gregory. He was invested by then-Archbishop Bernard Law at Saint Paul's. In December 1996, he received the Saint Ignatius Award from his alma mater, Boston College High School.

Personal

Theodore Marier was a good friend of French composer Jean Langlais. He was also a friend of the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut and assigned the copyright to his last book, A Gregorian Chant Master Class, to the Abbey.

Legacy

Cardinal Bernard Francis Law celebrated Marier's funeral Mass at The Church of St. Paul (Harvard Square) in Cambridge. In the 1950s Cardinal Law, while an undergraduate at Harvard, had sung under Marier's direction.

"Professor Marier effectively transmitted his inspiration about Gregorian chant to generations of Catholic musicians", wrote Helen Hull Hitchcock, editor of the Adoremus Bulletin. She had been recruited to sing in a schola Marier conducted at a symposium of the Church Music Association of America where she had given a lecture on liturgical translation. "It is a privileged memory", Mrs. Hitchcock recalled. "His enthusiasm was as impressive as his musical expertise. No one has done more to promote the musical tradition of the Church in America".

Works

Organ: