Outside the Chinese Christian Fellowship Church in Wilmette on a recent Sunday, harvest sun drips onto leaves the color of butterscotch.
Winds whisper and leaves rustle risque replies. It’s the kind of day when kids come in late for supper and parents don’t really mind.
Inside the church, 31 young folks, ages 12 to 25, barely notice.
They’re focused on Lucy Ding of Mt. Prospect, conductor of His Command Performance (HCP), their church choir. The choir is just one of the musical outlets for Ding, a conductor who has made a name working with such diverse groups as children’s choruses and a Polish music ensemble.
“Come, come, you chicken cacciatores,” Ding prompts.
Thirty-one pairs of eyes rivet on her. Their struttin’ stuff–jostling, joking and general goofing off–stops in a staccato beat.
The piano sounds the first chord of a South African song, “Freedom is Coming.” The primal thrum of a jimbe drum pulses.
Thirty-one bodies sway in unison.
“Soon and very soon, we are going to see the king,” they sway and sing.
Ding injects, “A little loosening up. I don’t care what you loosen, but you can’t do this song like tight socks.”
Thirty-one bodies loosen.
“That’s too much loosening, Melanie.” Melanie adjusts.
For two hours, they rehearse a repertoire of baroque, renaissance, classical and modern songs, many in languages that twist English-speaking tongues. Some are plaintive, some are jubilant. All of them are beautiful.
Ding patiently guides the multicultural choir, which performs 12 times a year for homeless shelters, retirement homes, prisons, missions, youth rallies and colleges, among others,
For two hours, she corrects and cajoles.
“Faster doesn’t mean louder, and slower doesn’t mean softer,” she says.
“Now we have the word `fish’ in our lyric. What kind of fish is this? Yes, it’s a big, big fish. It’s not a guppy fish. Let’s make it a big fish sound.”
For two hours, she directs and defers. And she never misses a beat.
“Mom is so focused,” says her daughter Monica, 21, a senior majoring in oboe performance at Peabody Institute of Music, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, who continues to perform with the choir during school breaks. “It’s like she is saying to the choir, `We all are here. We are here to make music.’ Then, boom-boom. Everyone responds and the music happens.”
Lucyna Migala, artistic director and general manager of The Lira Ensemble, a Chicago-based performing arts company dedicated to Polish music, song, and dance where Ding conducts, says simply, “Lucy exudes music.”
She adds, “I tease Lucy that I could hand her a phone book and she could make music from it.”
Anton Armstrong, director of the St. Olaf College Choir in Northfield, Minn., knows Ding from choral workshops. “Music permeates Lucy’s being,” he says. “She approaches it with a fervency and a reverence. She pursues the highest level of her craft as a musician. Yet she is an artist who does not worship art. She doesn’t seek prestige or personal gain.”
Her humanitarian values may explain why her conducting career unfolds like a symphony of many movements, a harmony achieved by blending family needs, her Christian commitment and her love of music.
She was born in Shanghai in 1944. She began conducting when she was 16, the youngest member ever accepted into the Hong Kong Oratorio Society.
She graduated with a degree in voice from Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J. There her voice and hands were trained via work with Leonard Bernstein and others; and her affections were won by future husband Sam, an engineer with AT&T.
They moved to Mt. Prospect, where daughters Monica and Paula, 16, were born, and where Ding taught math for two years to junior high school students at Maple Elementary School in Northbrook. “I love this age group,” Ding says. “They have so much adventure in them. I left when the school switched to an open curriculum because I believe such adventurous spirit needs discipline to thrive.”
On a dare from her husband, Ding took a computer programming course and worked for the next seven years as a systems analyst at Underwriters Laboratories in Northbrook.
Despite a successful career, Ding says, “I was unhappy. Something in me was missing.”
The something was music. She completed a master’s degree in conducting at Northwestern University in Evanston and began working in 1984, first as assistant conductor, later as musical director of the Glen Ellyn Children’s Chorus. “It only took me 25 years to start my career in music,” she says, laughing.
Her andante (moderate, graceful) beginning has been building since then. During six years with the chorus, Ding prepared the nearly 200 8- to 16-year-olds for performances with, among others, the Chicago Symphony under Sir Georg Solti and James Levine.
During its 1991 season, she also served as musical director of the Chicago Children’s Choir. She is frequently guest conductor for workshops and festivals. Volunteering, she conducts the Chancel Choir of Glenview Community Church as well as HCP church choir in Wilmette.
This year, Ding was named one of four 1995 Women of Achievement by the Girl Scouts of Illinois Crossroads Council.
Since 1990, she also has been conductor of three areas of the Lira Ensemble: its female Lira Singers, mixed Chamber Chorus, and Chamber Orchestra.
“Lucy, somehow, always seems to find the deepest essence of the music,” Migala says.
“Something in Lucy goes so far beyond, is so passionate,” says Calvin Langejans, director of the Holland (Mich.) Chorale and Holland March Festival, where Ding has conducted. “It’s as if she burns from a light within.”
Although her work attracts acclaim, those who know her say she doesn’t bask in its glow. “Whenever Lucy gets an award or accolade, I always hear about it from someone else, never from her,” says friend Chris McQueen, choir director of Christian Heritage Academy in Northfield.
“Lucy’s love of God and her feel for music somehow combine with her choir in a power that moves people, truly touches something in them,” says friend and HCP choir manager Dr. Margaret Go, a neonatologist from Glenview.
“Everyone needs to sing, especially children,” McQueen says. “They are like little birds who can fly if only they can see their own potential. And Lucy touches that. She frees it.”
That’s the crescendo, the healing power, Ding strives for.
“As a girl, I was a rebel, like many kids today,” she says. “Before I became a Christian, I fought everyone and everything. I understand that troubled spirit. Music is my gift to touch the spirit, to try to help others.”
Rehearsal is almost over. Outside, butterscotch leaves dip in shadow under a sun grown lazy after its florid display.
Inside, the choir struggles with the Latin words and music of Sait-Saens’ oratorio “Tollite Hostias.”
Ding commands: “Sing out. I don’t care if you sing it wrong. If you are going to make a mistake, then make it with conviction.
“Be brave now. Sing with gusto!”
And they do.
