Anyone who has attended LCH for any length of time has surely noticed the name of Peter R. Hallock in the Sunday bulletin.  Outside of St. Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle, where Peter Hallock was the cathedral musician for forty years, the Lutheran Church of Honolulu is probably the church which performs Peter’s music the most.

Actually, Peter Hallock’s connection to Hawaii began during World War II, when he found himself stationed here for several months en route to Okinawa and South Korea. It was in 1944 that he played his first public organ recital at St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Honolulu. It was his service in the U. S. Army that made it possible for him to spend 2 years in England at the Royal School of Church Music. It was his experience of singing Compline in the crypt chapel of Canterbury that would lead to the establishment of the service at St. Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle, and then eventually to Honolulu at LCH in 1976.

Carl Crosier attended the University of Washington and frequently attended major musical services, concerts and Compline at St. Mark’s. He says he was most impressed by the Compline service, which he attended in the early 1960s. In those days it was heard by only 70 or 80 people and not the hundreds who attend today. It was Carl’s first exposure to plainsong, and the sound of the choir singing chant in the dark, cavernous Cathedral made a lasting impression.

When Carl moved to Honolulu in 1972, the experiences at St. Mark’s were still very much on his mind as LCH decided to re-energize its music ministry, through the renovation of the nave and the installation of a major tracker organ.

Carl wrote to Peter, asking for copies of some of his music, and Peter most generously complied. Most of the music was still in manuscript form. However, since Peter’s handwriting was difficult to read, Carl decided to prepare new editions. This was in the days before personal computers and music software, so he re-did the scores in his neat handwriting. Peter was delighted by the rewritten manuscripts and in fact, submitted some of them to G.I.A. for publication.

(Much of this information was published in an article Carl Crosier wrote for the September 2009 issue of The Journal of the Association of Anglican Musicians which was devoted in its entirety to a tribute to Peter Hallock.)