CHARACTER STUDY

As the last note dies away, Anne Dorsey turns to face the audience. She bows, then turns back to face the chorus, sweeping a hand from one side of the stage to the other, passing on the applause to every singer and musician in the Moore County Choral Society. It’s a love affair that has lasted 22 years.

On April 27, the Moore County Choral Society will hold its 50th anniversary concert in the Robert E. Lee Auditorium at Pinecrest High School. Dorsey has wielded the baton in very nearly half of them. Befitting the occasion, the Choral Society will be joined by a professional chorus, local high school choruses, the Arc of Moore County Joyful Noise and a full orchestra.

Dorsey will have chosen a program with a careful balance between old favorites and new, or lesser-known, pieces — perhaps from a different country or in a foreign language — adding up to a memorable performance. It’s what she has done, time and time again.

To get the chorus to where it needs to be, rehearsal after rehearsal, Dorsey’s approach depends on the situation, but humor is her main weapon. She is witty, quick with words, and has an infectious smile that radiates from behind the podium. And the chorus works hard for those smiles. One place you don’t want to be is on the end of her black look. It happens when she has just told a section, or indeed the whole chorus, precisely what she is expecting — a clean cutoff at the end of a phrase or a particular vowel pronunciation — and it is not delivered. It’s a well-practiced skill she developed studying with the legendary, and fear-inducing, Dr. Lara Hoggard and the Carolina Choir at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“Choir was everything,” she says of her undergrad days. “I never missed. I was never late. I wanted to be like him.”

Born in Rockingham, Dorsey sang her first solo at the age of 3 in a recital in Ellerbe. In junior high school she sang alto, “because I could read music and hear a harmony part which helped me develop a musical ear,” she says. Inspired by the Carolina Choir, it was during her high school years in Henderson that Dorsey decided she wanted to be a school choral director. “I heard them sing and I’d never heard anything like that sound,” she says. “I wanted to be part of it and learn how to make it.” 

With a music education degree from UNC in one hand and a teaching certificate in the other, Dorsey moved to Moore County in the fall of 1977, too late to land a teaching position, but not too late to be hired by organist Paul Long at the Community Congregational Church of Southern Pines as choir director. “The ink was still wet on my diploma, and I got a job with a Juilliard genius,” says Dorsey. At roughly the same time she discovered the Moore County Choral Society, then in its infancy, and joined as a member under Dr. Armand Kitto. It was the beginning of an incredible 48-year relationship.

Dorsey did finally get that teaching job — in the Hoke County School System. Over the course of her career as an educator, she taught grades 4-12 and did children’s choir work at church and in the community. “Every grade, every class and every student taught me something — probably more than I taught them,” she says.

In the spring of 2002, Dorsey filled in for John Shannon, then the conductor of the Moore County Choral Society, and upon his resignation she was offered the job of director. She found that working with adults is both the same and different from working with young people.

“I sometimes forget who I am dealing with, but I have largely been forgiven for that,” she says with a smile. “I have certainly been stretched, and I have, in turn, tried to stretch those who sing with MCCS. No year should lack musical challenge; no season should be without something new, something difficult, something different, and also be appealing to our audiences.”

Chris Dunn, executive director of The Arts Council of Moore County and a brass trumpeter in MCCS, says, “As a musician who has played many concerts with Anne, I marvel at how nothing seems to faze her. One example was at the beginning of a concert the entire brass section missed an entrance. Anne turned to us with a stern look but continued conducting as if everything was fine. We can laugh about it now, but not then.”