It was all about the music on Sunday, when the family and friends of Marshall Rutter sang adieu at his and his spouse, Terry Knowles’, beloved All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena.
Marshall was the cofounder of the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Terry, an institutional advancement executive, is the chorale’s former interim chief. Among the anthems chorale members offered, like incense and gold, was a stunning setting of “O Magnum Mysterium” that Marshall commissioned for Terry in 1994, two years after their marriage, from composer Morten Lauridsen.
It was always music between Terry and Marshall. Seeing them together, standing hand in hand or separated by a roomful of people, friends could sight read their mutual devotion. In a charming reflection during the service, Terry, my colleague from the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles Standing Committee, talked about the Pennsylvania-born Marshall’s study year in England, from which he returned with the timbre of a British accent that was quickly teased out of him. He went on to Amherst. At his 70th reunion last year, Terry said with a smile, “I was the trophy wife.”
After law school at Penn, he came to Los Angeles and joined O’Melveny & Myers before forming his own firm in 1973. When he had been in town just three years, in 1963, the great Dorothy Chandler, founder of the Los Angeles Music Center and mother of the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, invited him to organize its in-house chorale. I can imagine the tone of the invitation. When the Times hired my mother as an editor in 1971, Dorothy arrived in her office and invited my mother to agree with her about what color it should be painted.
The church was full of church friends, chorale and law practice friends, and friends from Bloy House, The Episcopal Theological School at Los Angeles, where Marshall served on the board until the end of his life. The Rev. Canon Susan Russell co-presided alongside the interim priest in charge, the Rev. Tim Rich, who offered a moving, lively sermon about the love between Marshall and Terry and our nagging, ineffable faith in eternal life, signified by our God in Christ, who promised never to stop loving us, whether in life or beyond.
We even had a grace note about current events. Rising to read “When Great Trees Fall,” a poem by Maya Angelou, was Marshall’s daughter and Terry’s stepdaughter, Deborah Rutter, until recently the distinguished president and CEO of the Kennedy Center. It invoked the reality of Marshall and all who have died and yet inspire us, in good times and bad. “They existed. They existed,” she read. “We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.”
