History

The St. Ann Choir was founded in 1963 as the choir of St. Ann Chapel, at that time home of the Newman Center of Stanford University. Its founding director, William F. Pohl, was a professor of mathematics who had directed a choir at the Newman Center of U.C. Berkeley as a graduate student. Pohl believed that Catholic liturgy should principally foster contemplation, and that this ideal is inherent to Gregorian chant and choral music from the Renaissance era. The first formal document issued by the Second Vatican Council, Sanctosacrum concilium (The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy) reinforced his convictions. Published the same year, it affirmed Gregorian chant sung in Latin as the normative music of the Roman liturgy, while giving special praise to Renaissance polyphony and music for the pipe organ. 

Pohl thus set out to form a choir that would cultivate these repertoires within the chapel’s regular services. After singing its first Mass on October 13, 1963, the typical musical program for Sunday masses with the St. Ann Choir was soon established, with the choir singing the chants of the Mass Proper, the congregation joining in the chants of the Mass Ordinary, and Renaissance motets and organ music incorporated at suitable moments in the liturgy. The choir has remained faithful to this program through the years of liturgical revision that followed the Second Vatican Council and the introduction of the Novus Ordo Missae (1969), to the present.

The endurance of the choir and the development of its musical life after the 1960s is above all the fruit of the dedicated and vigorous leadership of William P. Mahrt, who directed the choir for over fifty years. Mahrt had been a founding member of the choir under Pohl and succeeded him for a time after the latter left Stanford for a professorship in Minnesota. After graduating and moving on to faculty positions in the east himself, Mahrt returned to Stanford as a professor of musicology in 1972 and became the choir's director permanently the following year. In the intervening years, interim directors of the choir included Erich Schwandt, Kari Windingstatt, Rev. Andrew Forster, Beverly Simmons, and Hermann Ebenhoech. Under Mahrt's leadership the choir strengthened its already close relationship with the Stanford Department of Music. For many years the ranks of the Choir were fortified by skilled music students including specialists in early music and musicology, and its repertoire expanded to include a vast number of polyphonic motets and mass settings by Renaissance composers such as William Byrd, Orlando di Lasso, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and Josquin des Prez. From the 1970s onward, as Gregorian Chant and traditional choral music largely disappeared from most Catholic Churches, the St. Ann Chapel Choir grew to become a leading light in the wider movement to preserve these repertoires in liturgical performance, and Mahrt rose to become one of the movement’s most influential scholar-practitioners. 

The support of local clergy and lay community members was also crucial to the choir's mission. Particular priests associated with the Stanford Newman Center who helped to sustain the choir and its liturgical program include Rev. Robert Giguere, S.S., Rev. John Duryea, and Rev. Msgr. Eugene Boyle. The choir also cultivated friendships with priests serving on the faculty of nearby St. Patrick's Seminary, and others of the various religious orders present in the Bay Area. The latter include Rev. Benignus Barat, O.S.B. and Rev. Pius Horvath, O.S.B., two of the founding Benedictines of Woodside Priory, who frequently celebrated High Masses with the choir. For decades the choir benefitted profoundly from the faithful service of noted medievalist George Hardin Brown, Professor of  English at Stanford. Brown's role as the choir's master of ceremonies, which he served from the early 1970s through 2019, was grounded in his deep expertise in liturgy and Latin. Among many members of the choir who also made major contributions to its development across these decades are John Altstatt, an engineer who has provided significant technical support, and his wife Susan Altstatt, an artist whose work for the choir includes a series of illuminated chant pages to supplement the distinctive large, choirbook-format Graduale Romanum (Amsterdam: Annie Bank, 1950) from which the choir sings on most occasions. 

In addition to its regular Sunday and holy day services, the Choir has been privileged to sing for many special liturgical events over the years. Some of the more momentous examples include: The first Catholic Mass celebrated in the Stanford Memorial Church, in 1964--attended by hundreds of worshipers, this High Mass eventually led to the regular celebration of the Mass there, including periodic feast day services with the St. Ann Choir. In the 1970s-1980s the Choir sang for a number of special Masses celebrated by the successive Archbishops of San Francisco, Most. Rev. Joseph McGucken and Most Rev. John Quinn. In 1981 it served as choir for the Vespers which solemnized the establishment of the Diocese of San José and installation of its first bishop, Most. Rev. Pierre DuMaine. The following year the Choir sang for Masses celebrated in San Francisco by H. Em. Terrence Cardinal Cooke, Archbishop of New York, for chaplains of the military vicariate (forerunner of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA). A High Mass with the St. Ann Choir for the Feast of the Purification (Candlemas) was celebrated in 1990 as part of the series of special events marking the inauguration of the Cathedral of St. Joseph in San José. In 2000 the Choir sang for the Solemn Pontifical Requiem Mass, according to the traditional pre-Vatican II liturgy, celebrated in San José for the soul of H. Em. Ignatius Cardinal Kung, exiled Bishop of Shanghai, prior to his burial in the Mission Santa Clara cemetery. It participated in the Mass commemorating the 35th anniversary of the establishment of the Diocese of San José in 2006. The following year the Choir traveled to the Czech Republic to sing Masses in a number of Prague's most historic churches and participate in the Fifteenth International St. Wenceslaus Festival of Sacred Art. 

The choir sang its regular services at the St. Ann Chapel until it closed in 1998. While the Newman Center relocated to the Stanford Campus, the choir and its well-known "Gregorian Mass" remained in Palo Alto's merged Catholic parish. With the encouragement of Bishop DuMaine and Rev. Bernard Freyne, the parish pastor, in August of that year it took up residence at historic St. Thomas Aquinas Church, where it has sung since. As reflected by its name, the choir retained St. Ann as its patroness after this move, continuing to pray for her intercession, and celebrating her feast day every July 26. The choir's Sung Latin Masses have continued to be celebrated by valued group of Bay Area priests supportive of the choir's mission, including Dominicans, Franciscans, professors of St. Patrick's Seminary, and retired diocesan clergy, In October 2013, the choir commemorated its 50th anniversary, and in October 2023 its 60th anniversary. These occasions brought together many present and past members of the choir and its congregation.  

William Mahrt's storied tenure as director of the choir continued until his death on January 1, 2025. At that time, the board of directors of the St. Ann Choir nonprofit organization, which Mahrt had established to ensure the continuity and development of the choir after his death, took over the administration of its activities. Erick Arenas, a musicologist and long-time choir member who had served Mahrt as a deputy conductor, was appointed to the role of music director. It is a testament to the clarity and durability of Mahrt's vision for the St. Ann Choir, along with the dedication of its members and collaborators, that its liturgical-musical program has continued without interruption or alteration.