IT was a shared memory easily pictured.
Rhona Morton “at the kitchen sink peeling potatoes” sprouting melodic advice to one of her three sons.
The Imbil-born mother to Ralph, Graeme and Paul and wife to William, a Methodist minister, “taught piano virtually her whole life … until six days before she died”.
“She was a country girl,” Ralph, eldest son and director of music at St Stephen’s Cathedral, Brisbane, said.
“Mum first taught piano at the age of ten, to her cousin.”
Musical counterpart Graeme, appointed this year as part-time director of choral music at St John’s Anglican Cathedral, Brisbane, soon recalled the time before Rhona died, about 10 years ago.
“I took her pupils while she was in hospital,” Graeme said.
“She was instructing me what I had to do with them from around her hospital bed.”
An hour with the accomplished gentlemen provided an engaging insight into the lives of their parents and the overlap into today.
“Dad, as a Methodist minister, was living in a vestry … in Esk,” Ralph said.
“The presbytery was decrepit and dirty.
“He asked permission to get married and he and Mum came back to Esk after a week or so of honeymoon and Dad said, ‘Here’s my wife’.
“They (church officials) said, ‘Well, we’d better open up the house’.
“Apparently the house was so awful that after the church official left, my mother sat and cried.”
Regardless of the shaky start, Rhona was dutiful as “the minister’s wife”.
Ralph said the family, “often paid in farm produce”, eventually moved to Brisbane and lived in Moorooka, Kedron, Ashgrove and Toowong – all three sons raised with “a fervent Protestant influence”.
Ralph recalled first playing the organ at age 10 in Rocklea – one of seven churches William had “oversight” of.
“It was in a converted army hut,” Ralph said of that setting.
“I was wearing short pants and was shown where I should walk because there were other places where the floor was rotten and I would fall through.”
Graeme began playing the organ at church from age 17 and all three sons went on to study music at university level.
Paul, said to be “the best of the three” musically, moved into the world of finance while Graeme and Ralph continued down more melodic pathways.
Health realities encouraged Graeme into the conducting role and Ralph as a specialist behind the organ.
“We both trained as organists but I developed arthritis quite early in the scheme of things,” Graeme said.
“(And) in an unspoken way that gave Ralph the permission to be the organist I wasn’t going to be and perhaps me the permission to work hard with the conducting – that he didn’t do because he was being an organist.”
As well as the St John’s role Graeme is director of music at St Peter’s Lutheran College, Indooroopilly, a school he has had an association with for 28 years.
Wife Barbara heads the music department at St Peter’s too – something often “joked about”.
She has accompanied Graeme and the St Peter’s school choir to England, Europe, Russia and America as well as all Australian states with “a choral program of national significance”.
Graeme said when he began conducting “very few people were performing Australian music”.
“He’s also the founding conductor of Australian Voices … although he hasn’t been involved in it consistently,” Ralph was quick to add of his brother’s achievements.
“He’s on the board of the National Youth Choir of Australia and in Brisbane has a choir called the Brisbane Chamber Choir.
“All those groups, under Graeme’s direction, have made twenty CDs.”
“On the way to (20 CDs) … ,” Graeme said, soon speaking of Ralph as his “strongest supporter”.
“There’s never been a skerrick of competition between us,” Graeme said.
“It’s not in our nature.
“My conducting at St Peter’s doesn’t quite have a parallel in Ralph’s career but is balanced by the fact he has a doctorate in organ playing.
“I sometimes stumble to be credible to be an organist.”
Singing each other’s praises, Ralph said his first appointment was in an Anglican church in Christchurch, New Zealand.
“With a father as a Methodist minister and a mother passionate about music and the Church, looking back one might have thought that this (the appointment in the Anglican church) wasn’t a good idea, that I was going outside my Church or I didn’t have their support.
“But that wasn’t the case.”
Ralph has ministered musically in the Methodist, Uniting, Anglican, Presbyterian and Jewish Temple denominations, in churches and schools, and now finds himself “welcome” in the Catholic Church although an “outsider”.
“In all of those situations I have been an important person in terms of the liturgy but there has been a sense I have been an outsider,” he said.
“Not in a nasty sense but that I’m dealing with a denomination or a faith which is not exactly my own.”
Ralph is “very much at home” in the Catholic Church and has had “wonderful experiences” throughout his 10 years at St Stephen’s.
As he “grows older” Ralph says he’s aware of the past while maintaining his identity.
“I’m recognising how much of my parents are in me,” he said.
“But at the same time how I have moved in different ways and am quite different.
“There’s no Methodist Church in Australia now but I suspect, at the heart, that I am still a Methodist.”
Graeme said while his ministry “hasn’t been as diverse as Ralph’s” he “loves the mystical aspect of all churches and (how) music as an art form poetically takes us closer to that”.
The gentlemen agreed they are “desirous of excellence”.
“There is a hymn which was strong in Methodist circles and continues in Anglican circles and I suspect is occasionally used in Catholicism too,” Ralph said of the hymn, Just As I Am.
“There’s a verse in it and one line that says, ‘To be the best that I can be’.
“To be a perfectionist is not what I am talking about … but to be the best that you can as an expression of a human being created in the image of God.”
Graeme added his thoughts in terms of the choirs and groups they lead.
” … To allow the musicians you work with … to be the best they can be,” he said.
“I think for both of us it goes back to the same quality that underpins good teaching.
“To want and expect the best of everyone you are working with and yet have the ability to forgive them or to allow them not to achieve that and still not to lose your zeal to be the best.”
One surmises Rhona Morton was conveying exactly that to her sons, even from the kitchen sink.
