The Northern Illinois Harmony Alliance is planning to offer two holiday shows coming up that will feature an 80-voice mass barbershop chorus.
A total of eight choruses will come together on Dec. 10 and 16 to present Christmas Memories, an approximately 20-song program that will include Christmas favorites and other holiday music.
The first show will be offered at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 10, at Baker Memorial United Methodist Church, 307 Cedar St. in St Charles, with the show repeated at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 16, at the Barrows Auditorium of the Billy Graham Center, 500 College Ave., on the csmpus of Wheaton College in Wheaton.
Tickets are $25 for adults, $15 for students 18 years old and younger and free for those 5 years old and younger accompanied by an adult.
For tickets, go to www.chorusofdupage.com/events or call 331-444-2740.
“We call this the ‘Mass Chorus Project’ and I think that word really resonates,” said Bill Murschel, 70, of Wheaton, one of the organizers of the shows. “This is the third year we have combined multiple choruses from northern Illinois to do these shows. What’s powerful about them is when you combine seven or eight barbershop organizations you suddenly have 80 singers instead of 12 and so it makes for a dramatic and powerful program.”
The musical program, Murschel said, “is all chorus songs and we have some quartets.”
“When people think of barbershop they often tend to think more of quartet music as opposed to choruses, so we’ve got about six numbers that are either quartets and what we would call small ensembles – eight guys or 10 guys,” he said. “They’ll be sprinkled into the two program sets in addition to all the full chorus numbers.”
In a press release Northern Illinois Harmony Alliance officials said the first half of the program “will feature traditional holiday favorites such as ‘Jingle Bell Rock,’ ‘It’s Beginning to look a lot Like Christmas,’ ‘Winter Wonderland’ and ‘White Christmas.'”
The second portion will feature a narration of the Christmas story of the birth of Jesus, interwoven with carols such as “Silent Night,” “Angels We Have Heard on High” and “Mary Did You Know?”
The performance will come to a close with “O Holy Night” with the audience joining in singing “Joy to the World” with pipe organ accompaniment, the release said.
Murschel is a member of the Chorus of DuPage out of Naperville, a group with about 50 members which he said “is probably the largest chorus involved in this project” but also one that continues to struggle with the number of participants.
The pandemic, Murschel said, “hit groups like us pretty hard because we couldn’t rehearse and we couldn’t perform.”
“Every group was hurt in those 24 months and, of course, barbershop trends change and there are lot of musical organizations people can join these days,” he said.
Aurora resident Dan Britton, 65, who serves as the chorus manager for the Aurora Lamplighters, a group that has been around since the mid-1940s, acknowledged similar membership problems as the group once had about 100 members and will feature most of its 15 current members during the upcoming shows that began rehearsals about six weeks ago.
Back in the early to mid-1990s, Britton said the group “still had 40 to 50 members” but that those numbers have since been affected by “people either dying or moving away.”
“The next generation isn’t taking up the mantle. We try and go to a high school or junior high to try and promote a cappella type singing but it’s going to be on our radar now that COVID has taken more of a back seat,” Britton said. “We try and perform through the area at least half a dozen times a year. We sing in parades that Aurora puts on and we have been at Geneva Swedish Days and we were just at the St. Charles Electric Parade.”
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
