The power of music as heritage

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The Smoky Valley Men’s Choir, a consummate instrument of voice, will perform at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 14, at the Swedish Pavilion in Heritage Square. The event is part of the annual Old Fashioned Christmas celebration at the McPherson County Old Mill Museum in south Lindsborg.

It’s an opportunity for those who missed the Hyllningsfest concert, or the Choir’s program at Assaria Church, to experience the clear radiance of men who know how to sing and love doing it. For those who have heard them, it’s a chance to hear them once more. The group performs only in the odd-numbered years of Hyllningsfest.

Leah Ann Anderson, the Choir’s director, says the 30-minute Pavilion program will include “a variety of familiar and not-so-familiar tunes, both sacred and secular. Back by popular demand will be the (Choir’s) tenor trio – Stephen Klaassen, Tyler Johnson, Mark Klaassen – singing ‘Nella Fantasia.’ This time they will be joined by oboist Ellen Neufeld. Brenda Finch is our fabulous accompanist.”

A Men’s Choir performance is a lifting experience, and with moments of exhilaration. The group’s crystal tone and resonance, its sheer force, comprise a wholehearted alliance of talent, a community treasure that has flourished for more than two decades.

But how?

The other night, hard winds carried in the raw sting of winter and brought to mind nature’s capacity for indifference. A century and a half ago many of the first settlers here could only burrow into a river bank or huddle in a dugout and hope to last the winter. They had arrived with little more than some clothes and a few tools – and their hymnals. Music would invigorate their faith and their talent; musicians gave it strength and force.

Time can be caustic even to the strongest legacies. Over the decades’ long march, attention can be distracted during the slowest progress; interest is corroded, missions and even values diverted. Histories of American settlements are full of examples of promises abandoned, heritage frayed or forgotten. The Swedes here kept their focus, pressed on. They were determined to endow their culture and to secure its footings. From the outset, music was always at the core. It lives on, today.

The Pavilion where the Men’s Choir will perform is part of that heritage, a building from the Swedish exhibition at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. After the Fair the Pavilion was dismantled, shipped to Lindsborg and reassembled on the Bethany College campus; it was home, then, for the classrooms, library and workspace of the college art department. In 1969 the Pavilion was moved to Heritage Square at the Old Mill.

Anderson admires the Pavilion, its history, its  vaulted wood ceilings, its grand acoustics – “a great place to perform,” she has said.

The Men’s Choir was the idea of Carroll Lindgren, who believed a community men’s choir should be part of the Hyllningsfest program in 1997. Aware of Anderson’s talent, he asked her to direct the group.

The men who comprise this choir are the eclectic components of community, the shopkeepers, merchants, farmers, bankers, doctors, builders, teachers, laborers, insurers and others who have lives to live, work to do. They hold a certain devotion to music and rehearse as often as they are able. Any man who enjoys song may join, and their ages have at times covered three generations; membership over the years has run from three dozen to four dozen or more. This year, 50 sang at the Choir’s Hyllningsfest concert.

Hyllningsfest has been a biennial celebration in October to commemorate Swedish heritage, a nod to the pioneers who created this community. The anima of this men’s choir is largely descended from that heritage, evoking a love of song, the promise and faith of those first settlers. Today the Men’s Choir is something strong and immutable, a group that confirms heritage with a clear and potent voice.

What better, than to hear them as Christmas approaches.

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