Rita Mathern sometimes thinks it would be nice to have a Monday night to herself.
But when the 82-year-old arrives for rehearsal with the Naperville Chorus at Community United Methodist Church in downtown Naperville, that thought quickly disappears.
“I get there to rehearsal on a cold winter night, and I realize, ‘Oh, yes, this is where I need to be. This is great,’” Mathern said. “It’s the camaraderie, the people that look forward to seeing you and you to them, and people that care about your life.”
That camaraderie is part of what has kept Mathern coming back to the Naperville Chorus for the past 27 years. On April 19, she’ll be one of dozens of singers performing when the chorus presents its spring concert, which also commemorates the group’s 50th anniversary.
“There was a time (several years back) where the then-president of the chorus said, ‘Just out of curiosity, how many people have been a member of the chorus for five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years?’” said Elisabeth Case, a former chorus president herself. “It was incredible how many people had been, at that point in time, already a member of the chorus for 20 years, 25 years, and we were still bringing in new members.”
Ultimately the group is “a living, breathing thing” that continues to bring on “new, younger people all the time,” she said
Naperville Chorus was founded in 1976, but its origins can be traced back more than 100 years to the Oratorio Society, a singing group made up of students and townspeople that continued into the 1920s and 1930s, according to the Naperville Chorus website.
It can also credit the NCC-Community Chorus as one of its biggest precursors. Started in the 1960s by North Central College music professor Paul Allen Warren, it included students, college personnel and community members and peformed until 1971, when financial issues forced North Central to suspend its music program.
Robert Jaynes saw an opportunity to resurrect the group in 1976. A 40-member ad hoc singing group being put together to perform with the Naperville Municipal Band for the city’s U.S. Bicentennial celebrationn would become the Naperville Community Chorus under Jaynes’ direction.
As it grew and started attracting members from across the Chicago area, “community” was dropped from its name in 1992.
That they now have 100 members, Case said, “is a testament to the music we sing, the environment that we provide for the folks who are singing, the fun that is participating in this group.”
Unlike some other choral groups, Naperville’s does not require auditions. Anyone can join and there is a mix of skill levels, with some not having sung since elementary school and others who have studied music in college or are music teachers themselves, Case said.
“We get a very good mix of very strong singers, folks who are really good at reading music, sight reading, and some that aren’t,” she said. “But we provide an opportunity to kind of stretch and grow for anybody who’s interested.”
The lack of auditions surprised John Zelman when he joined about 15 years ago. Zelman describes himself an amateur musician but the opportunity to sing with such a large group has helped him sharpen his musical abilities, he said.
“I depend a lot on people around me and when you do that, you kind of find your own voice too. And you join with them, and it gives you this wonderful sense of confidence that you can actually do this. You can read this music and … you can really belt it out if you need to,” he said. “You’re harmonizing with people around you and they say that once you make a chord with people, you’re friends forever.”
That sentiment was shared by Mathern, whose husband joined the chorus about five years before she did. When he died in 2016, 40 members from the chorus sang with her church choir at his memorial Mass.
“That was such a gift, that was just wonderful,” Mathern said, noting that the chorus’ music director at the time, Jeordano “Pete” Martínez, led the 40 members in a special piece for the service.
The Naperville Chorus has showcased its talents not just in the Chicago area, but across the country and internationally, traveling to places as far as Spain, Portugal and Poland. For Mathern, traveling to the Polish hometown church of Pope John Paul II just outside of Krakow was one of the highlights of her time with the group.
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Zelman said the chorus’ value is not just personal but what it brings to the broader Naperville community.
“We represent another aspect of the arts in Naperville,” he said. “Arts really flourish here in town. You’ve got art everywhere. You’ve got theater, you’ve got dance, you’ve got visual arts all over the place. And to have one more part of it be local and be choral, I think, it broadens the entire community to be able to have a little bit more music available to them.”
At their April 19 concert, the group will be accompanied by an orchestra as they present a mix of more traditional choral music alongside choral opera pieces. The music will feature four different languages: English, German, Latin and Italian.
To purchase tickets, go to napervillechorus.org/upcoming-concerts.