(bright music) - Will you consider this?

As I have said before, music just warms your heart, makes you just, it brings you happiness.

And Laura Lane brings happiness in many, many ways and for many, many years through the NOVA Singers out of Galesburg, Illinois.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for being here.

- I'm so glad to be here.

- You founded NOVA Singers in Galesburg in 1986, so you're in your 39th season now.

- [Laura] That's right.

Yes, we are.

- Tell me about how this all came about.

- Well, I was conducting, I was teaching at Knox College and conducting the Galesburg Community Chorus, and one of the singers from the chorus just came up to me after rehearsal and said, "Hey, Laura, if you started a small ensemble "that was really, really, really good, I would sing in it."

And this particular person was Bob Fornander, who was an amazing tenor, and he inspired me to think about it.

So then I asked some other people from Community Chorus, just a couple here and there, and met with them and talked about it, and then I recruited singers, and we started with a meeting where we sat around in my living room and sang madrigals, and- - I love it.

- And then we made up our not-for-profit application for the state of Illinois, so we could be a not-for-profit right away.

- Wow, well that was a pretty big pow wow that you had there then.

- Yeah, it was fun.

- And you did it musically?

- Yes, at that time, everybody on the board was also a singer, because that's how we got started.

We didn't have non-singing board members.

And often, that is the case with a not-for-profit singing group.

But anyway, we only had 13 singers in the group the first year, and- - [Christine] All right, how did you divide those parts?

- Well, it was four sopranos, four altos, two tenors and three bases.

- Okay.

(laughs) And you remember that from all those years ago?

- Oh, yeah, I remember each person, yeah, yeah.

- That is awesome, and you have people, now you have 20 singers, and you limit it to 20.

- Most of the time, yes.

The regular group that sings the whole season, the regular members are 20 or 21 sometimes, but then we expand.

Every now and then we expand to 30 or 34 to do something special.

Like last fall, we expanded to 34 to do a specific piece that was for acapella double choir, where you just needed more voices to do it.

- And you decide what is going to be performed and what you want from your singers.

- Yes.

- Yeah.

And what songs you're gonna sing.

- That's right.

- So, auditions are held just once a year?

- No, actually, auditions for the returning singers, who are already in the group, are in January.

But, and then we announce auditions for new singers about April one.

- Okay.

- And I like to do it in the spring for new singers, but honestly, whenever somebody new comes into the area that one of the singers recommends to me, and I don't care what time of year it is.

I'll do it any time of year if someone comes who's really strong.

And because I was doing this expanded group last year, I did the auditions all through the year to build that, to get enough singers that were of the quality and experience that I needed to be able to do the expanded thing.

- And you draw from many different communities.

You're not only Galesburg.

- Oh, yeah.

In fact, sometimes we have no singers from Galesburg.

- That's interesting.

- Right now, we happen to have three, but that's a high number of the last 15 years.

- Wow.

Wow.

- Yeah.

We have three from Galesburg, one from Monmouth, three from Peoria, and one from Iowa about directly west of us, and the rest are from the Quad Cities.

- And then, so how did they hear about the NOVA Singers then?

They were obviously involved in some kind of chorus prior to this?

- Right, so it happens in different ways.

Sometimes I'm looking for a singer to replace someone who moved away.

And I will call or contact my colleagues and say, "Do you have anyone new in your area to recommend?"

That's how I found Christian- - Who is now running our audio, so your microphone sounds perfect.

Thank you, Christian.

- Thank you, Christian.

- All right.

- And he's terrific.

And then, but a lot of the time I find new singers, because one of the singers recommends that I listen to someone.

So, I have a whole bunch of these singers in the Quad Cities who are very, very active in the Broadway musical scene up there, and they do a whole bunch of shows in the summer.

Some of them are the music directors for the show.

So they will text me, "Laura, we heard a new soprano.

"We really want you to hear.

"Laura, we heard a new tenor.

Laura, there's a baritone.

"You need to come to hear this show this summer, "'cause there are some new singers," and they'll tell me who to listen to.

- I love it.

- Yeah.

So, the singers themselves are often recruiting for me, which is wonderful.

- Well, that means that they have a part, they have some skin in the game, you know, they want it to sound perfect.

- Yes, and it also means they're happy.

- Yeah, absolutely.

- They're having a good time.

And they think it's worth somebody's time to spend all the time preparing the music ahead, driving to Galesburg, 'cause you know, they drive an hour each way from wherever they are to meet in Galesburg for those rehearsals.

And it's a two and a half hour rehearsal, and then they drive back, so it's a big time commitment.

- A big commitment.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- But you find that they're okay with that.

That's their commitment, that's their love, that's their passion.

- Yes.

Each and every person in the group is really passionate about singing, and especially about choral singing.

Each person has a soloistic voice and really could be a soloist, but they have decided, I think their hearts are not in the opera world generally, it's more in the choral music world.

And all of them have had experience singing in high school and college choirs before they come to me.

Sometimes though, a new singer, a new person just arrives in the area and finds us online.

This happened last spring.

A new tenor, who just got in touch and he said, "I found you online.

I'd like to audition."

and that happens too, every now and then, so you never know.

- You've had a little bit of everything in these 39 years.

- That's right.

- Okay.

You have how many performances a year?

- Three different programs, and each time we do a program, we do it twice, once in Galesburg on a Saturday night usually, and the second time on a Sunday afternoon up in the Quad Cities.

Since we have so many singers from there, we do our second performance there, and we have crowds in both places.

- So, how is it that you've expanded westward so much?

You said you have three members now from, three voices from Peoria right now- - That's east, yes.

- East.

Yeah, so how is it that these Easterners didn't get, or have you been Peoria-heavy or east before?

- No, no, normally we have one or two in from Peoria.

This time, we happen to have three.

But when we first began, we also had singers from Macomb, which is an hour south of us.

So we actually had people coming from an hour every direction.

- North, south, east and west.

- That's right.

And we don't have very many from directly west.

We have one guy, Dakota.

But we have quite a few generally from the Quad Cities.

- Interesting.

- Yeah.

- And this is your passion.

- Yeah.

- And so you said that you taught at Knox College, but what was your musical background before that?

- Well, I grew up doing music casually and for fun and singing in choirs.

I learned piano and oboe, because my mother said we should learn piano plus one other instrument, and she wanted us to, and I took to it and kept playing in bands and orchestras.

I loved band and orchestra and choir, all of them, all the way through high school and college.

- And they didn't conflict, band and orchestra?

- Actually, the band conflicted directly with the choirs in high school.

- Okay, yeah.

- So I didn't get to, I had to choose.

And in my high school, I chose band, because it was so outstanding.

- And where are you from, Galesburg?

- I'm from Illinois.

No, I'm from Wheaton, Illinois.

- Wheaton, okay.

- Yeah.

Wheaton North High School, yeah.

And when I went to college, they did not conflict.

So actually, in college for four years- - You did it all.

- I sang in the choir, played in the band, and played in the orchestra.

- [Christine] And where did you go to college?

- Washington University in St. Louis.

- All right, Wash U.

- Wash U.

It's a great place.

- It is.

It's beautiful.

- Yeah, yeah, and I went to France for a year and studied, did music on the side, but studied everything under the sun.

I really wanted to live abroad and become fluent in French, which I did.

But then when I came back, I just had fallen in love with singing even more, and thought about conducting, had to decide, choirs, orchestras.

I loved them both.

- Oh yeah, tough decision.

- It was hard for me, but I chose choral conducting, choirs, because I had taken a Renaissance music class, loved Renaissance music, but also, with a choir, you can do all the music that's out there.

You can do every style under the sun from every time period, and that's not true of orchestras.

Not until, actually, that's never true of orchestras, even the professional level, because there weren't any orchestras in the Renaissance time.

- No, there weren't.

- And the orchestras in the baroque time were very, very small.

So yeah, it's just different.

I chose it because I wanted to do everything.

- [Christine] Good for you.

- I really have a passion for doing a huge variety of types of music.

And I'm not a collector by nature, but I do collect one thing, and it's songs for choir.

I have thousands of scores.

I go to conferences and World Choral Symposium.

I go to concerts and I listen to everything, and when I find something I like, I buy the music and study it.

- And it's in your collection.

- So I have huge piles of music everywhere, all the time.

- (laughs) Well, your enthusiasm is just, it's contagious, that's for sure.

- [Laura] Thank you.

(laughing) - So I'm sure that's why you've attracted all these singers.

Now you had a performance in April, and that was... - "Come to the Woods."

- "Come to the Woods."

- It was a thematic program about trees, woods, forests, and the positive effect that being out in nature has on human beings.

- All right.

I think we have a little clip of that, so let's take a break, and let's give a listen.

Okay, that was delightful.

- Thank you.

- You also have something called Project Sing.

So, you're still always kind of looking for potentials.

- Yes, Project Sing is an educational outreach program where high school students from two different high schools come and join us for some rehearsals and performances, and it's been a great experience for those kids.

They tend to love it.

And yeah, every now and then, somebody who sang with me in Project Sing comes to a concert and says hi, or I meet them at a conference, because they became a music teacher.

Has there been anybody in Project Sing who actually became a regular member of NOVA Singers, I'm not sure.

One person who sang with us in a different project did, Moline Boys Choir.

He became a regular NOVA singer.

But generally, it's a way to encourage young people, of course, to keep singing and to show them what it could be like if they keep going.

College choir singing is different from high school.

- It's a little bit more... Well, people are usually majoring in music, right?

- Not always, no.

- Okay, all right.

- Lots and lots of people sing in college that are not majoring in music, people that are gonna go into all different kinds of fields.

But, and everybody in NOVA Singers sang in their college choir, and as you have seen, many of them are not music teachers.

So, you know, they were not music majors when they were in college.

But choral singing, once it grabs you, it's like you love it so much, it gives you endorphins and it's really, really, really fun to make beautiful music with other people.

But also, there's a community aspect to it.

People really love getting to know each other.

- It's a family.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- A musical family.

- It's really great.

And once you've experienced that, whether it was in junior high, high school, or college, you tend to wanna keep doing it.

- Continue, yes.

- Yes.

And there are different ways of doing it.

There are community choruses out there.

Almost every town has a community chorus, and they're all excellent.

And then, this is a level up from that in that it's a professional choir.

I call it an orchestra of voices.

- [Christine] I like that.

- It's like a professional orchestra like the Peoria- - Symphony?

- Symphony, or the Knox Galesburg Symphony or the Quad City Symphony.

It's like that, only just voices.

- I like that.

Do you do a lot of acapella?

- Yes, a lot.

- All right.

And that's fun just to hear all of the harmonies.

- Oh yeah, the sound is so beautiful.

Most people who come for the first time to hear us say, first they mention the sound, like they were surprised how beautiful it was, and they were surprised perhaps at the excellence.

It's very, very, very excellent.

And most people who come to hear us have never heard a choir like this.

- Now, my guests, before this taping, were Mary Ann Fahey-Darling and Mary Jo Papich.

And you got all kinds of wonderful kudos from Mary Ann Fahey-Darling, who said she feels you're the best in the state- - [Laura] Oh my goodness.

- when it comes to bringing voices together.

- Wow.

- How about that?

- That's a nice compliment.

That's very nice.

Thank you.

- So how do you live up to that?

(laughs) - I'm just myself.

- Keep doing what you're doing.

- I'm just doing my thing, but I've been doing it a long time.

- Yeah, I like that.

- And we do have audience members from Chicago and Peoria, a couple from Peoria.

We have a loyal group that comes over.

We have people from... We have somebody from Colorado who flies in to visit a friend and come to concerts, - Because they have experienced it and love it so much.

- Yes, and our Chicago fans say, "There's nothing like this in Chicago."

The first time we got the National Endowment for the Arts grant, which is a big deal to get that.

- Mm-hm, it is.

- Someone called me from the "Chicago Tribune" to interview me for an article about the fact that a downstate Illinois group got a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

And he said, and the NEA people, they called me themselves and said, "Okay, you're in Chicago, right?"

"No."

"Are you in a suburb of Chicago?"

"No, we're in Galesburg, Illinois."

And they said, "Where is that?"

They could not believe that we were from a town of 30,000 people.

So, it's very unusual because of the nature of where we are.

- We're in a small town.

- And what you do.

- Right, surrounded by soybean fields and corn fields.

- [Christine] And corn fields, right.

- And then we have Peoria this way and Quad Cities that way.

Yeah, we're very special.

- Absolutely.

And you grew up in one of the suburbs.

- [Laura] I grew up in Wheaton.

- So did you know where Galesburg or Peoria was when you were growing up?

Because a lot of people, I mean, that's their cocoon.

- No, it wasn't until I looked at colleges that I even knew that Knox College was in Galesburg, didn't know of the town.

I was looking all around and more aware of the wider world, I would say, than downstate Illinois, but I knew of Peoria.

There are phrases that people say, "It plays in Peoria."

- Exactly.

- Yeah, there are phrases, yeah.

But no, I was a big city girl.

I grew up outside of Chicago and was in the city all the time.

I grew up going to the CSO and the opera sometimes and playing in orchestras.

There was a youth orchestra, a youth symphony in my town.

I got to play first oboe in the youth symphony.

I got to go to the Allstate Festivals in Peoria.

They're in Peoria, so I probably was there for that, yes.

- Well thanks to your mother, you learned the oboe.

- Yes, and I got to play.

I got to choose when I would go to Allstate or district.

Would I prefer to be in the band or the orchestra.

I always said orchestra.

I just loved the sound of the orchestra.

And if you play oboe or flute, you're right there in the center, surrounded by the entire orchestra.

The strings, you hear them, you hear the brass behind you.

It's just an amazing experience to be surrounded by that sound.

That is true in a choir as well.

To be surrounded by the choir is really, really wonderful.

- So if you're first soprano though, generally you're off to the side, but when you're in the middle, second soprano and alto sometimes- - Alto one, yes, and the tenors and the baritones, yep, they get to hear more.

- So, alright, well then what took you to Galesburg?

Was it your teaching job at Knox?

- Yes, I went for my master's to Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, and then my first job was a sabbatical replacement, so it was only one year, and I had to leave.

That was a wonderful job, and they loved me and I loved them, but that person was coming back, I had to go.

So I looked nationally at that time, and I had several opportunities, but I was drawn to this job at Knox College because of the person who interviewed me, Charles Farley, and also because it was in Illinois, and my father was still living in Chicago.

That was still home base for him, and he wasn't gonna leave.

And I thought, oh, it was something having lived in France, on the East Coast for a while, in the South, there was something that felt like home when I came back to Galesburg.

- Illinois.

- Yes, and this man, this is funny, but at the end of my interview, I'm about to drive all the way back to South Carolina, and this man came running out of the gas station to pump my gas, and he was so nice.

- That doesn't happen many places.

- He was so nice, and I was like, "Wow, this is what it's like in Illinois."

I'd forgotten how friendly everybody was, so that drew me.

And then I stayed because of two reasons.

I was gonna go off, I did go off and do my doctorate and come back.

- All right.

- I wasn't gonna stay.

I was gonna be here a couple years and then go do my doctorate and then get the real job.

But I fell in love with the students.

The students at Knox College are very, very smart.

And most of them at the time, and most of them still are not going to become music majors.

They're gonna be doctors and lawyers and politicians and teachers and everything under the sun, and- - But they brought all that depth and- - Yes, knowledge about literature.

If I quoted a Shakespeare play and said the wrong play, an English major would raise their hand and say, "No, Laura, it's this one," you know, they knew.

I mean, it really stimulated me intellectually to be surrounded by them and engaging with them all the time, but also, my friends were on the faculty, and the faculty at Knox is brilliant, and that was fun.

And then also, I fell in love with an economics professor named Rich Stout, and I married him.

- And?

- And after that, I realized when I had my daughter, I realized, boy, I really like being only five minutes from my daughter.

- How about it?

- It's a small town, and it's wonderful.

It was wonderful for having a career where I could teach and conduct and be a mom and have a home.

- You got those priorities absolutely perfect.

- Well, yeah, I mean, you know, it just was important to me my whole life to have a family.

I knew I wanted to have a long-term marriage and a family, and I did.

- Yay.

You're successful at that.

- Yeah.

- And so, we have a couple minutes left.

So you have a performance or what's your next season then?

- Yes, we're doing some really special things for our 40th season next year.

The fall concert is called, "In Our Voices," and it's a thematic program with three different sections.

The first section is "Voices of Praise," so it's sacred music, including spirituals and all different kinds of sacred music.

The second section is "Voices of Nature."

We have commissioned a very popular and famous, world famous, actually, composer to write a special piece just for us, and that will be the world premiere of that piece.

- [Christine] I like that.

- And then we're gonna do another piece about nature that's just lovely.

And then the third set is "Voices of Creation."

To close the concert, we're going to do a piece called, "Make Me a World," that we commissioned and performed about 20 years ago, but we haven't done it since, and it's very popular out there.

We've commissioned a lot of new pieces, but we don't always do them again, but I wanted to do this one again, and that'll be fun.

- So these are in your collection?

These are in your collection of music?

- Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

I have thousands of pieces in my collection.

- That's what you said.

(Laura laughing) So do you have like one favorite or- - Oh my gosh, no.

- You just can't choose.

- Oh no.

- It's like who's your favorite child, right?

- Right, and people ask me that, "Who's your favorite composer?

"What's your favorite piece?"

And I say, "Whatever I'm doing right now."

- [Christine] I like that.

- Whatever I'm doing right now, I'm very much in the moment now, living with that music and that piece, and that's what's running through my head.

When my daughter was home and practicing the piano all the time, it was whatever she was playing all the time, and I would be somewhere else in the house, in the kitchen or the dining room, and she'd be practicing.

I loved that too.

But you know, it's fun.

- Yeah, yeah, well thank you for being with us, and I'm sure you sing every morning just to get your day started.

- I sing a lot.

- Good for you.

- Yeah.

- Well, thank you.

Nice to meet you.

- So nice to meet you.

- Thank you for sharing the story of the NOVA Singers.

(bright music) We gotta thank Mr. Christian Sander for letting me know about you guys.

And now you all know too.

Thanks for joining us.

Until next time, be well.

That went fast.

- It went really fast.

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