Mishawum Choral Society Starts Rehearsals for Holiday Concert

Outside, it’s still summer, with a snap of fall.

Inside, it’s winter. At least it sounds like winter. A choral group is rehearsing a piece that refers to snow—“White Christmas” and one about a mean Grinch.

The has begun to rehearse for its holiday concert.

The chorus, with about 50 members, whose ages range from about 20 to 84, is also looking for prospective new members:  people who have some experience with four-part choral singing and can read sheet music.

Joanne Colella Boag has been a member of the choral group for nine years. The Woburn resident holds a bachelor’s degree in vocal performance from the New England Conservatory.  She joined the group when she was “between gigs” with other music groups and home raising her children. 

It’s “a lot of fun,” she said. The choral group might sing Broadway tunes, movie tunes and selections from major choral works, Boag said.

Barbara Bacon has been in on the music from the beginning, in 1963.  She is one of the few remaining charter members, she said. Bacon, “84, and proud of it," has no formal voice training. She learned to read music as a child, when she studied piano.

“All my family has a great love of music,” said Bacon, who moved to Woburn two years ago. She joined the choral society because she wanted a creative outlet, she said, and an “out-of-the-house opportunity”—social time, she said.

Renelle Hebert holds a degree in music education. She finds singing “de-stressing.”  She taught both voice and instrumental music to students in grades one through 12 in New Hampshire for five years. She sang with a group in Waltham for a time, but the commute was hard, she said. When she moved to Woburn about 15 years ago, she went to her first rehearsal with the Mishawum group—and stayed.

Members of the Mishawum group have “great camaraderie,” Hebert said.

”The altos mingle with the sopranos,” she said, and so on with the tenors and basses. Beyond that, groups get together for barbeques, she said, and even go to shows together.

The group, originally named the Woburn Choral Society, started as a four-part chorus, according to Myrna Tichenor, who does publicity for the group. Its name soon changed, according to Tichenor, to the Mishawum Choral Society, reflecting that members come from Mishawum, the Indian name that refers, she said, to Woburn, Wakefield, Reading, Lexington, Burlington, Bedford, Wilmington, Stoneham and Winchester—and beyond.

Its purpose:  “To provide musical enrichment to the public and to its members,” Tichenor explained, “by performing two concerts per year.”

Members rehearse every Tuesday evening, September through spring, at the in Woburn Center, at the corner of Main and Winn Streets. They meet in the church sanctuary.

They will perform on Dec. 4 and in the spring.

This year, the group has welcomed a new director, Sean Landers. Landers holds both bachelor and master of music degrees from Boston University, where he concentrated in music education and vocal performance.  He began to teach in 2003. Since 2007, he has directed the choruses at Belmont High School. He is also music director at the Crawford Memorial United Methodist Church in Winchester, where the Mishawum Choral Society performs. 

Landers is taking the group from “good,” Hebert said, to “very good.” The singers have “come out tired,” Bacon said, after their first rehearsals with him.

Prospective choral society members are invited to attend the group’s open rehearsals this month, on Tuesday evenings, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m.

Between the winter concert and the start of rehearsals for the spring performance, choral society members have several Tuesday nights free.  For those few weeks, Hebert said she “feels like something is missing” with no rehearsals.