Novi Choralaires to celebrate 50 years of singing in May

NOVI — The Novi Choralaires, a community choral group, will be commemorating 50 years of performing during its annual spring concert May 10.

According to the group’s director, Aidan Rickel, the group’s survival for 50 years is truly something to celebrate. He said the group’s numbers declined severely during the COVID-19 pandemic and at one point was almost nonexistent. Rickel said he’s been working to bring the group’s count back up since he took over in 2021-2022.

“It’s been a difficult time since COVID to try and get people fired up about singing,” he said. “Now that people have warmed up to it, our numbers are growing, but yeah, we almost hit zero.”

The choir numbers peaked in the high 40s, according to Rickel. Today the Novi Choralaires has 35 members ranging in age from their mid-30s to almost 90. Rickel said that 15-20 members are considered legacy members who joined as young adults and are now grandparents. He said the group used to do much more than sing — the group once incorporated dancing and choreographed routines.

“The group has a lot of legacy,” said Rickel, who grew up in Novi. “At one time, and they always tell me this, they used to be a lot younger.”

He said that they decided to call people out of retirement for the Novi Choralaires anniversary, as they might have just stepped away from it for a while. He said many members took a 10- to 15-year hiatus or so from the group for various reasons before coming back to the choir.

Dick Baryerl, 89, recently rejoined the group and is currently the oldest member. He said he originally participated in the group from 1986 to 2019 and then left the group as a result of heart issues and his wife’s dementia. After she died, he rejoined the group as it made him feel good.

“It’s good to be back,” said Baryerl. “And the thing is it’s just like every week buying a free ticket to a concert, because you’re sitting there between all these beautiful soprano voices and the altos on the other side, and us guys are in the middle.”

Baryerl said he heard of the Choralaires through friends he sang with in the choir at the Catholic Church of the Holy Family in Novi. He said that at the time he was a member of three choirs. He said he truly fell in love with choir singing on Dec. 15, 1958, the date his employer, Michigan Bell, transferred him to Battle Creek. There he joined his first choir and fell in love with and later married the choir accompanist’s younger sister.

Rose Johnson, 70, of Livonia, has been in the group for 45 years. She joined the choir in 1980 after seeing the group perform and has been singing with it ever since. She said the first concert she saw had a nice variety of music and members even performed as quartets.

“They did stuff, different kinds of stuff, back then and I was really impressed. They were more like a show choir,” she said.

“That’s why I joined this particular choir. When I tell people that I sing in a choir, everybody always assumes that I’m singing in my church. I have to tell them no, that kind of heavy music I don’t care to sing. Sure, I’ll do the hymns when I go to church every week while I’m in the pews. I wanted to join a community choir because they do all sorts of secular songs, and that’s what I like. I like doing all the secular songs — the fun stuff,” Johnson said.

Rickel works full-time as a music minister at St. Mary’s in Westland and jumped at the chance to direct a community choir and be able to perform choral songs that were outside the standard for church music.   

Johnson recalled that the group once did a Disney-themed concert circa 1997, and she said it was her favorite memory of performing with the group. She said she performed a solo from Mary Poppins during the performance.

“I’ve done a lot of solos over the years, but that was one of the funnest concerts because it was fun songs that everybody knew,” she said.

Baryerl recalled performing as the Addams Family during a performance.

According to Johnson, the group has mainly performed locally over their years. However, she said that a few members were able to perform in Poland in the early 1980s, but she did not go.

Johnson said she is still in it because she loves to sing, especially upbeat tunes. The group also gives her a chance to get out of the house every week, to perform and simply hang out with friends.

The theme for the spring anniversary concert is “Music Brings Us Together.” The concert will feature songs that the group has performed during each decade of its existence. Rickel said he went through all the programs he could find from the past and picked songs that he thought emulated where the choir was at that stage of its existence.  He said the group will perform two to three songs from each of the five decades.

“They’re not songs from that decade. They are songs that were performed in that decade,” he said.

“Most of these songs I have sung with the group throughout the years and it’s kind of cool,” Bayerl said.

The current ensemble will be joined onstage by former members to perform “Bridge over Troubled Water.”

For the grand finale, the group will perform a song called “Fly, Wild Bird,” which was written by one of its late members, Don Sill, and scored by a previous director, G. Kevin Dewey. The score was handwritten, so Rickel said he took the time to put the score into modern notation software so it is easy to read and easier to perform.

“It’s a very interesting piece. It’s about the author’s love for this wild bird, very literal, but it is more metaphorical in that the author thinks he would like to have that wild bird, but they know that would just spoil what makes the wild bird a wild bird,” said Rickel. “It’s about going out into the world and living your life.”

Rickel said that he feels it is a nice song to finish with for the anniversary, as the group came together as a choir, had moments together and continued to move on, and the group has continued to move forward.

“It’s kind of like no hard feelings. We are born to live our life in the direction that it needs to take,” he said. “I think that is a nice song to remember the past and to treasure what we love about each other, and also to have no hard feelings that some of us have moved on to different things.”

The group is planning to have souvenirs available for purchase, such as commemorative pins and T-shirts.  The show is scheduled to be held at 7 p.m. May 10 at Novi Middle School’s auditorium. Tickets cost $15 for adults and $10 for students and seniors; they can be purchased at the door. Children ages 6 and younger will be admitted for free. The group performs three main shows a year and makes appearances at local nursing homes and events.

Former members interested in performing with the current ensemble and anyone interested in joining the group can contact it at novichoralaires.org..

“It’s all about people,” Bayerl said. “Music brings us together and we’re singing and we’re ‘The Way We Were’ and it’s good. It’s just good to sing like that and it’s good to share it with people.”