City’s Oldest Men’s Choir Hits Farewell Note

They vowed to focus on the music, not the impending silence.

So on Sunday night, the men of the Ellis-Orpheus Choir lifted their voices for the last time in a final concert before a packed crowd at Riviera United Methodist Church in Torrance.

The 112-year-old chorus, L.A.’s oldest men’s choir, is disbanding because it has been unable to attract new members to replace those who have died or lost their voices to age, said choir director Randall Schwalbe.

And though the Gay Men’s Chorus (of Los Angeles) boasts a healthy membership in the Los Angeles area, men’s choruses as a rule are fading away, Schwalbe said.

“We are heartbroken, but we are treating this as a celebration,” Schwalbe said. “We decided to end it before it became too late to end it in style.”

In recent years, as it became clear that the group was failing to attract necessary younger voices, the men decided to disband rather than listen as their beloved choir lost its sound.

“My voice is not what it was,” said George Stevens, 94, who has been singing with the choir for 72 years. “A lot of the time, I’m just mouthing the words, because I don’t have the breath. . . . I’m really sorry to see the choir closing down.”

He sighed and shrugged, looking at his fellow choir members on a break at a recent practice. Some joked around, tossing off inside jokes that go back decades. Others squinted seriously at musical scores or talked with Schwalbe.

It was 1928 when Stevens joined the Orpheus Chorus. He was 22 and living with his parents and three brothers in Highland Park, which was then a middle-class suburb.

What he did for a living then, he doesn’t recall. Stevens does remember singing--at school and with his parents and three brothers in his church choir.

“We all loved to sing,” he said.

In the days before television, when church was the center of many more people’s social lives, Los Angeles boasted hundreds of choirs.

One day, a friend of Stevens’ invited him to join the Orpheus Chorus, a men’s choir formed in 1905 that gained national attention because singers sang songs from memory.

Almost every Tuesday since that day, Stevens has gone to choir practice.

In 1939, because of the ravages of the Depression and the lure of other forms of entertainment, the Orpheus Chorus merged with the Ellis Club, a men’s chorus formed in 1888.

Back then, singing with the group, which held concerts in L.A.’s biggest venues, held a certain glamour that’s hard to fathom from the delicate assemblage of 16 neatly dressed retired men who appeared on the stage Sunday, Stevens said.

In 1916, the Ellis Club made telecommunications history when it gave the first trans-American concert over the phone, to a group of tuxedo-attired singers gathered in New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

In the past, the group has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and at the Hollywood Bowl’s famous Easter Sunrise Service.

But in the last few years, as membership has dwindled, the group’s venues have shifted from famous gilded concert halls to church auditoriums.

Nowadays, most choir members are in their late 60s, and membership is drawn from church choirs across the South Bay, said Ellis-Orpheus club President Gene Ogle.

The sparkling, high-society dinners, cocktail parties and picnics that used to accompany practices and concerts are nothing more than a memory preserved in fading black and white photographs that many members have at their homes.

For a while, some of the men went to El Cholo restaurant before practice, but even that tradition withered away, though many in the group have known each other for decades and socialized informally.

For the 16 men who remained active members, however, the music was every bit as beautiful.

“We love to sing together,” said Don Norton, a retired high school shop teacher who has been singing with the group for 38 years. “Guys don’t always delve into personal lives, but we have a good time.”

Unlike a church choir, which sings mostly religious hymns, on Tuesday nights he and his friends got to sing boisterous sea chanteys and even drinking songs.

Norton, who prefers the sound of an all-men’s choir to the mixed choirs fielded by many church groups, said the Tuesday night practices wiped away the tiny hardships and depressions of the day, and filled him with joy.

“The sound is more virile, but it’s also more tender,” he said. “You get to have all these emotions of tenderness that you don’t normally get to have with men.”

Like many members, Norton said he plans to find another mixed male and female group to sing with as soon as possible.

“If I stop singing, I’ll probably die,” he said.

Ogle, a 44-year veteran of the group, said he will continue to sing with his church choir.

What he will miss is the camaraderie of the group. “You knew, going to practice, that you were going to see old friends,” he said. In today’s frantic world, there are few places where men can go and be together. “Those friendships will never be the same,” he said.

Schwalbe, who has been directing the group since 1988, said he too is sad to see the group go.

“It’s like losing a friend,” he said. “But the only thing about this friend is, it’s been around for 112 years.”