NEWS

 

Choral conductor Elvera Voth has returned to her Newton area roots, bringing the richness of her lifelong passion for music and a spirit of giving to her new home at Kidron Bethel Village in North Newton.

 

Voth earned a bachelor’s degree in 1946 at Bethel College and a master’s in music education in 1948 at Northwestern University. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Alaska in the early 1980s.

 

She moved to Alaska in 1961. There she met Robert Shaw, who came to conduct the Alaska Festival of Music, and they worked together for a decade. She enjoyed a 40-year distinguished music career while in Alaska, conducting groups including the Alaska Methodist University Chorale, University of Alaska Singers, and directing the Sunday afternoon concert series at the Anchorage Historical and Fine Arts Museum. The Alaska Center for the Performing Arts dedicated Elvera Voth Hall, an 1,800-square-foot performance and rehearsal area, in 2003.

 

“I was a public school teacher who turned into a professional conductor in Anchorage,” Voth said. “I had a wonderful time there because I came just at the right time. Shortly after I got there, Alaska struck oil and the money I needed was at my disposal. Oilmen came to me and wanted me to start an opera company so their wives could be involved.”

 

She founded the Anchorage Opera Company and served as its artistic director while teaching at the University of Alaska. She conducted the Anchorage Community Chorus, which was the backbone of the Festival of Music. She founded the Alaska Chamber Singers in 1986, an “absolutely marvelous” choir that once traveled for two weeks in Siberia. She also established the Anchorage Boys’ Choir.

 

 “Anchorage, by reputation, changes population every seven years,” Voth said. “People come and go.” Voth was there “long enough” to do the things she could, including the opera.

 

She returned to Kansas in 1994. “Like any good Alaskan resident,” Voth quipped, “I started swimming back upstream.”

 

Voth had been considering starting a men’s chorus, and in 1996 she established the East Hill Singers. She also was chorus master for the Kansas City Lyric Opera and used a blend of those members and some from local church choirs to practice and perform with minimum-security inmates from the east unit of the Lansing Correctional Facility in Lansing. Their performances drew large audiences, Voth said, because people were curious about the inmates. Audience members often remarked that the inmates were no different than they, Voth recalled.

 

“I found the real love of my life in working with inmates,” Voth said. “You really get the feeling that maybe you are doing some good. How dare we incarcerate people and not give them anything to do!

 

“Some inmates have no outside contact,” Voth added. “The recidivism rate is shockingly high because an inmate gets out and has no help, no money and no one will hire an ex-con. Before you know it, they’re back in the system.”

 

Voth welcomed every inmate who wished to participate in the chorus, saying, “I just didn’t want to give them one more failure in life. Why not invest yourself in other people’s lives? Why keep everybody at arm’s length?”

 

The chorus performs four concerts annually at locations in the Kansas City and Topeka area. She recalls an inmate who received a standing ovation for his vocal solo. He started to leave the podium, then turned back, leaned toward the microphone and asked the audience, “Do you have any idea what it’s like to get a standing ovation when you’ve been told all your life you are worthless?”

 

Voth also remembered a revealing comment by an inmate who played the villain Iago in a Missouri prison production of the Shakespearean play, “Othello.” After the performance, the inmate said, “I never knew that I was a villain until I played one.”

 

 “The thing I learned from Kansas City audiences is that they came to hear the inmates speak as much as to hear them sing,” Voth said. Inmates spoke, sometimes doing a reading or sharing a personal testimony, between each song during the group’s performances.

 

“My field, the choral field, basically has sort of lost audiences, partly because we don’t pay any attention to the audience,” Voth explained. “We just stare into our books and sing words. I want to reconnect with an audience.”

 

Voth and the East Hill Singers are the subjects of a “Sunflower Journeys” documentary produced for KTWU-TV in Topeka. The film won the top prize for documentaries at the Midwest Emmy Awards.

 

Voth also was awarded the Dr. Karl Menninger Award for her outstanding contribution to the field of corrections. In addition, the governors of Alaska and Kansas honored her with state Conductor of the Year awards.

 

In 1998, the East Hill Singers evolved into a nonprofit, Arts in Prison Inc., with a mission of facilitating personal growth through arts for the incarcerated and their families. The group’s programs now include creative writing, drama, gardening, guitar, painting, yoga, drawing and singing.

 

Voth gleaned her seed money for the Arts in Prison program with some help from her friend Shaw, who liked Mennonites a lot, she said. He came to Bethel College to help her with a special performance. She told him she’d get some members of the Newton and Wichita symphonies together along with eight or nine college choirs. They printed selections from great oratorios for everyone in the audience. The one-day event raised $30,000 to start the Arts in Prison program. Shaw died within months of the performance.

 

“My biggest disappointment is that I didn’t have time to expand the Arts in Prison program to the national level,” Voth said. “However, a number of facilities have picked it up. Hutchinson Correctional Facility (formerly Kansas State Industrial Reformatory) has a men’s chorus.”

 

After 15 years directing the East Hill Singers, conductor Kirk Carson told Voth if she ever got to the point where she didn’t want to do it anymore, he’d like to take over the leadership role. Voth, 85, said she knew that was the time to bow out.

 

“You can look down the path and know you’re not going to go on forever,” Voth said. “And I didn’t want the program to be interrupted.”

 

She served as conductor until 2008, coming to North Newton earlier this year. One factor in Voth’s decision to move to Kidron Bethel Village was to be near family.

 

“I had no one the entire time I was in Alaska,” she explained. “I have many nieces and nephews living in this area. It’s just a joy for me to have those charming people drop in and out.”

 

Voth remains true to her philosophy for people her age who don’t have enough to do or don’t know what to do: “Go help somebody.”

 

“I decided to start a new career at age 85, and what I have now is a very fine men’s chorus,” Voth said. “People in this area have so much talent.”

With a few exceptions, the new chorus of 20 is comprised of men whose average age is 75 to 80. Practices are held each week at Schowalter Villa in Hesston.

 

How does conducting a chorus of older men differ from that of the inmates?

 

“I use a mic for rehearsal because a lot of them have hearing aids, and with hearing aids they don’t realize they’re singing too loud,” Voth explained.

 

“We’re not prisoners in an institution,” she added. “We’re prisoners of old age, myself included. My biggest crime is memory loss.”

 

When she moved to Kidron Bethel Village, she planned to do volunteer work but couldn’t find anything that really struck her. She didn’t know what she was getting into, she says jokingly, when the Hesston group called her during its search for a conductor.

 

The new chorus will perform July 26 during a service at Bethel College Mennonite Church, North Newton, and will be part of the Life Enrichment program series at the college in the fall.

 

“It feels exactly like what I ought to be doing right now,” said Voth, smiling with satisfaction.