Alumni honor founder, original organist
By Kathleen Acuff, Town Crier Staff Writer
 Joe Hu/Town Crier Main Street Singers director Mark Shaull founded the Main Street Singers along with Virginia Hebel 20 years ago. |
The Main Street Singers celebrated 20 years of making beautiful music together with a reunion last month that brought 100 singing alumni back to Los Altos High School to rehearse, perform, party and honor the pillars that sustained the program through two successful decades: founder and director Mark Shaull and organist extraordinaire Virginia Hebel.
Hebel accompanied the group through most of its history, even as she quietly kept lung cancer at bay through a 10-year battle that she lost on New Year’s Day 2004. In gratitude for her dedication and many kindnesses, Main Street alumni are raising money to buy a high-quality portable organ for the Eagle Theater, which has no keyboard. By the end of June, they had raised about half the estimated $40,000 purchase price and hoped to have the organ in time for the annual winter concert.
At the reunion banquet June 11, Hebel’s husband, Chuck, presented a plaque denoting the Virginia Hebel Memorial Organ to Shaull and Debbie Yowell, Main Street’s accompanist since the 2000-2001 school year.
Shaull described Hebel as “a woman of incredible courage and talent and giving.” Much of the credit for what he called the choral music program’s environment belongs to her, he said.
“She was an extraordinary organist. If you’d asked her what she was, she was first and foremost an organist,” he added.
In late June, two pieces of red satin ribbon still hung from either side of the door to the new Virginia Hebel Laboratory for Keyboard Studies, dedicated during the reunion weekend. Through the door off the choir room is SRO for pianos. The lab was made possible by a $15,000 donation from an anonymous source and $15,000 that Shaull raised, he said.
“There is ongoing generosity every year,” he added. “We’ve had a 50 percent reduction in site expenses for this department. It’s a little bit scary - kind of year to year, at this point. The salary for Debbie Yowell is hanging in the balance.”
Part of the money for operating the music program comes from the Mountain View-Los Altos Union High School District, but Shaull will “have to scramble” to raise the rest, he said.
Reflecting on the reunion and the years that led up to it, Shaull said, “It’s amazing how one small three-day period can be inclusive of 20 years of experiences and people and achievements. The weekend was extraordinary, every bit of it. … Imagine 200-300 people so vibrant and charged, not able to tell enough stories or to greet enough people.”
That’s a good description of the man himself. He is tall and vigorous, with a warm personality. His obvious pleasure in his work animates his conversation.
“The human voice is such a beautiful and remarkable gift - a combination of air and spirit. It’s amazing when voices come together,” he said. “Music allows expression that words cannot.”
Shaull has long taught his students to be “true to the style and the literature of the period the music comes from.” Because his musical resource is 500 years deep and two hemispheres wide, students who go through all four years in the choral department emerge well versed.
He tells them, “You are responsible as a musician to bring this music alive. It lives because you’re making it music.”
During the reunion, “I saw (the alumni) all fall back into the internal discipline of putting forth their best effort to create beauty. It was amazing to watch them be so in awe of walking back into what they did so many years ago,” Shaull said.
Before the reunion, the alumni practiced on their own for a month with a CD he sent them. They rehearsed as a group for about 10 hours during the reunion weekend. Their former director said of them, “They put forth an incredible concert.”
The eight pieces they sang June 12 were representative of Main Street’s performances over the years. They ranged from Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Missa St. Johannes de Deo” to modern work by John Rutter and included a set of madrigals and a spiritual. The alumni closed the program with their signature farewell, “Not to Say Goodbye.” The concert was held in First United Methodist in Palo Alto, where Shaull is director of music and a baritone soloist.
The making of a singer
The choral program Shaull directs at Los Altos High School demands commitment from both students and parents. His students learn complex music, leavened with occasional Gershwin - “that’s as light as I get” — and the rare musical. Shaull has always assigned his students “music you can sink your teeth into and enjoy - we get enough fluff as it is,” he said.
As Erica Dunkle (alto, 1999, 2000), who organized the reunion, and Aaron Olson (tenor, 1999, 2000) wrote in “The Main Street Experience from an Alumni Perspective,” printed in the concert program, “Mark Shaull gives high school students music that is recommended for people twice their age and convinces them that what they might lack in vocal maturity, they can make up with passion, conviction and hard work.”
Shaull described the Main Street program as “three years of rigor.” His students rehearse as a group in each of their four days of class and on Monday evenings. In addition, the vocal sections rehearse separately once a week. Two weekends each school year, the group retreats to the YMCA’s Camp Campbell in Boulder Creek for intensive, interruption-free work. Over the summer, the singers study in sections, combining lighter music with social activities. The altos might have a sleepover, the tenors hike and sections combine for a bowling party.
Other than talent - “we have a great group coming in” - the most important attributes for an incoming Main Street Singer are “a strong sense of commitment and a can-do attitude,” Shaull said.
“A kid newly challenged by this kind of commitment becomes a better student and better across all aspects of campus life because they have to learn how to manage their time, prioritize and multitask,” he added. “The commitment is grand, and so is the reward.”
The commitment doesn’t stop with the students. Parents of Main Street Singers must be committed to the program, too.
“The demands on the student certainly play out at home,” Shaull said. “This program couldn’t happen without the commitment of the parents, which has been very present over these 20 years.”
In the choir room
Shaull has directed the activities of six choral ensembles and coordinated the music department at LAHS since 1984. The best part of his job, he said, is “watching someone get hooked and come alive with the wide-eyed, chill-up-the-back-of-the-neck (realization that) the beautiful sound they hear - it’s them.”
The freshman choral experience includes training the ear and musicianship.
“But more important is pride in their voice, what they’re able to produce as a singer, in ensemble, in the department,” Shaull said. “They can see ensembles in progress and see their future, if they want to go that way.”
His student singers scale a pyramidal order of commitment and ability to perform. It starts with earning Shaull’s approval for voice instruction. The next step is to join the Choral Union. The Girls Ensemble for sopranos and altos or the Varsity Men’s Glee for tenors and baritones takes a student higher. Just beyond these are the chorale, for all voices. Membership in the upper reaches of the pyramid is by audition only. Students can try out for the Concert Choir, Girls’ Twenty-One or, at the pinnacle, the Main Street Singers.
Every year, more students than the tip can hold seek the peak experience. But even with a single year of music training, students have “a keener understanding of how to appreciate music, how to go from Point A to Point B in music. They can understand themselves better through the art form,” Shaull said.
Over the summer, Shaull researches new music and communicates with incoming singers “to get them excited and driven toward their new career.” He also travels, conducting as he goes, to develop connections for the Main Street Singers’ annual April tour. This spring’s tour took the singers to European cathedrals, the highlight of which was St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Next April will take them to Santiago, Chile, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. This summer, Shaull will conduct first in Europe then in South America as he sets the wheels in motion for the complicated arrangements for moving and housing a company of 33 and their entourage.
Shaull admitted that he would love to “go another 20 years … to have a finger in the actual making of music and creating beauty … in an environment in which variables such as funding can be minimized.”
