Uniting people to raise their voices in song

A choir begins with a single voice. One person breathes, opens a mouth and makes a sound. It’s an unusually vulnerable act, Diane Schutz believes, because singers have nowhere to hide. There is no clarinet or flute between them and the audience.

Then another voice joins. And another. For more than half a century, voices have been coming together that way in the Mesilla Valley Chorale, one of Las Cruces’ longest-running musical organizations.

Now Schutz is adding her own. She is the chorale’s new director, but there is little about the Las Cruces music community that is new to her. Schutz arrived in 1975, only a few years after the chorale began, and has spent much of the half-century since teaching, conducting, accompanying and performing with generations of local musicians.

In many ways, she has been circling the chorale for years. It began in the early 1970s, growing from a group of singers connected to St. Paul’s Methodist Church, and has continued performing ever since. Schutz now directs music at St. Paul’s and had watched the chorale through the years, sometimes helping provide rehearsal space and knowing many of the people involved.

When the group needed another director this year, she was ready.

“I think I bring in new energy,” Schutz said. “I have a different approach to rehearsals.”

That approach is fast-moving and deliberately fun. Rather than stopping repeatedly to perfect a measure, Schutz likes to keep singers working through the music, make notes about trouble spots and return to them later.

“When I get in front of them, I want to make it fun and exciting,” she said.

Fun matters to Schutz. So does the music. But underneath both is something she has seen music provide throughout her career: a place to belong. Schutz remembers a young man who came to her when she was teaching at Las Cruces High School. He was deaf, but he wanted to sing in the choir. Schutz had a rule. She didn’t turn students away.

They tried. They experimented with ways he might feel the vibrations and learn to produce the notes. Eventually, the student acknowledged it simply wasn’t working. Schutz found another way.

“How would you like to be my roadie?” she asked him.

He could help set up and take responsibility for the choir’s equipment.

“He thrived,” Schutz said. “He just wanted a family. He wanted a home.”

For Schutz, that was as much a part of what a choir could accomplish as anything that happened on a concert stage.

“That’s what music gives our kids in school,” she said. “It’s an automatic family. Be it band or orchestra or choir, they’ve got an automatic family when they step on campus.”

It was a philosophy that helped Schutz build the Las Cruces High choir program from 19 students when she arrived to 325 by the time she left in 2006. Not all of them were great singers.

She remembers another student who wasn't among the strongest musically but never missed a rehearsal or concert. He was never late. He simply showed up, every time. Schutz eventually created an award in his name.

Her students learned that being part of the choir wasn't reserved for the most talented voices. Sometimes the kid needed the choir more than the choir needed the kid.

Schutz brought that philosophy from a lifetime in music.

Raised in Los Angeles, she began playing piano as a child and went on to study music education and choral conducting at Texas Christian University. After coming to Las Cruces, she continued her education at New Mexico State University, where she said she received the university’s first master’s degree in choral conducting in 1987.

Her musical footprint in Las Cruces has grown steadily since. She taught students from elementary school through college, spent years at Las Cruces High, accompanied young musicians around the community and performed for decades alongside her late husband, John. The two played with Ron Thielman’s High Society for about 30 years, and Schutz has played percussion and keyboards with the Mesilla Valley Concert Band since 1988.

She also directs music at St. Paul’s and created Sold Out, a group for high school- and college-age singers that gives younger musicians another place to perform. It all grows from the same idea.

“I use music to reach our kids,” Schutz said. “And I use music to reach everybody.”

Sometimes, she said, that happens through grief or pain. Sometimes it comes through joy, a wedding or the birth of a child.

“I think music can speak to everybody,” she said. “And if you use music that way, it becomes, I think, a healing tool, too.”

Now she is bringing that philosophy to the Mesilla Valley Chorale. The group has about 56 singers this fall, and Schutz would like to make it increasingly multigenerational. She has already brought in some younger former students and college-age musicians to join long-time singers.

The music is intended to cross generations as well. The chorale will continue performing traditional choral works, but Schutz is mixing those with contemporary music, gospel and jazz. She isn't interested in turning the chorale into something it has never been.

“They’ve done great music and great people are still there with the chorale,” she said.

Instead, she sees an opportunity to build on that history and make the circle a little wider. That includes people who once sang but haven't done it for years. It includes people who don't read music particularly well. It might even include someone who has never considered joining a choir.

“I’d like them to just come and enjoy,” Schutz said. “You’ll meet a great group of people. You’ll sing some fun songs, and I’ll help you at any level.”

Teaching people from where they are is familiar territory.

“In high school, you constantly have kids coming in who’ve never been in music before,” she said. “So, you take them where they are, start them right there and then help them grow. And that’s what we’re going to do.”

Schutz also wants the chorale to move beyond its two major annual performances and further into the community, taking music to retirement homes and other places where people may not be able to come to them.

“Wherever people need us,” she said.

That, too, fits a career built around the belief that music isn't only for musicians. Schutz once had a principal tell her he couldn't do anything musical except play the radio. She had an answer for him.

“Hey, you’re a great consumer,” she told him. “That’s important. Someone’s got to listen.”

There have been plenty of remarkable musical moments during Schutz’s years in Las Cruces. Her students performed at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. Others went on to become teachers and professional performers themselves.

What she remembers most, though, is helping young people from Las Cruces discover they could do things they hadn't imagined possible. She sees some of that same courage in the singers standing in front of her now.

“Singing is very intimate,” Schutz said. “It’s you out there.”

Still, nobody in a choir really stands out there alone. Combining voice to voice takes that individual singer and creates something much larger.

After nearly 50 years of helping people throughout Las Cruces find a place in music, Schutz has found another place for her own voice, among the dozens already gathered in the Mesilla Valley Chorale.

And, perhaps more importantly to its new director, she’s in another place where she can help someone else discover they belong.