Karla Peters sings with the Lawrence Civic Choir during a rehearsal March 30 at the First Baptist Church, 1330 Kasold Drive. The choir is preparing for its 40th Anniversary Concert, which will be held April 12 at the Lied Center. The Lawrence Community Orchestra will accompany the choir at the concert.

Just as individual grains of sand bond to form rock, members of the Lawrence Civic Choir have, since 1975, joined together to create “a mighty song of joy, of love, of light, of peace.”

Lawrence Civic Choir artistic director Steve Eubank directs the choir during a rehearsal Monday, March 30, 2015 at the First Baptist Church, 1330 Kasold Drive.

So read the final stanzas of “One Out of Many,” a piece commissioned to longtime LCC accompanist Geoffrey Wilcken in honor of the group’s 40th anniversary. The song will premiere Sunday, April 12, at the Lied Center during a special commemorative concert, 40 years and six days after the choir’s first performance back in April 1975.

“When you hear it, you’ll understand the meaning,” says David Ice, LCC president. “It’s about many people singing together to perform a joyous sound and to bring many people together via singing and music. That’s the final stanzas of the song, and that sort of tells you what this is all about.”

The concert will also feature the Lawrence Community Orchestra, which will perform one piece on its own before joining the choir on “Brahms’ Requiem.” Before and after the performance, guests are encouraged to check out a special display in the Lied Center’s lobby.

Over the last year, a planning committee has been asking current and past LCC members — 1,350 singers have been part of the choir over the years, Ice estimates — for memorabilia, including old photographs and programs from previous concerts.

All sorts of items started flooding in, which have been sorted and put in display units, Ice says, adding that the goal was to illustrate what the group looked like when it started in 1975.

An early picture of members of the Lawrence Civic Choir in 1980, in Warsaw, Poland. The choir, which began in 1975, will be celebrating its 40th anniversary.

‘An interesting experience’

Andi Parson, the leader of that committee, could tell you. The retired teacher is the last original member remaining in the choir.

Parson, who played piano and trumpet in her school days, had never sung in a choral setting before joining the LCC 40 years ago. There had been a general call for singers in the Lawrence Journal-World, she remembers, but it wasn’t until a neighbor’s suggestion that Parson decided to jump in.

“She had three girls who were baby-sitter ages, and she said if my husband was out of town — which he was frequently — that she would see that her girls could baby-sit. And that was just a contribution. She wasn’t expecting to be paid,” recalls Parson, now 74. “Well, it’s a little hard to turn down something like that.”

So far, it’s been “an interesting experience,” says Parson, who in 1980 traveled to Poland with the choir. Under the auspices of Ambassadors for Friendship, the Lawrence Civic Choir began its first in a series of European tours meant to bring “hope and goodwill to audiences living behind the Iron Curtain,” according to the group’s website.

In 1980, Poland was still nine years away from overthrowing its communist government and establishing itself as a democracy. The country was the first in a line of revolutions that year, now dubbed the Revolutions of 1989, which led to the fall of communism in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania.

Andi Parson, original member of the Lawrence Civic Choir, which began in 1975.

“At the time we were there, tourism was not…” says Parson, her words trailing off before adding, “Who signed up to go to a Soviet country?”

Parson remembers stepping out of the plane at the Warsaw airport and being greeted by two armed soldiers at the bottom of the steps. Thirty-five years had passed since the end of World War II, and Warsaw was in disrepair, with much of its hastily constructed Soviet housing crumbling after decades of heavy use.

Outside the city, rural residents lived in thatched-roof houses, often packing two families inside a tiny home meant for one. Farmers employed horse-drawn equipment to plow their fields, and folks used primitive brooms fashioned out of bundles of sticks. Shoes, Parson remembers, came in sizes small, medium and large.

“It was very Old World,” she says. “It was pretty obvious there wasn’t an abundance of consumer goods.”

But the people of Poland, it seemed, had not lost their humanity despite bleak conditions.

One day, Parson and the choir stopped to perform at a church. It was during Corpus Christi, and parishioners remained in the cold, “meagerly furnished” church after mass for another hour just to hear the Americans’ music.

“Afterwards, they came up and wanted to tell you about relatives they had in Chicago or wherever, as if you’d possibly know them. None of us spoke Polish beyond asking the fundamental questions of life,” Parson says. “But they were just so kind. I felt like people tried to help, even though the language barrier was so enormous.”

She’ll never forget handing out buttons — “the plastic little things you pin to your shirt” that read, “Poland 1980, Friendship Ambassadors, Lawrence Civic Choir” — to attendees afterward.

“We gave those things away, and you would think we were giving them money,” Parson recalls of the unexpected enthusiasm and gratitude she received from the Polish people.

Music, as the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once wrote, is the universal language of mankind. The sentiment is just as true within the choir as it is to overseas audiences, it seems.

Singing tunefully

Since its founding in 1975, the Lawrence Civic Choir has never asked participants to audition, only mandating that they “sing tunefully.”

For two hours every Monday, about 100 singers of all ages — from seniors in high school to seniors in life — and musical backgrounds rehearse together at the First Baptist Church at 1330 Kasold Drive.

Some are recent additions. Some — at least a quarter — have belonged to the choir 20 years or more. But none have lasted as long as Parson, and “for the most part, I’m satisfied,” she says.

Coordinating the 40th anniversary concert is her way of giving back. After all these years, “you feel like you owe the organization something.”

Steve Eubank, the group’s artistic director, once described the Lawrence Civic Choir as “an intimate group of strangers,” Parson says.

“We share the music, we share texts, we’re together on most parts of things, and when the rehearsal is over, people scatter in every direction,” she explains. “But you feel connected to pieces of the community.”

Over time, most older singers simply “age out” of the choir when they no longer have the stamina to stand and sing for long periods of time, and Parson misses performing with her friends who’ve come and gone.

Parson says she’ll get there eventually, but she tries not to think about it in the meantime. She’s grateful to the choir that has introduced her to so many people and so much new music over the years.

“Your voice just doesn’t contribute anything, not that mine was ever in great shape,” the alto jokes. “I can learn the music and sing it relatively tunefully and after that, it’s something for me. It’s been very meaningful.”