North Tahoe Community Choir | Dec. 1 & 3 | Saint Patrick’s Episcopal Church | Incline Village, Nev.
In a return to tradition, Tahoe Sierra community choirs take the stage in the coming weeks to celebrate the holiday season in song.
Music runs deep in one local choir director. Donna Axton, the leader of North Tahoe Community Choir, was raised in a musical family in upstate New York. In fact, her parents met when her mother came home from college to find her grandmother rehearsing for church choir with her father. Later, he was a singer who starred in local musicals. Since he didn’t know how to read music, he often asked his daughter to help him learn the parts.
She married singer/songwriter Hoyt Axton, who famously penned Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” and “Never Been to Spain” and Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher.” Composition was family tradition; Hoyt’s mother Mae Axton wrote “Heartbreak Hotel” for Elvis Presley.
“One of the reasons I’m still doing the choir is it’s always uplifting to me. … It’s a world I understand. It’s a world I love. It’s my lifeblood.” –Donna Axton
Donna and Hoyt met at the old Fanny Bridge Inn in Tahoe City in 1976 when he came to see her play piano with her folk rock band, Desert Sun. She joined his solo group and they toured together for more than a decade. Their son, Matt, is a professional musician based in Los Angeles who recently performed at the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in honor of his dad.
The Sierra Nevada College Choir, as it used to be known, was founded 37 years ago by Richard Lee. Axton was his longtime piano accompanist who took over as choir director in 2008.
Over the years, the choir typically presented three concerts a year: holiday music in December, a spring concert in April and Broadway tunes in May. They’ve sung everything from “Wicked” to “Hamilton” to Puccini. It was all smooth sailing until the pandemic shut down the world in 2020.
With in-person learning unfeasible, enrollment at Sierra Nevada College dropped precipitously. In 2021, the private liberal arts college announced it would be absorbed by University of Nevada, Reno. This summer, Axton and her five colleagues that made up the music department learned their programs were being cut.
“They don’t want any music in the college for reasons never explained to me,” she says. “It wasn’t required for any remaining students, so they nixed it. I was quite saddened when the college didn’t want to support the music I’d done for decades.”
Axton, who also teaches psychology at what is now called UNR at Lake Tahoe, decided to keep the choir alive by partnering with Saint Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Incline Village, Nev. The choir regrouped in September for the first time post-Covid for Monday evening rehearsals.
They plan to perform a holiday-themed concert on Dec. 1 and 3 at the church. The assorted program will feature “Misa Criolla” in Spanish by Argentinian composer Ariel Ramirez, “Magnificat” in Latin by Pergolesi and a host of holiday favorites including “Sleigh Ride,” “One Bright Star” and “Hallelujah Chorus.”
“One of the reasons I’m still doing the choir is it’s always uplifting to me,” says Axton “I love music. It’s a world I understand. It’s a world I love. It’s my lifeblood.”
The choir members range in age from 16 to 75.
“It’s a wonderful group of people, it really is,” says Axton. “We’re giving people a place to sing and bringing music to the community. It is essential to being a whole person to be open to the artistic part of humanity. It’s essential to musicians and artists to have a way to express what’s in their heart. It’s essential for mental health for people to have contact with others.” | North Tahoe Community Choir on Facebook
Truckee Tahoe Community Chorus will also present a holiday concert Dec. 11 at the Resort at Squaw Creek. Find details in our Holidays Happenings feature. | truckeechorus.org
Find more holiday concerts & events in our Holiday Happenings feature in this edition and at TheTahoeWeekly.com/events.
