Longtime music professor Charles A. “Chuck” Byers, who died at 83 on Jan. 15, spent several decades teaching vocal music at the University of Colorado at Boulder, leaving a legacy of a madrigal singing group now in its 44th year.
A memorial service will be at 2 p.m. Feb. 19 at First Baptist Church of Boulder, 1237 Pine St., Boulder.
Byers, a graduate of the University of Kansas at Lawrence and the University of Colorado, began teaching music in Coffeyville, Kan., before the CU-Boulder school of music hired him in 1954.
Among his first successes there was the University Singers, a touring choir specializing in Renaissance and madrigal music. The group toured throughout the United States and annually serenaded the Sisters of the Abbey of St. Walburga at their Boulder convent.
Initially, the nuns, whose Benedictine order emphasizes solitude, expressed hesitation when Byers approached them.
“The first time the singers went to Walburga, they had to stand in the hallway and all the doors were closed,” recalled Byers’ wife, Jane.
“But then they started singing, and the doors started opening. After that, everyone was out, enjoying the music.”
The caroling ended when the nuns relocated to Virginia Dale in the late 1990s, about the time Byers discovered that one of his former students had led the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California.
Byers knew Marshall Herff Applewhite Jr. as a talented performer who played Emile de Becque, the leading man in “South Pacific,” a CU production staged at Red Rocks Amphitheatre.
“It was a big shock, heavens,” Jane Byers said. “We knew him as a family man. He had a wife and children.”
The Byerses speculated that Applewhite’s fruitless efforts to break into show business in New York City prompted him to found the Heaven’s Gate cult and its bizarre mix of Christianity and spacecraft.
Applewhite died in March 1997, along with 38 cult members, in the mass suicide.
Byers’ other protégés, including his four musically gifted children, made more conventional career choices, becoming professional singers or music teachers. One daughter is a professional opera singer in Lubeck, Germany, and one son teaches and sings with an opera house in Zurich, Switzerland.
Byers’ professorial career ended when he resigned as associate dean emeritus of undergraduate studies at the CU-Boulder school of music. He spent his final months in a Louisville nursing home, routinely greeting female staffers entering his room by bursting into the “Miss America” theme song.
Survivors include his wife of 58 years, Jane Byers of Boulder; sons Timothy Byers of Westminster and Jeffrey Byers of Zurich; daughters Rebecca Norton of Denver and Mardi Byers of Lubeck; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
