It’s summer and life is… hectic—but worth it—for Abby Musgrove, who’s back in west-central Illinois this week preparing her Spero Chamber Chorale for concerts Saturday and Sunday.

Musgrove, formerly of the music department at Illinois College, now works at Southeastern Oklahoma State University.

But she returns to the area for a week each summer to rehearse and perform with Spero, which she founded in 2018 and named after her intentions for the group. Spero is Latin for “hope.” The group is made up of music teachers, vocal instructors, church musicians and talented amateurs.

“I still live in Oklahoma,” Musgrove said. “But I come out here and stay with one or two of the choir members — in their guest room — and work on my computer, and do what I have to get done. We rehearse in the evenings, every night.

“It’s crazy, but it’s worth it.”

This year’s concerts, taking place on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church in Springfield and on Sunday at 2 p.m. at Saint Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Springfield, will once again have a theme related to hope.

“I always try to choose music that is hopeful and inspiring,” Musgrove said of the concert schedule.

That doesn’t mean all the music is light and airy.

“It’s not necessarily a matter of carefree enjoyment,” Musgrove said. “You have to build a kind of foundation, so that the concert starts in a kind of dark place.”

Some of the early pieces are based on Bible passages where people are “angry and screaming at God and don’t have all the answers,” Musgrove said. “‘I didn’t do anything wrong, so why is this happening to me?’ They’re groping around and trying to build up hope again.”

The tone can be surprising, she said.

“I think people often go to choir concerts and think it’s all going to be beautiful,” she said. “We definitely have two or three pieces that aren’t beautiful. They’re angry and loud and shouty. Bad things happen to good people. What’s the journey from there back to hope, so that we don’t fall back into despair?”

The concerts’ musical selections offer a path forward, evolving from a darker place to pieces like Mozart’s “Kyrie,” which means “Lord, have mercy,” and a piece based on God’s promise that “I will not leave you comfortless,” Musgrove said.

“Another piece is about the sunrise and the realization that there is something on the horizon,” she said. “It is gradually transferred, gradually turned into hope, because you build the foundation of it. … A foundation is just a slab, but you have to build the trusses, the walls, little by little, until you have a house.”

Musgrove deliberately chose not only to explore hope, but also the path to it.

“I thought it would be good to have a concert that was not only full of happy, hopeful music, but also an acknowledgement that people aren’t always happy,” she said. “If your happiness is just based on your income or your job or whatever, that’s not a solid enough foundation.”

Hope takes effort, she said.

“You have to work on your relationship to build it over time,” Musgrove said. “Having hope and being hopeful is not just ‘I’m naturally hopeful,’ it’s ‘I’ve built it over time.'”

Although some of the 13 or 14 pieces on the program this weekend are religious music, not all of them are.

“A lot of our music is sacred, but I think it can be translated in a secular way” into something relatable, she said.

Admission to the concerts is free, but donations are accepted to cover the cost of the music, Musgrove said.