The chamber singers were drawing the Western tradition Out West.

Western Culture was in full throat, Stanford be damned.

“Now is the gentle season freshly flowering, “ the voices of the chorus trilled.

“ To sing and play and dance while May endureth;

And woo and wed, that sweet delight procureth.”

The a cappella harmonies soared to the rafters of the century-old wooden building.

The polyphonic music would have been more at home in an ancient stone university church in cool, green England. But the chorus of 13 women and 11 men were doing very well with it in a former train station on the doorstep of the Mojave Desert.

Although there are only a few small windows, the strong sun of late afternoon lit up the white-painted interior of what was once the station’s freight handling room. Three ceiling fans revolved steadily. The audience of about 80 people sat on folding chairs on the rough plank floor, some fanning themselves with programs.

The Santa Clarita Chamber Singers were presenting Western Culture with a capital W, singing a concert of European classics surrounded by the artifacts of many American Wests--historical, cinematic and contemporary, the deliberately museum-preserved and the serendipitously happenstance.

Western culture was used in its conventional meaning during the recent much-reported debate at Stanford over whether to keep the study of it or chuck it as the work of a gang of white male malefactors, a Jonathan Club for geniuses with a conspiratorial lock on the Great Books biz.

But in their concert the chamber singers of the far suburbs overlapped the two meanings, drawing the Western tradition Out West.

On the wall beside them hung paintings of 20-mule-team wagons and a portrait of the famous bandit Tiburcio Vasquez, looking grimly determined. Vasquez, who practiced income redistribution in the 19th Century--he distributed it at gunpoint, to himself--probably had as dim an opinion as the Stanford professors of Western Civilization, which saw to it that he was hanged by the neck until dead.

The station building, a type as common as rocks earlier in this century but already a historical treasure, is painted pale yellow. It is still called “The Saugus Station” even though it was sawed in half 8 years ago and trucked 3 miles to Newhall. It was reassembled as a museum and home of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society in William S. Hart Park, on the site of the silent Western movie hero’s ranch, where the buffalo still roam.

The new location is also beside the Southern Pacific tracks. The museum has its own steam engine parked out front, and a green chalkboard in the old waiting room still carries the last notation a stationmaster made there, “San Joaquin Daylight, 6:35 p.m., flag stop .” But the trains have not stopped for 17 years.

“The trains go zooming by, and we wave,” said Laura Mehterian, who manages the museum and gift shop that now occupy the old waiting room.

Among the railroad memorabilia are odds and ends picked up from other Old West exhibitions that faded away, from Indian grinding stones to a genuine Rex Lard bucket and a black and chrome potbelly stove, immaculately non-functioning.

Here visitors can see an enormous valise identified as cowboy movie star Tom Mix’s “lucky travel case” and film comic Jack Oakie’s polo helmet. On the wall is a genuine 1940s pinup calendar, with a typical sweet young thing having the typical trouble with her stockings.

The 1900 typewriter beside the candlestick phone on the stationmaster’s desk was given by an Army general to One Bull, son of the Sioux chief Sitting Bull. According to the museum, One Bull used it to type out his tribe’s recollections of Custer’s Last Stand.

The gift shop sells postcards with railroad themes, trainmen’s ticking-stripe caps and small American flags of silk for $1.25. There are brass-plated “gold” railroad spikes, of the kind that once were driven to celebrate track linkups, impressively hefty even at only 6 inches long. They sell for $25, “$30 if mailed.”

Donations to the chamber singers treasury were wheedled out of concert-goers at the door by April Hiller, a bright, talkative 12-year-old (“Come on, you really should, it’s tax deductible”).

April, whose mother was one of the singers, said of the music that “I don’t like all of it, but most of it’s OK,” probably as high a rating as music more than five years old could get from a sixth-grader.

The women singers wore ankle-length black dresses of individual styles and cuts; the men, dark trousers, white shirts and dark ties. They were conducted by Jeannine Wagner, a veteran of choruses from the Roger Wagner Chorale to the Deutsche Oper Berlin to movie sound tracks, including “Conan the Barbarian.”

They wound up with a less than sprightly madrigal taken from a lament by 16th Century English poet Chidiock Tichborne, set to music in 1981:

“The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,

And now I live and now my life is done.

My tale was heard and yet it was not told,

My fruit is fallen and yet my leaves are green,

My youth is spent and yet I am not old,

I saw the world and yet I was not seen . . . .”