March 2020: Name the LSM Alumni Choir!

By Jeanine Krause, LSM ‘89-’91

Please help start a new tradition. LSM is inviting significant alumni participation during all future Festival Weekends. In addition to various social events involving coffee, cookies and perhaps other beverages, activities are to include opportunities for alumni to provide leadership, musical offerings, create an LSM alumni choir, which needs a name! (please fill out the survey and submit your suggestions) and to sit with the governing bodies of LSM. For me personally, Abendmusik and Evening Prayer are the heart of LSM. I am so pleased to announce that alumni will provide leadership of both on Festival Weekend Saturday following the orchestra concert. This is the LAST ABENDMUSIK and EVENING PRAYER of the whole LSM experience, therefore a great honor and fitting acknowledgment that we as alumni are important and integral members of the LSM community.

We need you! Registration for the alumni events will be open soon. LSM 2020 Festival Week will take place July 22-26 at Valparaiso University . Please mark the dates and begin thinking about how you would like to be involved in LSM.

Are you unavailable during Festival Week this summer?

I would also like to point out that there is a relatively new expression of involvement in LSM. You can sponsor an instrumental or vocal studio . I am sponsoring the oboe studio for the second time this summer. Oboe professor, Dr. Courtney Miller from Iowa City, Iowa earns my admiration not only for her dedicated and conscientious guidance of her students but also for her wonderful musicianship and commitment to the values LSM represents. I know she is giving her charges an experience that is as meaningful to them as my own LSM experience with my oboe teachers, Merilee Klemp and Blake Duncan.

You will have seen the announcements of the faculty engaged to teach in the 2020 session. What a line up! A few studios are still in need of sponsorship. For example, the composition studio in the capable care of Dr. Ben Krause . He provides fledgling young composers with the opportunity to have their works performed during Festival Weekend in the “Fresh Ink” recital. (In case you are wondering, Ben Krause is a relative of mine! We have the same great, great grandfather, a fact we only discovered after we met three years ago during LSM Festival Weekend!) 

Do you remember the end of the long day of rehearsals, lessons and those moments of silliness in the halls on the way to steal a quick practice session to attempt to lick that tricky passage from your chamber music repertoire? You filed into the chapel still carrying the hubbub and buzz of the day like a cloak around you.

A warm whirlwind of Abendmusik wound around us all, surrounding our collective of a mostly teenage congregation and folded us up in a funnel that rose into the distant heavens carrying the chaos of the day with it and away. 

May the road rise up to meet you

May the wind be soft upon your back

May the sun shine warm upon your face

And the rain fall soft upon your fields

And until we meet again,

May God hold you in the palm of his hand.

May God be with you and bless you:

 ---The Irish Blessing