President Loren Swartzendruber ’76, MDiv ’79, DMin, with his wife Pat

Aaron Copland, 20th century American composer, shared this perspective regarding music: “The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.’”

Many of my earliest memories involve music, most often in the context of a worship service in my home congregation. It is amazing that the memories evoked frequently cannot be adequately expressed in words. I am transported back in time and space, subconsciously touched by the rhythms, harmonies, and melodies of hymns. Sitting next to my dad, I learned to sing the tenor line long before I knew how to read the music. For those warm memories I shall always be grateful.

I well recall, however, a deep feeling of incompetence in a public school 7th grade music class when being tested on our ability to recognize the sounds of individual musical instruments. Though many of my classmates could not have joined an a cappella choir and didn’t know the difference between the tenor and bass lines, I was embarrassed to realize that the sounds of individual musical instruments were largely indistinguishable to my ears. Fortunately, through music appreciation classes in high school and college, I expanded my repertoire of understanding.

Copland’s suggestion that music has meaning, but that its meaning can hardly be reduced to words, rings so true at this stage of my life. It is not uncommon, especially if I have no responsibilities in a worship service and if I have experienced some stressful weeks, to be overcome with emotion while joining others in congregational singing. Frequently, I sense that I am part of something much larger than myself and am filled with gratitude for the privilege of being a member of a church that takes corporate worship seriously (and joyously!). There must be a reason why such experiences rarely occur when I am preparing to preach!

Music, in its many forms and genres, makes an essential contribution to the quality of life at EMU and beyond. To quote Copland again, “To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.” The making of music at EMU has always been strong, even when the music was only made with one instrument (the vocal cords). Yet our musical output keeps getting stronger, as EMU’s outstanding musicians embrace and contribute to other musical streams. May we make music forever!

Loren Swartzendruber
President

What makes the same hymn inspire one individual to heroism and lead another to boredom cannot be calculated. It has to do with the mysterious way in which song connects us to our past, our soul, our future, our Savior. And because God intended us to be different, our uniqueness is caught up and reflected in our response to the music of the church.

John L. Bell in his introduction to Singing – A Mennonite Voice by Marlene Kropf and Kenneth J. Nafziger, EMU professor of music

Musical Revolution

“The Holy City,” directed by J. Mark Stauffer, at homecoming in 1953.

Students entering Eastern Mennonite University today may not realize that in their grandparents’ generation, this institution offered one option in terms of music. Singing. Usually in four-part harmony. A cappella only. Hymns.

But it was beautiful singing, by all accounts. And almost all of them did it. In daily chapel for sure, but also in choral groups. In 1930-31, of the 148 students who were enrolled in Eastern Mennonite, 72% belonged to one of three campus choruses. [1]

“From morn till night the halls of EMS [Eastern Mennonite School, as it was then called] fairly resound with music,” wrote student Ida Mae Brunk in 1933. “It is a very part of our atmosphere – EMS without its music would no longer be our same beloved school.”

In 1944, Elton L. Martin wrote:

Music is the heart of the school [Eastern Mennonite]. It revives our spirits when they are at a low ebb. It puts hope into our hearts when worry would invade them. It unites us in purpose. Every chorus practice means relaxation from classes. We forget ourselves, our work, and our grades, as we listen for harmony and beauty.

In contrast to singing wafting through campus from morn to night 70 or 80 years ago, EMU students in 2011 will, or can, partake of almost any type of music – if not every day, then at some point during the week. Jazz ensembles, orchestral performances, auditioned and open choirs, individual training in keyboard, stringed, wind and percussion instruments, as well as vocals. Gospel, rock and folk groups. And, yes, a cappella singing.

An EMU student can aim to be a performer, conductor, music educator, minister of music, or combination of these. He or she can do music as a wonderful way of praying and worshiping God, or purely out of love for it, or because making music is a way of balancing out one’s life as a student or as (say) a future scientist, business person, or full-time parent.

After graduation, many former students join other alumni in forming ongoing groups, like the six-member men’s a cappella group Sons of the Day and the eight-member women’s a cappella group Shekinah. Based in Harrisonburg, both groups are eight years old and composed mainly of alumni. Cantore in Harrisonburg consists of 10 men, seven being alumni from the ’80s or earlier.

Daphna Creek in the Broadway area of the Valley had four alumni as core members (and three alumni who rotated in) when it performed Christian-themed folk music from 2001 to 2009.

More recently, we’ve seen alumni forming folk or “Indie” music groups, such as Trent Wagler & the Steel Wheels (named “Best in the Valley” by the Daily News Record in 2010), Dear Wolfgang, Mild Winter, and Preacher.

Many music majors become private instructors, as Faye G. Yoder ’68 did upon graduating as EMU’s first piano major, or they become schoolteachers. (More on this topic later).

Some move into music ministry. Bradley Swope ’85, for instance, was EMU’s first organ major, mentored by our longest-serving music professor, John Fast. Swope is now music director of the First United Methodist Church of Clearwater, Florida, where he plans entirely different music for two Sunday services – a contemporary one and a traditional one. He jokes that between services he sometimes has to do a costume change, switching from jeans to a suit and tie. For the traditional service, he conducts the choirs and the handbell groups (one for children, one for adults) and leads congregational singing. The contemporary service requires him to be adept at working the audio-visual and sound systems. He has been classically trained, finishing a master’s degree and coursework for a doctorate in organ music from the University of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Yet his training did not include guitar, which he would find handy for his contemporary service. His main objective for both services is to “take the pastor’s point and hit it over the fence with music,” he says. “When everything comes together, people leave feeling changed.”

In the Beginning

M.T. Brackbill directs the men’s chorus in 1925.

Today’s rich diversity in music would have stunned the founders of this university. In 1913, the first constitution for what became Eastern Mennonite College (EMC) specified that only vocal music was to be taught and that no instruments were to be permitted. As odd as this proscription may sound to 21st century ears, the founders of EMC were not being arbitrary. They saw unaccompanied congregational singing as essential to staying true to the Mennonite form of worship.

EMC’s first full-time music instructor, J. Mark Stauffer ’38, articulated the founders’ concerns (which he shared) in a 1947 booklet Mennonite Church Music—Its Theory and Practice. In its introduction, Gospel Herald editor Paul Erb wrote:

… Christian churches in general have handed over, so far as any real effective singing is concerned, the entire musical service to the choir and its soloists. What congregational singing there may be is usually very dependent upon the organ or other accompanying instruments. To hear good, unaccompanied congregational singing in America today, one is practically required to go to a Mennonite Church, or to some other of the few smaller groups which have retained similar musical practices. [2]

J. Mark Stauffer ’38 led choirs at EMU from the late 1930s through the 1960s.

Stauffer noted that beginning under Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, Christians spent about 13 centuries unable to have a full voice in their churches. Instead of participating in congregational singing, they were expected to listen to trained choirs singing in a language they didn’t understand (Latin) and to obey clergy chosen without their consent. The Anabaptist movement that gave rise to Mennonite churches was filled with people who wished to worship God in the manner of their own choosing, with no intermediaries. Singing hymns themselves—with understandable words that came from their hearts or directly from the Bible—was one of the worship choices they wished to make.

As participants in a small religious movement that did not conform to the dominant Catholic and Protestant churches of their day, Mennonites were persecuted almost everywhere they lived in Europe and Prussia. When imprisoned, many early Mennonites wrote new devotional words for the popular tunes of the day. They sang these songs in their final hours and moments before being executed in torturous ways.

Earl M. Maust taught music from 1948 until his death in 1969.

Years later, these songs became the basis of a hymnal used to this day by cousins to the Mennonites, the Amish. Called the Ausbund, the hymnal includes 51 hymns written by Swiss-German Anabaptists who were imprisoned, and often killed, before the year 1540. [3] The hymns spoke of great sorrow at living in a wicked world, but stressed that God would not forsake his children. Early Anabaptist hymnals simply stated the name of the tune at the top and then offered the words to go with it. It was assumed that everyone would know the then-popular tunes. [4]

In these early days, Anabaptists gathered in secret. They rejected the hierarchy, icons, statues, tithing and rituals of the state-approved churches, as well as—and this bears on EMC’s much-later rejection of musical instruments—the pipe organ, which was often one of the most expensive, elaborate items in the officially sanctioned churches. [5]

In this early history, we can see the roots of Stauffer’s advocacy for preserving the purity of congregational singing:

“If we fail to teach, develop, and encourage our congregational music as we should, it is only logical to conclude that in the course of years, we, the Mennonite Church, will be spending money for, and listening to pianos, organs, orchestras, soloists and trained choirs,” he wrote in his booklet. “…[T]his would be tragic.”

Stauffer argued that the Bible favored vocal music: “The musical emphasis in the New Testament is on singing; the instruments in the Old Testament worship should be considered a part of the Law which was forever swept away by Christ as He instituted the age of Grace in which we live.”

The Vespers Chorus, pictured in the 1956 Shen.

Stauffer played a pivotal role in the college’s music program from his arrival as a faculty member in 1939 through the 1960s. Alumni from his era appear unanimous in praising him for the choral leadership and training he offered. Every year, for instance, Stauffer gathered hundreds of singers to rehearse and perform the “The Holy City,” an oratorio, and “David the Shepherd Boy,” a light Sunday school cantata evocative of a Gilbert and Sullivan musical. These events began being held in the early 1920s and continued after Stauffer’s time, through the 1970s.

Mennonites came from significant distances to partake in these events. Carroll J. Lehman ’64, a well-known voice professor and choir conductor in New Hampshire, recalls his father driving their family from the Chambersburg area of Pennsylvania to EMC to see “The Holy City.”

“When I came to EMC in 1956,” John L. Horst Jr. ’60 told Crossroads recently, ““the Holy City was done annually at homecoming in the spring of the year. The large Collegiate Chorus rehearsed it extensively and alumni would join us for a two-hour Saturday morning rehearsal, followed by a packed Lehman Auditorium performance on Saturday night.” Horst is a retired EMU physics professor.

In the 1950s, instruments had to be played off campus, in homes. As pictured in the 1955 Shen: Alma Trumbo, Miriam Pellman, Gerald Bender, Lee Hartzler, Amsey Martin.

In additional to musical instruments, secular music was officially discouraged until the 1960s. “We must guard against using any type of music that may interfere with true divine worship,” Stauffer wrote in 1947. “Inferior gospel choruses, rhythmed music, secular tunes, modernistic songs, and songs which appeal only to the emotions are to be avoided.”

Stauffer’s desired alternative was to ensure that every young person learn to read music and be encouraged to sing hymns. “Congregational music does not progress and develop of itself; it tends to deteriorate as does almost everything else here on earth. Someone must sponsor it, guide it, and be entrusted with its improvement and security.”

The last 50 years have proven Stauffer to be both right and wrong. Right, in insisting on the necessity of quality musical instruction. [6] But Stauffer appears mistaken in thinking that other forms of music inevitably lead to less devotion to God.

Park View Mennonite Church, a church physically near EMU that is heavily populated by EMU-linked congregants, has managed to retain the strength and beauty of its congregational four-part singing while adding regular organ and piano playing, along with periodic chamber and folk musicians, gospel choirs, percussionists, and songs from other traditions sung in unison or even chanted.

Long-time EMU music professor Kenneth J. Nafziger, a member of Park View, says ideally a church should weave its music into the liturgy, ritual and message of the entire service, so that the worship experience is just that: an all-embracing experience, supported and elevated by various forms of musical expression.

Usually led by music director Judy Bomberger ’73 or choir director Karen Moshier-Shenk ’73, some of the singing at Park View is a cappella, but much is not. Park View does not sponsor ““singing schools” for its newcomers and musically challenged members, as some Mennonite churches did a century ago. Nevertheless most of its congregants clearly know how to sing, as exemplified by their periodic unrehearsed singing of portions of Handel’s Messiah. [7] With dozens of EMU-trained singers and musicians, Park View offers a vibrant answer to Stauffer’s mid-century concerns about the future of Mennonite worship music.

Roots of Singing Tradition

The a cappella multi-part harmony singing associated with Mennonites is actually not that old. The tradition dates to the mid-1800s among Mennonites in Russia and to the late 1800s in the United States.

John Fast, teacher of organ, piano and music theory since arriving in 1975 (our longest-serving music prof), with Sandy Waltner in 1993.

Seeking a better life and religious freedom, Mennonites in Prussia moved to Russia in the 1700s. They took with them the tunes of Lutheran hymns, to which they put their own words. They apparently sang these hymns in unison for several generations, but by the late 1800s, some in their communities realized the singing was becoming abysmal.

One Russian Mennonite, Heinrich Franz (1812-1889) produced a Choralbuch in 1860 in an effort to upgrade the quality of singing among his people. He likely would have agreed with Margaret Loewen Reimer’s 1995 comments about the quality of Mennonite singing in the mid-1800s:

Transmitting unwritten melodies through the generations had reduced singing to ponderously slow repetition of corrupted tunes. They [Mennonite educators interested in quality music] felt it was urgent to recover the original melodies and rhythms, as well as to train people in singing. [8]

Such changes were resisted by many, which explains why the Amish and some Old Order Mennonites sing in unison to this day. In their eyes, four-part singing fosters individualism and pride instead of humble obedience to God.

When Russian and Prussian Mennonites began to migrate to North America after 1870, they brought Franz’s Choralbuch and their revitalized choir-singing tradition with them. Once in North America — where they mostly settled in the mid-western states and eventually in Manitoba, Canada — they proved open to adopting musical and worship practices they saw in neighboring Protestant churches and to incorporating instrumental music into their churches. This more liberal group of Mennonites became known as “General Conference.”

Mennonites directly descended from the Dutch, Swiss and Germans had arrived in North America earlier, from the late 1600s through the 1700s, in search of greater religious freedom and economic opportunity in the resource-rich colony established by William Penn. These Mennonites, with whom the Amish share roots (Anabaptist elder Jakob Ammann led a split from the main body of Mennonites in Switzerland in the 1690s), brought recent memories of martyrdom and oppression with them from Europe. Thus they made a point of establishing communities that were self-protectively separate from encircling society and civil institutions. They also made a point of maintaining their adherence to unaccompanied singing in non-ornate buildings. This more conservative group of Mennonites became known as the “Mennonite Church.”

Ken J. Nafziger conducting a rehearsal in the mid 1990's.

Both the General Conference (GC) Mennonites and the Mennonite Church (MC) Mennonites eventually founded colleges, with the GC group leading the way with the establishment of Bethel College in Kansas in 1887. The MC group then founded Goshen College in northern Indiana in 1894 and Bluffton University (initially named Central Mennonite College) in Ohio in 1899.

At Bethel, Bluffton and Goshen colleges, organ and piano music and choirs were accepted for teaching music from the beginning, though participatory a cappella singing remained the favored approach. [9] At Goshen, however, all musical instruments were banned from worship services until around World War II. [10] At EMC, instrumental music was banned on college radio broadcasts until the early 1960s. The first musical instrument owned by EMC, a piano, appeared in 1962 for “technical studies,” but authorized classes in how to play other musical instruments and a music education major did not evolve until the late 1960s. [11] In 1966, under the direction of a new professor, Ira T. Zook Jr., a piano was used for the first time as accompaniment for “The Holy City.”

Joseph S. Funk

Judy Keener Bomberger ’73, music director at Park View Mennonite Church.

With Mennonites avoiding instrumental music until the 1900s, there was much space and energy for developing the voice and for congregational singing. Joseph S. Funk (1778-1862) stepped into this space.

Funk was born into a German-speaking Mennonite family in Franconia, Pennsylvania. His pastor-father moved the family to the Shenandoah Valley in 1786. Funk grew up to be the patriarch of a family famous for publishing four-shape-note and, later, seven-shape-note, tunebooks. They also published one of the South’s first music periodicals, the 16-page monthly Southern Musical Advocate and Singer’s Friend, from July 1859 to April 1861. [12]

The Virginia Mennonite Conference appointed Funk to the three-man committee that published the first Mennonite hymnal in English. First printed in Winchester, Virginia, in 1847, the 364-page hymnal was reprinted on the Funk-owned press in Singers Glen near Harrisonburg in 1851, 1855, 1859, 1868, and 1872 (as well as reprinted elsewhere in other years).

Karen Moshier-Shenk ’73, choir director at Park View Mennonite Church. She and Judy Bomberger '73 (facing page) also sing in "Finely Tuned," a women's a cappella group with Elaine Hunsecker Dunaway '89 and L. Elaine Warfel Stauffer '73.

Funk’s most famous book, Harmonia Sacra, has remained in circulation for 177 years. It is now in its 25th edition, published by Good Books of Intercourse, Pennsylvania, with nearly 100,000 copies sold. [13]

Stephen Shearon wrote in the Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music that Funk appreciated use of instruments in sacred music, but he also “believed strongly that music should be sung by all members of a congregation as a participatory form of worship . . . as a kind of musical democracy.” Thus Funk, like most of his fellow Mennonites, was opposed to having a paid or select choir. [14]

By 1890, four-part singing was sufficiently accepted by North American Mennonites that they furnished each hymn of their hymnals with a four-part harmony, making the use of a separate choralbook superfluous. [15] Beginning in the late 1800s, Mennonites organized and attended singing schools, though generally it was not acceptable for these schools to be housed in churches. By the 1950s, singing schools had fallen by the wayside, probably due to competition from other entertainment outlets and due to opportunities to learn singing at Mennonite-sponsored schools and colleges.

In 1913, Bluffton became the first Mennonite college to select an a cappella choir and dispatch it into the community and on tour for performances. [16] Over the next several decades all Mennonite colleges began doing the same – a distinct change from the 19th century view that sacred music was not a spectator activity for Mennonites, but only a participatory one as part of communal worship.

Music educators

Glenn Lehman ’66, founder and director of Harmonies Workshop, 1987 to present. Also organist at Neffsville Mennonite Church In Lancaster. Author of You Can Lead Singing. Has two master's, one from Westminster Choir College.

A final reason for Mennonite colleges to embrace change in the way they approached music stemmed from gaining accreditation to train music teachers destined for public institutions. To do this work, Mennonite colleges needed to provide a well-rounded music education that included competency in musical instruments, regardless of historical and theological reasons for downplaying instruments and emphasizing the voice.

Today, EMU-trained music teachers – such as Michael W. Miller ’82 of Boonsboro, Maryland, who teaches music to elementary-aged students [17]; Bethany Blouse ’06, who is choral director at Stuarts Draft (Va.) High School [18]; and Janet Heatwole Hostetter ’87, choir director and pianist at Wilbur S. Pence Middle School in Dayton, Virginia [19] – are feeding the spirits of hundreds with their passionate musical service and leadership in public school systems.

EMU has a number of music doctorate-holding alumni teaching at the collegiate level, including:

Carroll J. Lehman ’64 teaches voice and opera at Keene State College (5,400 students) in New Hampshire. He holds master’s and doctor’s degrees in vocal performance from the University of Iowa. He has been on the faculty of Hope College, Holland, Michigan, and Western Washington University. As a bass-baritone, he has performed more than 20 principal roles in opera. He judges vocal competitions up through the national level.

Ronald Lyndaker ’78 is academic director of Lewis & Clark College in France, a consortial study abroad program. He is also an administrator and a humanities professor at the trilingual undergraduate program of the Institut d’Études Politics in Nancy, a branch of the highly selective “Sciences Po” of Paris. Finally, he is a tenor in the permanent chorus of the Opéra National de Lorraine. Lyndaker did a double major at EMU – modern languages and music – followed by graduate work at Ohio University and University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a doctor of musical arts degree.

Karen Fix Rice ’95 teaches piano and sings at Winston Salem State University (6,000 students) in North Carolina, a public institution that was historically black. In 2009, she completed a doctorate in musical arts (piano) at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has taught at four North Carolina universities. She recently performed at the College Music Society’s national conference in Quebec City.

Singing Today

SONS OF THE DAY: Nathan May, Matthew Hunsberger '02, Joel Ross, Michael V. Heatwole '09, W. Clay Showalter '02, Chris A. Burkholder '08.

In 2002, the two main traditions among modern Mennonites in the United States – the General Conference and Mennonite Church groups – officially merged, reflecting their increasing similarities and, some would say, their increasing assimilation into mainstream US society. The majority of Mennonites no longer live on farms, and they no longer spend as much of Sunday and Wednesday evenings in their churches, singing and otherwise worshiping as a group. Less than half of those enrolled at the six Mennonite institutions of higher education identify themselves as being Mennonite, reducing the pool of those trained in congregational singing.

Newer Mennonite churches consisting of recent converts, often in urban areas and serving ethnic or minority constituencies, tend not to sing in four-part harmony or to seek ways to learn the skill. There are even those church leaders (a minority, so far) who assert that any amount of sight-reading music and four-part harmonizing makes newcomers feel uncomfortable and thus should be avoided. “Contemporary-style” services generally feature songs sung in unison, often with words (but not musical notes) projected on a large screen in the front, with instrumental or recorded music carrying the singing.

Songs from other countries have been incorporated into the main Mennonite hymnal, Hymnal: A Worship Book (1992). Seven percent of the songs in it are not American or European in origin, and these often do not lend themselves to four-part harmony. Two supplemental hymnals, Sing the Journey (2005) and Sing the Story (2007) contain many contemporary or cross-cultural songs that are intended to be sung with accompanying percussion or other instruments. EMU music professor Kenneth J. Nafziger, who holds a doctor of music (conducting) from the University of Oregon, is one of two people who has served as an editor for all three hymnals. This work has spanned more than 25 years of his life. (The other long-time editor is Marlene Kropf, an associate professor at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary.)

SHEKINAH: (Back, l-r) Aubrey Helmuth Miller, Sharon Kniss '06, Joanna Souder Showalter ‘04, Greta Shenk '10, Sara Hershberger Gingerich '07. (Front) Jessica Hostetler '08, Jenny Hartwig Wagner '06, Sylvia Hooley Meyer '09.

A 2003 survey of 104 Mennonite congregations shows that they continued to do four-part harmony “more than anything else,” [20] but the time devoted to it is giving way to other forms of music, including singing international worship songs in unison, listening to select choirs, and being accompanied by various forms of instrumental music. Is this an enrichment of the Mennonite choral tradition, or an erosion of it?

Nafziger, who has pioneered bringing fresh songs from foreign lands into Mennonite hymnbooks and who has produced CDs of choirs modeling how to sing these new songs, argues for both embracing new ways and taking conscious steps to preserve the beautiful congregational singing of the last century or so. He says:

Most of us in our churches sing much less than we used to. Not only do we meet each other less frequently, but we also sing less when we are together. Other aspects of worship have found space in worship, often at the expense of congregational singing… If singing is as important as we claim it is in our tradition, we will need to find ways of making more time for singing, of teaching our children to sing, and of strengthening the abilities of many of us to sing more confidently. [21]

Janet Heatwole Hostetter ’87, choir director, Wilbur S. Pence Middle School, Dayton, Va.

Writing in 1998, Gary Harder (then pastor of Toronto United Mennonite Church) argued that the “participatory community” of the Mennonite church was nourished by its style of congregational singing. “As much as I enjoy and am often led to encountering God by a good choir, an instrumental ensemble or solo, or a well played piano or organ, these, in my mind, are not the center of a church’s musical ministry; congregational singing is.” [22]

Synthesizing the views of experts on the Mennonite choral tradition, it appears that EMU and the other Mennonite colleges need to keep working at preserving the positive elements of their religious tradition, while simultaneously being open to change. The experts suggest that preserving implies:

• Continuing to sing, and teaching the next generation to sing, regardless of the quality of anyone’s voice, an impulse which goes against today’s drive for “professionalism” and perfectionism in most walks of life.
• Possibly reinstating a modern version of “singing schools,” or at least offering optional (and fun) practice sessions, for newcomers to the tradition.
• Retaining a core group of songs that people are able to sing from memory for critical moments in their lives, such as singing to calm oneself during a scary situation or singing as a family at the bedside of a dying loved one.
• Factoring in the acoustics when planning for new churches and auditoriums. The old rectangular meetinghouses used by Anabaptists in the 1700s and 1800s, with their unpadded seats and non-carpeted floors, lent themselves acoustically to congregational singing in a way that fan-shaped sanctuaries, with their typically thick carpeting and upholstery, do not. In fact, J. Evan Kreider calls many contemporary churches “dead sanctuaries,” where the “voice of the people” is literally silenced. [23] (Unfortunately, EMU’s own Lehman Auditorium is acoustically dead. Music faculty have been praying for donations toward overhauling the nearly 70-year-old building.)
• Considering whether instrumental music and technology might accidentally usher in theological changes. When amplified music overwhelms the singing, does this render the congregation more passive, with less “voice”?

Harder, a Canadian-Mennonite pastor for 38 years until he retired in June 2007, cherishes the “wholeness” that results when the worship team works well together, with the spoken word, silence and music seamlessly integrated:

It is immensely satisfying when music contributes to a particular moment in worship. Perhaps what is needed at a given moment is a Taizé short piece, or a Bach choral, or a guitar-led chorus, or folk hymn, or a song from Guatemala or Africa, or a chant, or an African-American spiritual, or a gospel song, or a Brian Wren or Bradley Lehman contemporary hymn. [24]

Surely it is easier for the Amish, who cling to their slow a cappella hymns with countless verses sung in unison, from the Ausbund of the early martyrs. They don’t have to choose from the wide array of hymnal possibilities – some better sung a cappella, others better with just percussion instruments, still others requiring orchestral music – for their communal experience of sacred music. Yet few Mennonites, not even J. Mark Stauffer who counseled against instruments in Mennonite church services, would want to revert to Amish-style dirge-like singing. Most realize that the Anabaptist choral tradition has been enriched by permitting new influences to seep into it. As Nafziger puts it:

‘Where there is devotional music, God with His grace is always present’ (Johann Sebastian Bach). Perhaps this is the issue for all music in worship… Perhaps we need to reclaim wholeheartedly a belief that indeed sound in worship is the shaping force we have sometimes claimed it to be. And maybe the music of the church of the next generation will be an eclectic mixture of old and new, familiar and foreign, experimental and safe, the much-loved and that which waits to be loved. [25]

Toward the end of Singing – A Mennonite Voice, the authors quote Sue Williamson, who became a Mennonite as an adult. She wonders whether those born into the Mennonite tradition fully grasp the awesomeness of their style of congregational singing:

I am always amazed, during these last four years spent worshiping in the Mennonite church, to go to other denominations and find that this singing and what it offers is just not as present in their worship services. It is something which is delegated to the professional musicians and the choir. It is a wonderful gift, and I wonder if Mennonites realize that. [26]

— Bonnie Price Lofton, MA ’04, editor

[1] Roth, Daniel Roy. “A Curriculum for a Proposed Church Music Major at Eastern Mennonite College,” his master’s thesis at U. of Oregon. September 1972. Source of this quote and following two paragraphs. It and other materials referenced in this article can all be found in EMU’s library system.

[2] Stauffer, Mark J. Mennonite Church Music—Its Theory and Practic, a 46-page booklet. Mennonite Publishing House, 1947. All Stauffer quotes herein come from this booklet.

[3] Friedmann, Robert. “Ausbund.” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, 1953. http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/A8995ME.html

[4] Friedmann.

[5] Sharp, John. “The Devil’s Bagpipe or God’s Voice? The Organ in Historical Context,” a 2008 speech covered by Hesston News Services. www.hesston.edu/ newsport/archives/spring2008/080310sharp.htm newsport/archives/spring2008/080310sharp.htm

[6] J. Mark Stauffer surely would like the excellence of the music instruction offered at EMU today, where faculty, staff and advanced students cater to all skill levels and ages with well-subscribed programs. The programs are overseen by musicians with graduate degrees, usually doctorates. In addition to their academic credentials, they have been hired for their ability to both make and teach music beautifully. a rare combination.

[7] Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRwpcTTfYb0 to view Karen Moshier-Shenk leading the Park View congregation in the singing of the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah during their Easter worship service on April 4, 2010. The organist is EMU music professor John Fast.

[8] Reimer, Margaret Loewen. “Mennonites & Music. Footnotes on the way to four-part harmony.” The Christian Leader, Nov. 1995, p. 13.

[9] Maust, Earl M. “The History and Development of Music in Mennonite-Controlled Liberal Arts Colleges in the United States.” Doctoral dissertation, School of Music of the George Peabody College for Teachers. August 1968, pp. 80 & 98.

[10] Maust, pp. 61-62

[11] Pellman, Hubert R, Eastern Mennonite College, 1917-1967—A History. EMC, 1967, p. 240.

[12] Hostetler, John A. “Funk, Joseph (1778-1862).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, 1956. http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/F87ME.html

[13] Hostetler. See also The Harmonia Sacra, Twenty-Fifth Edition at www.goodbks.com

[14] Shearon, Stephen. “Funk, Joseph.” Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music. Ed. W.K. McNeil. Routledge, 2005. p. 134.

[15] Neff, Christian. “Choral-Books (Choralbuch).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, 1953. http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/C463ME.html

[16] Maust, p. 110.

[17] Michael W. Miller ’82 was a voice major at EMU, who also played trumpet. He has since learned to play the baritone, violin, cello, clarinet, saxophone and flute sufficiently to teach these to children in his school band. In his 7th year as a teacher in 2010-11, he is working on a master’s in educational leadership. at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland.

[18] As an undergraduate, Bethany Blouse ’06 toured with the Chamber Singers, had a role in a musical (Music Man), took three opera scenes classes, and frequently performed in EMU’s noon recitals.
[19] Janet Heatwole Hostetter ’87, former director of music ministries at Harrisonburg Mennonite Church, has a master’s degree in choral conducting from James Madison University.

[20] Jacoby, Stephen. “What Are Mennonites Singing in Sunday Morning Worship?” Sound in the Land – Essays on Mennonites and Music. Eds. Maureen Epp and Carol Ann Weaver. Pandora Press, 2005, p. 186.

[21] Kropf, Marlene and Kenneth Nafziger. Singing, A Mennonite Voice. Herald Press, 2001, pp. 160-161.

[22] Harder, Gary. “Congregational Singing as a Pastor Sees It.“ Music in Worship – a Mennonite Perspective. Ed. Bernie Neufeld. Herald Press, 1998, p. 109.

[23] Kreider, J. Evan. “Silencing the Voice of the People: Effects of Changing Sanctuary Design.” Music in Worship – a Mennonite Perspective. Ed. Bernie Neufeld. Herald Press, 1998, pp. 212-225.

[24] Harder, p. 114.

[25] Nafziger, Kenneth. “And What Shall We Do with the Choir?” Music in Worship – a Mennonite Perspective. Ed. Bernie Neufeld. Herald Press, 1998, p. 193.

[26] Kroft & Nafziger, p. 163.

In West Hartford. Connecticut, Katherine Goins Frewen ’01 has taken her 10 years of post-graduate musical education and college-level teaching experience into a public school serving city-living teenagers.

“Katie” earned a doctor of musical arts (music education) at the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s in music performance (piano) at the University of Ohio. She traces her journey to music teaching to the early 1990s, when she heard the touring choir of Eastern Mennonite High School (EMHS), directed by Jay Hartzler, perform at Zion Mennonite Church in Broadway, 10 miles north of EMU.

Katie was enrolled in public school. “I turned to my mom and said, ‘I want to go there,’” Frewen recalls. Her family was a newcomer to the Mennonite tradition. From singing at EMHS, Frewen progressed to organ, piano, and voice instruction at EMU. She became the piano rehearsal accompanist for the Shenandoah Valley Children’s Choir and sang with the Chamber Singers.

In 2009, three years after completing her doctorate, Katie married Thomas Frewen, an Irish man she met while teaching at The New School for Music Study, a piano preparatory program in Princeton, New Jersey. Thomas was doing post-doctoral research in chemical engineering at Princeton University. She liked the fact that Thomas was an observant Catholic. She has joined him in attending mass regularly in West Hartford. She stresses that she is not abandoning her Mennonite upbringing, but enlarging on it.

Katie says she loves her work—and based on a visit by Crossroads staff to her classroom of beginning music students—she is an inspiring teacher. Katie says she draws upon the model provided by Kenneth J. Nafziger and other professors of visualizing the final product one wishes to shape and then setting up sequential steps to get students to arrive at the desired completion point. “Even masterful musicians need training to become excellent teachers,” she says. “You have to know how to break down what you are trying to achieve, how to start at the beginning, and how to lead your students through the process, putting it all together at the end. Ken showed me how you can do that.”

Katie did not visualize herself in a middle school classroom when she was performing difficult piano pieces as a graduate student, but she has learned that it pays to be multi-talented when one is trying to earn a living through music. “Earning a living as a concert pianist is incredibly difficult. The performing musicians I know supplement their income by teaching privately and performing or accompanying in lots of settings—churches, schools, marriages, funerals, entertainment spots. They have to be flexible, and they have to be willing to work nights, and weekends, and to travel to gigs. I am really happy to be in a situation [as a salaried schoolteacher] where I have regular hours, appropriate compensation, supportive administrators, and nice colleagues.” Katie and Thomas are expecting their first child in March 2011, another reason for Katie to be pleased with having a sane work situation this year.

Katie’s two siblings are also EMU alumni, with terminal degrees. Matthew Goins ’00 is an anesthesiologist at one of Harvard’s teaching hospitals, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. And Joanna Goins Myers ’04 earned a law degree at George Washington University and is a tax attorney at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP in Washington DC.

MADELINE BENDER ’93 is the singer, the patron, the inspiration, for rallying members of the opera world to support the Global Family program of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC).

To those who follow opera, Madeline is known as leading lady Violetta in “La Traviata” with the Vancouver Opera. Or as Eurydice in the cutting-edge Paris production of “Orphée et Eurydice,” conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. Or as Helena in “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream” with the acclaimed Glyndebourne Festival Opera in England (and also with the Pittsburgh Opera and La Monnaie in Brussels). Her list of major operatic roles as a soprano is pages long – just Google “Madeline Bender.”

Less visible in the opera world is her Mennonite background. One has to dig to discover that before she entered graduate school at the prestigious Manhattan School of Music, she earned a bachelor’s in music at Eastern Mennonite University.

Madeline spent her early childhood among her mother’s folks in the Harrisonburg area, and her middle-school and high-school years in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. She is the daughter of Jon Scott ’62 and Nancy Shank Bender ’64, both public school educators. Madeline and her two sisters graduated from Lancaster Mennonite High School.[1] Neffsville Mennonite is their home church (earlier, it was Trissels Mennonite in Broadway, Virginia).

Madeline came to EMU intending to be a pre-med major. “I thought I could be of service if I was a doctor. It goes back to this wonderful Mennonite undercurrent that service is so important. I loved to sing, but I thought it was a self-indulgent thing.”

She enjoyed taking anatomy and physiology under an “astonishingly great” science professor, Daniel B. Suter, but she hit a wall with organic chemistry. Meanwhile, she felt alive every moment she stepped on stage, as she did under the direction of theater professor Barb Graber and under music professor Kenneth J. Nafziger[2] with the
Chamber Singers.

Madeline Bender performing at the Vancouver Opera in La Traviata (2004). Photo by Tim Matheson.

Feeling confused to the point of paralysis, Madeline went to Nafziger and asked him, “Should I do pre-med, or should I do music?” She recalls receiving an unequivocal answer: “You need to be a singer.” Madeline credits Nafziger with giving her permission “to let go of feeling that I had to be of service in a direct way.”

Madeline had struggled with “justifying something I love to do” when that “something” is an art form that seems impractical and maybe even frivolous.

In the eyes of many, “putting on a wig and an 18th century corset and big bouncy dress doesn’t really serve a purpose other than putting on a good show,” Madeline says. “Opera singing is like being a little girl playing dress-up, it’s like Halloween, it is like becoming another person.”

Yet she has come to appreciate that truths emerge through telling good stories. “Sometimes the most truth comes through the arts. It’s somebody’s expression. It’s not their brain getting in the way. It’s a conduit or something. I always latch onto the expensive perfume being dumped on Jesus’s feet – it seemed wasteful to the disciples but Jesus said it wasn’t. It expressed love, beauty and giving. To me, that’s the Bible story that ties it all together.”

Madeline says that Ken J. Nafziger helped her to understand, in her words:

Sometimes you need to dump the perfume. It’s part of living in a civilized culture, of reaching higher. It feeds the soul. It’s part of being a sentient being. We aren’t animals. We don’t just need food and tuberculosis shots. We do need to feed our souls, and we do that through the arts.

The quality of the art you drink in is important, and we have to strive for the best. It can’t just be the best for Lancaster County or Harrisonburg, Virginia. You have to strive to be the very best that you can possibly be in the world, in the history of the world.

Such words should give music lovers a glimpse into the quality of the program that Madeline will be putting together for her January 22, 2011, MCC fundraiser.

The performers she has lined up “are really, truly world-class people who can easily get five-, six-, [or] seven-thousand dollars for a performance. So for them to come and sing for free is a big donation of their talent,” she explains. “It is a really generous act.”

But these performers are also going to have fun, Madeline adds, because they get to sing pieces they already know and can do well, they get tickets for an easy train ride from their homes in New York City to Lancaster, and they get the satisfaction of knowing they are helping others.

“Artists love to sing,” Madeline says. “I can’t think of a performer who wouldn’t be happy to sing for a good cause. So much about the arts is not a money-driven thing. To get where they are, most artists have had to rely on the generosity of people.”

Madeline says she has to be flexible, though, in who she books for the Global Family fundraiser. If a paying job unexpectedly comes through for one of her featured performers, Madeline will need to tap the shoulder of another good friend. No problem – New York is filled with possibilities.

One singer nobody will see at the Fulton this year, however, is Madeline’s husband, Paul Whelan, a baritone and bass-baritone singer. He will be in an opera in Oslo, Norway, at that time. He missed last year’s fundraiser, too – “he had to race off, I forget where,” she says.

In recent years, Whelan has filled so many leading roles in operas around the world – at such coveted venues as the Metropolitan, Covent Garden, München, Opéra de Paris, Opéra de Genève and Netherlands Opera – his name is known to almost everyone who follows the performances and progress of opera stars.

Several years before they married (in 2007), Whelan accompanied Madeline to the 2004 Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival, where both were featured singers. It may be a while before EMU sees the pair on the same stage again.

These days Whelan scarcely has time between engagements to connect in person with Madeline and their 2-year-old son, Zachary. She calculated that he will be spending just six days at their Manhattan home between December 2010 and May 2011. She and Zachary will travel for extended visits with Whelan, however, especially when he is performing in London (which Madeline views as her other home) and his native country of New Zealand.

Meanwhile, Madeline is taking steps to awaken her career from a deep sleep. In January 2005, Madeline was blissfully at the pinnacle of the opera world, having just played Helena in “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream” at Belgium’s top opera house, Le Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. She was preparing for her next role when she learned that her mother’s cancer had returned and was untreatable.

Madeline returned home to be with her mother during her last five months. “I lost my voice. I lost it almost completely. I could speak, but I couldn’t sing properly. Nothing was wrong physically. Basically it was a psychological block.”

Nancy Shank Bender died on May 31, 2005. “My mom – just as she taught me how to live in so many ways – I really feel like she taught me how to die. It was just so full. It was a time of visiting friends and seeing loved ones and focusing on family and life going on. She didn’t focus on dying, but she didn’t push it away.”

As Madeline was finding her voice again, another family matter intervened: She became pregnant. “Having Zachary wasn’t planned, but it is good that it worked out that way. It has been a tremendous blessing. To be honest, I don’t know if I ever would have had the courage to take the time out to have a child.

“I think a lot of women who are singers slip into that easily. They just keep putting it off and putting it off and putting it off because it is very hard. You kind of go from job to job and from the strength of your last performance, and it is very scary to think of turning something down or disappearing for a while. Unless you have to do it.”

Madeline may have temporarily fallen silent while focusing on her mother and son, but she has deepened her heart. This has got to be reflected, sooner or later, in the magnificent voice she first claimed at EMU.

For more information on Madeline Bender’s “Sing for Hope: Winter Opera Gala,” her third annual concert benefiting MCC’s Global Family educational sponsorship program, visit www.eastcoast.mcc.org/winteroperagala

[1] Her elder sister, Courtney Bender, proceeded to Swarthmore College, then Princeton, and is now a religion professor at Columbia University. Her younger sister, Sena Bender Larard, started at EMU in 1993, but transferred in 1995 to study cello with a mentor she found at Roanoke College. In 2000 she switched her focus to voice by studying at the Brooklyn Conservatory of City University of New York. She is now a singer based in London.

[2] Nafziger also led a group of students, including Madeline, on a cross-cultural semester to Germany, where Madeline spent much of her time at concerts and operas. This exposure also had a major impact on Madeline.

Clippings of coverage of the choral directing career of Arnold Moshier ’60

ARNOLD MOSHIER ’60, one of the best-known and longest-serving choral directors in the US Mennonite world, started his adult life as a farmer. For nine years he milked cows in northern New York. But this farmer preferred producing music in church.

As a teenager boarding at Eastern Mennonite High School, Moshier had studied voice and choral music with J. Mark Stauffer. When Moshier decided in his late 20s to explore music further, he headed back to Harrisonburg to learn from Stauffer again, this time at Eastern Mennonite College.

As the first full-time music teacher at Lancaster Mennonite School (LMS) in 1960, Moshier wanted to start a choral group.

“At that time the church community in Lancaster County didn’t acknowledge choral music as having a place in worship services”—or in Mennonite school settings, for that matter, he told a Lancaster Intelligencer reporter in 1999. Searching for acceptable alternatives, Moshier gained permission for 24 of his senior students to sing to inmates at the Lewisburg Penitentiary on Palm Sunday.

The group that sang at Lewisburg wanted to continue singing through the summer. They met once a week to rehearse in Moshier’s home. This marked the beginning of a touring choir that came to be called the Choraleers.

The 12/19/99 Intelligencer story by Lori Van Ingen summarized the Choraleers’ journey thus:

The teen singers toured locally until 1969, when they received an invitation to go to Jamaica. Until that point, the group had sung a cappella since instrumental music still was not accepted in Mennonite churches. But when they went to Jamaica, they were asked to bring a guitar and tambourine…

When they returned they sang with guitar accompaniment at Mount Joy Mennonite Church. It was a brand-new experience (for local Mennonite churches). They were packed wall to wall.

From 1970 to 1999, the Choraleers set out via van or bus at the end of each school year to offer music worship on the road. They performed a variety of Christian music from classical to contemporary and acted out biblical skits written by Moshier. As their fame grew, they expanded their touring, dividing into three teams, with two teams touring through different parts of North America and one team going to Central America – usually through Mexico to Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica – before driving back home.

They always made a point of stopping at national parks and singing at fireside gatherings and worship sites. In 1980, for instance, they sang to 2,500 people at the Easter sunrise service in Grand Canyon National Park.

Moshier’s wife, Maietta, is a licensed practical nurse who co-led the group and sometimes did medical service as part of the trip. The couple and their singers produced 15 albums.

Moshier, who taught at LMS until 1982, officially retired from choral directing at age 73. In 2008, however, when he was 81, Moshier led about 75 of his former singers, including daughter Karen Moshier-Shenk ’73, in a homecoming reunion concert at the LMS Fine Arts Center. Arnold and Maietta now live in Sarasota, Florida.

When Wanda Alger lived in Harrisonburg in the 1980s, she was known for launching two very different music initiatives.

In 1981, she founded the Shenandoah Valley Suzuki String program for children aged 3 to 18. Over the next seven years, her program grew six-fold, from 13 to 85 students.

In 1985, she became one of the founders of Cornerstone Mennonite Fellowship (now the non-denominational Cornerstone Church of Broadway), training worship musicians and teams through coaching, seminars and conferences.

“Cornerstone was, at that time, one of the few Mennonite churches doing ‘praise and worship’ music – it was a drawing card for young adults and young families looking for something more contemporary and experiential,” Wanda recalled in an 11/20/10 e-mail to Crossroads.

In 1988, she sold her Suzuki string program to her alma mater, and it became EMU’s Shenandoah Valley Preparatory Music Program. It has grown to serve 500 students, some as young as babies in the Musikgarten program, through high school seniors taking private lessons and in the Shenandoah Valley Youth Symphony. EMU is now the official provider of strings instruction in the local public schools.

“I started teaching violin in the first place because the schools didn’t offer anything,” Wanda wrote in her e-mail. “I never dreamed it would come full circle!”

Concurrently with selling her Suzuki string program, Wanda married Robert “Bobby” Alger (whose maternal grandfather was John L. Stauffer, the third president of EMU), and they enrolled in Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with Wanda pursuing a master’s in church music and Bobby a master’s in divinity.

“My experience in Tulsa was tremendous, musically,” she said. “I was principal second violinist in one of the two major professional orchestras, joined the union, and had many opportunities for performing music in the community.

“Tulsa’s music culture knew the value of trained musicians and paid accordingly (even in the church) – very different from my previous experiences! I also interned at a large Methodist church in the city and had a taste of being involved in a large ministry of over 2,000 congregants. It would have been very easy to stay, but God had other plans.”

In 1991, the Algers returned to Broadway, Virginia, “to continue growing the Cornerstone ministry,” Wanda said. “At its peak, Cornerstone’s annual rallies drew almost 1,500 people.”

In 1998, the Algers “sensed a call to do church planting” and they moved an hour north to Winchester, Virginia, with four other families. From gathering in the basement of the Alger home, their Crossroads Community Church has grown to 125-175 attendees on a Sunday morning, including 40-50 children and teens. They now gather in a 10,000- square-foot renovated warehouse in a strip mall near I-81 on the northern edge of Winchester. They are affiliated with Dove Christian Fellowship International, a church-planting movement based in Lititz, Pennsylvania.

“Our aim is to reach the next generation through worship that is relevant, inspirational and participatory,” she said. As a result, Wanda plays less classical violin these days and more electronic keyboard, accompanied by guitars and drums. She is training young men and women – including her three teenaged children, Rachel, Nathan and Josh – to produce the praise-and-worship music favored by her church. All musicians help lead the singing, while the congregation follows along, reading words projected onto a screen.

Hiram Hershey laughs at recalling that he didn’t fit the Mennonite mold in 1941-42 when he was a student at what was then Eastern Mennonite School (EMS).

Hershey had not been raised Mennonite. His ancestors on both sides of his family had left the Mennonite church in the late 1800s over what they viewed as its strictness and legalism.

After being homeschooled until his teens, Hershey ended up as a boarding student at EMS in 1941 because his mother knew Myra Lehman, the wife of Chester K. Lehman, and trusted putting Hershey in a school revolving around the likes of the Lehmans. (Chester was the first dean of Eastern Mennonite College and Seminary, 1923-1956).

Hershey says he spent a lot of time walking up and down the hillside beside what is now Eastern Mennonite Seminary. That was his punishment for such infractions as not buttoning his shirt up to his neck. After Lancaster Mennonite High School opened in September 1942, Hershey finished his high school degree there.

Despite his rebellious spirit, Hershey chose at age 17 to be baptized into the Mennonite church.

At the end of World War II — which saw him laboring on his family’s fruit farm for three years — Hershey returned to Eastern Mennonite as a mature college student.

He studied music under J. Mark Stauffer from 1945-47. Hershey confesses he and Stauffer did not see eye-to-eye on many things, but “I learned to love hymns from him.” Hershey sang as a baritone, with solos, in the Stauffer-directed annual production of “The Holy City.”

In search of broader and deeper choral training, Hershey transferred to Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1947. By 1953, Hershey had completed a BA and MA at Westminster. He continued studying through the 1970s with choral masters, including several stints with the famed Robert Shaw Choral Workshop. He also did private study with Julius Herford, considered one of the most influential conductors in American choral history.

Hershey became friends with Alice Parker, a composer, arranger and conductor close to Robert Shaw. He introduced her to Mennonite church music and arranged for her to visit EMU. Parker felt moved to write the opera “Singers Glen,” based on the life of Joseph S. Funk (see page 8).

Hershey became an accomplished choral conductor in southeastern Pennsylvania. For four decades, he conducted the Franconia-Lancaster Choral Singers, in addition to sometimes conducting other choirs and orchestras.

Of a 1966 performance directed by Hershey, a Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer wrote: “The chorus, whose members are from Montgomery, Chester, Bucks and Lancaster counties, was obviously well trained and enthusiastic. The singers, of all ages, performed with gratifying unity of ensemble under the careful direction of Hershey, a Harleysville businessman whose first love (and training) is music.”

Hershey and his wife, Mary Jane Lederach, have long supported themselves (and earlier their four children) with a real estate business in Harleysville, a community on the northwest outskirts of Philadelphia. He retired from choral conducting a dozen years ago – except for a reunion gathering in 2005 and 2007. That last one saw about 80 singers gather from his former choirs. They performed Handel’s Messiah to a full house at Souderton Mennonite Church.

Hershey and Mary Jane are members of Salford Mennonite Church in Harleysville.

Joan Griffing, DMA (Ohio State), BM & MM (Indiana University). Music department chair and professor (violin, viola).

EMU seeks to enable as many students as possible to understand and enjoy music. Strongly interested music students prepare to be music educators, performers, church musicians, master’s and doctor’s students in music, or to pursue other music-related professions or avocations.

The programs of EMU’s music department are widely known and highly respected. EMU’s curriculum offers students a thorough background in the music of Western traditions. It also grounds students in an appreciation of the vitality and applicability of all types of music, whether from this time and place, earlier centuries, or other cultures.

Music majors complete a common core of courses in music that include theory, history, conducting, performance, and elements of aesthetics, analysis, and writing about music. Students may choose a concentration in music education, performance, church music or our new concentration of interdisciplinary studies. The interdisciplinary concentration is perfect for students with the imagination and desire to integrate their music with another career path, such as nursing, business, or social work.

Lynne Mackey, DMA (The Eastman School), MM (Julliard), BM (University of Michigan). Associate professor (piano).

The music department has an extremely active performing faculty, on campus and away. They all possess graduate degrees from respected, competitive institutions, and they all seek to be excellent teachers and attentive mentors.

There are seven full-time music faculty members, plus a varying number of part-time teachers. They serve 20 to 25 students majoring in music and dozens more involved in departmental choirs or ensembles and in private study.

The music department sponsors more that 50 recitals and concerts annually, including student ensemble concerts, senior and junior recitals, noon recitals, faculty recitals, preparatory program events, and the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival. Each fall the music department coordinates a gala concert, performed and sometimes composed by students and recent graduates.

James Richardson, MM (Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins), BM (Covenant College). Assistant professor (voice).

Invited artists frequently perform on campus. Faculty-led trips to performances in Washington DC and other metropolitan centers provide educational enrichment.

The preparatory music program, which became a part of EMU in 1988, now provides classes to more than 350 school-aged students on the college campus each week. It is the only program of its kind in the region. In addition, since 2007 EMU has been the official provider of after-school strings instruction to Harrisonburg public school students. In 2010-11, 70 were receiving this instruction.

For more information, visit www.emu.edu/music.

Michael Allen often helps lead chapel worship with his singing and piano playing.

By the time he was a junior in high school, Michael Allen had surmounted many challenges. He had heard the boys at his first elementary-school track meet shout, “Hey, blackie – you’re going to be real slow.” And he had silenced them by coming in No. 1 in the 200 meters. (And, then, they wanted to be his friends, saying, “Ah, man, you’re fast.”)

He had been named “rookie of the year” after his first season of Little League football in Louisa County, Virginia, a rural area between Charlottesville and Richmond.

He had taught himself to play piano by ear in middle school and then learned to play bass guitar the same way. By his senior year of high school, every week he was playing piano or bass in his House of God Church in Gordonsville, Virginia.

Michael had ignored the teasing of his three older siblings – “stop singing, you can’t sing” – and become vice president of the church youth choir.

But then he ran into something he just couldn’t do – or wouldn’t let himself do. A new music teacher asked Michael to join the school chorus for grade 12. “You’ve got to do this,” he recalls the teacher saying. “I know you’ve never read music before, but you’ll be fine. Just try it.”

Michael did sign up for chorus, but then she asked him to sing the lead for “Stand By Me,” and it was too much. “I had just gotten there. It would have been in front of the whole school. I couldn’t do it.”

Michael (class of 2012) has set records in the triple jump and long jump and made All-ODAC First Team (2010 Outdoor Long Jump).

In 2010-11, as a junior at EMU, Michael is proving that his high school choral teacher had been right. He can do it all. He sings in the Chamber Singers and the Gospel Choir, plays piano and guitar, leads chapel singing, breaks long-jump and triple-jump records, serves as a “community assistant” in his dormitory, and is known around campus for his ready smile and spirit of helpfulness.

He’s majoring in both music and business – combining music and another field of study is a new interdisciplinary option at EMU – which means he juggles classes like “microeconomics” and “organizational behavior” with ones like “conducting” and “music theory.” To tell the truth, however, Michael still finds it torturous to read music.

After Michael graduates, he hopes to see much of the world, perhaps performing with a group like “Up With People,” then return home and start his own business, likely in the music arena. And, oh, he also wants to qualify for the Olympics in the long jump and triple jump.

Michael has gotten lots of support at home and at EMU, and he credits this for keeping him on the path to success, especially since his four closest friends from high school aren’t doing as well. One is even in prison. But Michael also gets credit for deciding to be a winner. Now if only he could only learn to enjoy sight reading.

Children’s Choir

“The SVCC is completely captivating and professionally poised. In truth, the childish intonations make ‘Silent Night’ shine especially brightly as a family-friendly seasonal release. Again, Director White extracts an incredibly high level of musicianship from her young charges, and the choir sings with tremendous enthusiasm and heart.”

— Carol Swanson in a 2007 review of “Silent Night,” an SVCC recording posted at www.christmasreviews.com

The Shenandoah Valley Children’s Choir (SVCC) represents one of the most widely traveled and highly acclaimed groups of musical performers associated with EMU.

It was founded in 1992 by Julia White, who remains its artistic director. It has performed for such dignitaries as Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Highlights include performances at:

• three Southern Division ACDA conferences (Orlando in ’00 and Charlotte in ’02, under the direction of Sir David Willcocks, and Charleston, W.Va., in ’06)
• the Carnegie Hall Children’s Choir Festival (’98 and ’07)
• the Tuscany International Children’s Chorus Festival in Italy (’01)
• the Pacific Rim Children’s Chorus Festival in Hawaii (’05 and ’09)
• three occasions with members of the Washington Symphonic Brass Quintet
• the White House, with Opera singer, Placido Domingo.

The SVCC serves young people from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and the surrounding region.

Its mission is to foster artistry and excellence through musical study using weekly practices as a group and individual homework in solfege and rhythm. The training includes sight-reading, memorization, and written theory.

The SVCC program encompasses the concert choir, ages 11-18; the treble choir, ages 9-15; and the preparatory choir, ages 8-11. Admission is by audition and requires serious commitment to attend practices and do homework. Early-elementary “explorers” classes are also offered for children in kindergarten through grade 3.

No qualified, interested child is turned away. White sees that financial assistance is extended to students who need it.

A highlight in October 2011 was SVCC’s appearance with The American Boychoir, regarded as the United States’ premier concert boys’ choir. It was the sixth time this choir had performed in Harrisonburg at the invitation of SVCC.

The 74-year-old American Boychoir, a highly selective residential program based in Princeton, New Jersey, joined SVCC in performing before hundreds of young teens enrolled in local public middle schools. The audience was also invited to participate at points, enabling them to experience the joy of community singing. Joint master classes of the Boychoir and SVCC were open to the public.

White worked with the American Boychoir School in the late 1980s when she was a master’s student at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, and has maintained a relationship with the Boychoir over the years.

The SVCC has released 14 recordings since 1996, with most still available on CD.

To hear samples of SVCC music, purchase a CD, or obtain more information about SVCC, visit www.emu.edu/svcc