Class Note 1995
Issue
Nov - Dec 2018
Earlier this year Alison Moll, Julie Weller Scott,and I joined dozens of Glee Club alumni on a pilgrimage to Hanover to celebrate the retirement of our director, Louis Burkot. It was a weekend full of song and memories, and it got me thinking about the many ways music was a part of our college years and how for me it has shaped my life after college, as I still sing regularly in the Boston area. It was time to reach out to some of the other singers in our class to see what they were up to, and here’s what I learned.
From Erik Vaveris: “I have been singing with the Bach Choir of Heidelberg (‘Bachchor Heidelberg’) in Germany for the last year. Connie Tromble Eyster and Brian Eyster visited us in Heidelberg with their son, Birch, last spring. Among many adventures in the area, they were able to come to our concert of Bach’s Mass in B-Minor. After two-plus years of living in Germany, my wife, Jane Petrof, daughter Gwen, and I are moving back to the Chicago area this fall.”
Connie and Brian had a visit this summer from Owen Gottlieb and his wife, Abigail Bellows, in Boulder, Colorado, where Owen completed his Wilderness First Responder certification. Owen’s team at the Rochester Institute of Technology Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity Center had two board games from its Lost & Found series featured at the Smithsonian American Museum of Art this year. The team has also built a mobile phone prototype of the first game for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), featured at the 50th anniversary of the NEH, and is busy at work on a new module on Islamic law and another project on interactive media and healing.
Jennifer Lien wrote from Minnesota: “My favorite Glee Club memories are many, but they all happened on that tour bus during three spring breaks. Those tours cemented friendships and gave me a sense of belonging to Dartmouth that has not wavered. Oh, for those innocent youthful days again! Glee Club got me started in the singing business, and I am still singing today. I just performed two Poulenc operas in Singapore this year—the one-woman opera La Voix Humaine with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s chamber series and led the nuns to the guillotine in Dialogues of the Carmelites with New Opera Singapore. This fall I begin a part-time gig teaching voice at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota, bringing me back full circle to my earliest days studying voice in Hanover. Although I received my doctor of musical arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015, I’ve been so busy with parenthood (daughter, 8, and son, 5) that music had to take a backseat for several years. In my spare time I sit on the board of a Montessori school I helped start here in Duluth and work on diversity, equity, and inclusion at the school and elsewhere in our community.”
James Mahoney chimed in on Facebook about his “first-ever gig at Tabard singing ‘Waiting for the Man’ with the short-lived band Hamlet Machine.” And Eric Waters answered that his favorite music memory was “singing ‘Brown-eyed Girl’ with the Dodecaphonics. It’s how Michelle Waters ’96 first noticed me and was the first step toward falling in love and marriage. I have continued singing, first as a graduate student at Yale and for the past 17 years as a Lutheran pastor. Michelle, our six kids, and I have moved to Texas. I’m the senior pastor of St. John Lutheran in Boerne, Texas, about 30 miles north of San Antonio.”
Keep your news coming!
—Kaja (Schuppert) Fickes, 2 Bishops Lane, Hingham, MA 02043; kaja.k.fickes.95@dartmouth.edu
From Erik Vaveris: “I have been singing with the Bach Choir of Heidelberg (‘Bachchor Heidelberg’) in Germany for the last year. Connie Tromble Eyster and Brian Eyster visited us in Heidelberg with their son, Birch, last spring. Among many adventures in the area, they were able to come to our concert of Bach’s Mass in B-Minor. After two-plus years of living in Germany, my wife, Jane Petrof, daughter Gwen, and I are moving back to the Chicago area this fall.”
Connie and Brian had a visit this summer from Owen Gottlieb and his wife, Abigail Bellows, in Boulder, Colorado, where Owen completed his Wilderness First Responder certification. Owen’s team at the Rochester Institute of Technology Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity Center had two board games from its Lost & Found series featured at the Smithsonian American Museum of Art this year. The team has also built a mobile phone prototype of the first game for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), featured at the 50th anniversary of the NEH, and is busy at work on a new module on Islamic law and another project on interactive media and healing.
Jennifer Lien wrote from Minnesota: “My favorite Glee Club memories are many, but they all happened on that tour bus during three spring breaks. Those tours cemented friendships and gave me a sense of belonging to Dartmouth that has not wavered. Oh, for those innocent youthful days again! Glee Club got me started in the singing business, and I am still singing today. I just performed two Poulenc operas in Singapore this year—the one-woman opera La Voix Humaine with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s chamber series and led the nuns to the guillotine in Dialogues of the Carmelites with New Opera Singapore. This fall I begin a part-time gig teaching voice at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota, bringing me back full circle to my earliest days studying voice in Hanover. Although I received my doctor of musical arts degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015, I’ve been so busy with parenthood (daughter, 8, and son, 5) that music had to take a backseat for several years. In my spare time I sit on the board of a Montessori school I helped start here in Duluth and work on diversity, equity, and inclusion at the school and elsewhere in our community.”
James Mahoney chimed in on Facebook about his “first-ever gig at Tabard singing ‘Waiting for the Man’ with the short-lived band Hamlet Machine.” And Eric Waters answered that his favorite music memory was “singing ‘Brown-eyed Girl’ with the Dodecaphonics. It’s how Michelle Waters ’96 first noticed me and was the first step toward falling in love and marriage. I have continued singing, first as a graduate student at Yale and for the past 17 years as a Lutheran pastor. Michelle, our six kids, and I have moved to Texas. I’m the senior pastor of St. John Lutheran in Boerne, Texas, about 30 miles north of San Antonio.”
Keep your news coming!
—Kaja (Schuppert) Fickes, 2 Bishops Lane, Hingham, MA 02043; kaja.k.fickes.95@dartmouth.edu