Happy Spring! This is the last Dean’s letter this season, and this month we will close the program year with our annual student recital. Thanks to the students for their participation this year with their busy school schedule. On and off through the year the students performing this month came to our monthly meetings, and I got to know everyone a little better. What interesting, artistic and intelligent people they all are. For this year, organ students from PLU as well as our scholarship recipient, Amy Castle are the only students from the chapter to perform (maybe with some of our members participating as well). I believe that you know them too, but in case you don’t, I would like to introduce them briefly here.

Amy is a senior at Covenant High School, and she has been taking organ lesson from Jonathan Wohlers for several years. From this fall, she will attend Seattle Pacific University. We have observed her musical growth these three years. Wow… what a talent. We will miss her, but I hope that she will come back to join us at AGO whenever possible since her home is here! There are four PLU organists this semester. Charles is sophomore pursuing a music education degree with a choral emphasis. He plays keyboards on Sunday evenings for University Congregation’s praise team. His passion is singing, and he is a part of PLU’s Choral Union. Wendell recently learned he will be a Seattle AGO scholarship recipient. His former life was as a boat captain for 15 years and now he is working on his nursing degree. He studied organ with Doug Cleveland before coming to PLU where he is a music minor. Jayden is junior majoring English literature with a minor in visual art. When you have a chance, ask her to share her art notebook. Just amazing! Her favorite composers are Debussy and Ravel and she enjoys playing piano, but decided to take organ lessons this year because she like the sound. This is her first year taking organ lessons. Chris is a senior in music education graduating this semester. His plans after PLU are to study music therapy. While at PLU he took piano lessons as well as organ. His introduction to the organ was through our POE Tech! Yay!!! He told me how much he enjoyed our POET! All the night meetings and actual work putting that event together—hearing this from him made me feel all the efforts of those in our chapter who worked on the POET really payed off. We made young people get excited and look at Chris, he knows so much about the organ and he plays beautifully. Again, good job and way to go, Tacoma AGO!!

Thanks, student members for providing music, and non-student members. Let’s simply enjoy music! Thanks everyone for your participation for the AGO in 2016–17. Enjoy your summer and see you in the fall with new program year!