Sean C. Morgan
Sweet Home High School choir teacher Duncan Tuomi wants to help students pursue music past the classroom, the same kind of opportunities he had when he was growing up.
Tuomi, 22, took over this year after Matthew Clark, who led the choir for a decade, resigned to take another position.
Tuomi grew up in Portland, where he graduated from Cleveland High School in 2012. He is in his first year of teaching after graduating from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn.
“I grew up in a musical family,” Tuomi said. “Music was always an important part of my life. It wasn’t until high school that I realized music was something I wanted to do with my life.”
He discovered that at the annual Oregon Bach Festival in Eugene. He auditioned for and joined the Stangeland Family Youth Choral Academy, a high school program offered by the Oregon Bach Festival designed to give students exposure to Bach and other important music.
The program is directed by Dr. Anton Armstrong, who teaches at St. Olaf College. That experience led Tuomi to St. Olaf.
“I followed the music program I wanted to be in,” Tuomi said. He earned his bachelor’s degree in music education, with an emphasis in vocal music, this year. While at St. Olaf, he performed in the famed St. Olaf Choir.
While at the college, he balanced work, music and recreational music. His senior year, he directed the German Choir, which specialized in German music and language.
Probably the biggest influences on music in the past 400 years have been Germans, Tuomi said. Many of his favorite composers were German or Austrian, along with some Russian and French composers.
Music was also recreation for him at St. Olaf. He and three friends weren’t able to join the official St. Olaf a cappella group, which had already been formed, so they started their own, the Kross-men. They performed everything from contemporary pop and jazz to classic rock, classical to barber shop.
“We also arranged most of our songs,” Tuomi said.
They made videos and exploded on Youtube, pulling in more than 18,000 views. The group was invited to host and perform during the quarter finals of an a cappella competition. They returned two years later to host the semi-finals.
Three of the group’s members have gone on to become choir teachers. One, who majored in vocal performance, is an intern with a music organization.
“The experience that really hooked me on teaching was when I was in high school, senior year,” Tuomi said. His teacher made him and friends assistants for an intro level group of students.
“By the end of the year, we were teaching our portions of the class,” Tuomi said. They would plan rehearsals.
As he watched the growth of the younger students, he decided he wanted to teach music, Tuomi said. He enjoyed seeing their skills improve and the students grow to like each other, forming a “community.” It wasn’t forced. They sang together and got used to the idea of sharing it.
Toward the end of the year, he began doing more with the chamber choir, Tuomi said.
“It’s about communities, more than anything,” Tuomi said of music. “It’s much like an athletic team the way we work. We rely on one another. We’re always there for each other as well.”
In some cases, those friendships will last a lifetime, Tuomi said.
Following graduation, Tuomi looked for work everywhere he could, he said, then found a listing for Sweet Home.
“It’s the age level I wanted to teach,” Tuomi said. “My passion was for high school choir.”
He likes working with junior high students too, he said. “It’s nice to be able to prepare my own singers.”
He said he would like to expand opportunities for Sweet Home music students. He is the assistant director of the Pacific Youth Choir in Portland, and he’s extended an invitation to his students to join him there. He joined the choir as a student in 2004 as a fourth-grader.
He also wants to form a jazz choir, he said. His goal is to get Sweet Home’s children involved in experiences that aren’t possible for local public schools to provide.
These kinds of programs influenced Tuomi, he said, and they can help students realize that music is something they can do if they want to.
Tuomi is hard-pressed to find a reason he finds music so important, he said.
Music influences people and their communities. Historically, music has brought people together. He quoted St. Olaf’s Armstrong as saying that if Congress sang in a choir together, it might start cooperating.
Aesthetically, it has the power to intensely impact people emotionally and spiritually, Tuomi said. A terrible day can turn around in the choir room.
On the intellectual side, Tuomi is fascinated by chord structures and themes, seeing how they’re related over a composers career.
It’s connected to history, he said. It’s the “infinite discipline,” with connections to physics, biology and language, for example.
He is commuting from Lebanon right now, he said. “I really like the town of Sweet Home.”
Sweet Home is small, like Northfield, he said, and he likes the small-town atmosphere.
“The transition to Sweet Home, it’s actually not been very difficult,” Tuomi said. “I’m really loving it. The first thing that stood out to me is the people. It’s a very interconnected community that’s supportive of each other.”
Tuomi said it’s difficult replacing a choir director who is well-liked, but “I feel welcomed here. For the large part, I’ve really felt very welcome, and it’s been an excellent transition.”