News Release
November 2003
(Bethlehem, Pa.)—A gathering of choir alumni
and friends from the 38 years that Richard and Monica Schantz led
the Moravian College
Music Department and built its choral music program raised funds to
endow a music scholarship in their honor.
An October 25 tribute at the College, commemorating
Richard Schantz’s
75th birthday, drew more than 200 alumni, faculty, and friends of Schantz’s
choirs. They donated almost $28,000, more than enough to endow the
Richard and Monica Schantz Music Scholarship. At Moravian College,
$25,000 is the baseline amount needed to endow a scholarship.
The Schantz party was the idea of Linda Pettinelli ’91, who
proposed it in August to Monica Schantz. “To put it together
and raise that much money in less than three months is simply amazing,” said
Joan Lardner Paul, director of major gifts at the College, whose areas
of concentration include the arts, Reeves Library, and Moravian’s
joint program with St. Luke’s Hospital School of Nursing.
Pettinelli and an organizing committee of J. Michael
Dowd ’68
and Kathleen Doyle Dowd ’68, Dennis J. Duda ’73, Sandra
Kuehner Frable ’63, Janice E. Lee ’91, Peter Lega ’85
and Wendy Talmont Lega ’85, Deborah L. Leyshon, Denise David
Parker ’86, Stephanie Reimers ’92, and Jennifer Volpato-Huntsberger ’94
worked with Monica Schantz to put together the program and to contact
almost 1,300 choir alumni, Moravian College Music Alliance members,
and other friends.
Contributors came from choir alumni from every class year since 1956,
as well as alumni of the 1940s and early 1950s who are longtime patrons
of the Moravian College Christmas Vespers and other musical events.
The Schantzes created the Christmas Vespers program as it exists today,
and their choirs performed at 240 Vespers services.
The event included a display on the stage of Foy
Hall of choir memorabilia—programs,
scores, and photographs—with a selection of paintings and drawings
by Richard Schantz.
The main event included a sing-along (conducted
by Denise Parker and accompanied by Janice Lee) of favorite songs
that choirs had sung under
Schantz: Thomas Ford’s 1607 madrigal “Since First I Saw
Your Face” and the hymn “With Your Presence, Lord.” There
also were parodies of two Vespers standards: Gustav Holst’s “On
This Day Earth Shall Ring” and the hymn “Von Himmel Hoch,” with
new lyrics about the choir members’ affection for their director.
Pettinelli and Volpato-Huntsberger prepared a slide-show tribute.
A benefit drawing allowed Schantz to subsidize
his own scholarship by offering such prizes as “Fireside Dinner for Two, Chez Schantz” and
three of his oils.
