About the Boulder Bach Festival Board of Directors
The Board of Directors is passionate about its mission to spread the good news of Bach far and wide. It is a producing body that works in concert with the Music Director and the Executive Director to set the artistic course of the Festival and bring it to life with fiscal responsibility. The Board actively seeks the monetary resources needed to maintain the highest musical and artistic quality.
The board has responded to the challenges of an economic downturn with vigorous action. When it sensed that there were difficult times, both externally and internally, the board, with the assistance of a consultant, faced its challenges head-on, developed a continually renewing strategic plan, with a three-year scope, that addressed the issues it was facing both structurally and financially. We are proud to say that we are now on target in both areas.
The board works through the coordinated efforts of its committees to accomplish its mission and carry out the vision of the Music Director. The committees include:
• The Executive Committee consisting of the officers and committee chairs
• The Finance Committee to set a budget and guide financial matters
• The Program/Education Committee to support the program vision of the Music Director
• The Strategic Planning Committee to monitor an update the Strategic Plan
• The Development/Marketing Committee to coordinate fundraising and publicizing the Festival
• The Nominations Committee to recruit new board members and plan for their orientation
See Board Member bios below.
Dan Seger
Dan Seger is a retired teacher from the Boulder Valley School District, who has had a lifelong love of music and passion for the works of J. S. Bach. He has sung in the Boulder Bach Festival Chorus for over 15 years and has been chorus manager for the past five. He served a term on the board of directors several years ago and returned to it in 2006. Outside of BBF, he sings in the Concert and Chamber Choirs of the Boulder Chorale, as well as in The Renaissance Project, an a capella choir of about 20 members specializing in pre-Baroque choral music. He performed on voice and recorder for more than twenty years with the Boulder Renaissance Consort, one of the pioneering early music performance groups in Boulder, and was on stage with the Rocky Mountain Revels for several seasons. In 2008 he was honored by an invitation to sing in the chorus of the Montana Early Music Festival in Helena and Missoula when they performed J. S. Bach’s St. John Passion, just a week before BBF performed the same work. Dan is also the current president of Early Music Colorado, an organization dedicated to the promotion, development, and support of informed performances of music and dance written before the Nineteenth Century.
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Dick Van Pelt
Dick started his musical life listening to a fog horn on the shore of Lake Superior, then advancing to playing the piccolo in the Stanford band. A Chicago performance of the Brahms German Requiem inspired him to take a two month German course at the Goethe Institute, followed by engineering work at IBM in Germany and the US. Later his wife inspired him to join her in choral singing, leading to thirty years of singing with the Boulder Bach Festival chorus. He has also had shorter stints with some of Boulder’s many other choral groups. His hobbies now are sailing, canoeing and vegetable gardening, and does some flying to keep up with a scattered family.
Al Lundell
Albert Lundell is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Professor Lundell sings in the Boulder Bach Festival Chorus, and has sung with the Boulder Chorale and the Colorado Music festival Chorus. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Boulder Bach Festival since 1995 and secretary of the Board since 1997.
Thurston Manning
Thurston E. (Ted) Manning was graduated from The Colorado College and earned a doctorate in physics from Yale. He taught on the faculty of Oberlin College, and came to the University of Colorado as Vice President and Dean of the Faculties. Subsequently he served as President of the University of Bridgeport, Executive Director of the Commission on Higher Education of the North Central Association and President of the Council on Postsecondary Accreditation. He has been a Director of DeVry, Inc., and is currently a Director of Rasmussen, Inc., a privately-held company providing career-oriented degree programs in fourteen midwestern cities and, through a subsidiary, services to colleges and universities offering on-line degree programs. Locally, in addition to his service as Board member and Treasurer of the Boulder Bach Festival he serves on the Boards of Frasier Meadows Retirement Community and Special Transit, among others.
Penny Anderson
Penny Anderson is the Energy Program assistant and IT coordinator for Western Resource Advocates, an environmental law and policy center. Before joining the organization in 1998, she spent ten years with the Texas State Historical Association as an editor and network administrator. Penny has been a member of the Boulder Bach Festival Chorus since 1996 and has also sung with the Colorado Music Festival Chorus and the Ars Nova Singers. She is a regular performer with Chamber Ensemble con Grazia and an active member and board member of the Colorado Celtic Harp Society. She has a B.A. in music (voice and organ) and humanities from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and also did graduate work in linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin.
Frederick M Denny
Frederick Mathewson Denny is Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies and History of Religions in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A Vermont native, he is an alumnus of the College of William and Mary and Andover Newton Theological School. He holds advanced degrees from the University of Chicago and has previously served on the faculties at Yale University and the University of Virginia. He has conducted extensive field research and published scholarly articles on Qur’an chanting in Egypt and Indonesia. He has served on the BBF Board of Directors for eleven years and has also been a longtime member of the BBF chorus. Denny is also a member of the Colorado Recorder Orchestra, plays trombone in the Niwot Free Grange Semi-Marching Band, and sings in the choir of the Boulder Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Lafayette, where he also serves on the “Sundays at Four” musical concerts committee.
Joseph de Raismes
A.B. Magna cum laude, with Honors in Political Science (1967), Yale College, New Haven, CT
J.D. (1970), Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA
(1) Associate, Holland & Hart, Esqs., Denver, 1970-73
(2) Regional Counsel, Mountain States Regional Office (national staff), American Civil Liberties Union, 1973-75
(3) First Assistant Attorney General, Human Resources Section, State of Colorado, 1975-1979
(4) City Attorney, City of Boulder, 1979 - 2003
(5) Special Counsel, Caplan and Earnest LLC, Boulder, 2005 - 2009
(6) General Counsel, Mental Health America (formerly the National Mental Health Association), Alexandria, VA, beginning in 2006
(7) Board Member, University of Colorado Artist Series, beginning in 2007
(8) Sing with Boulder Bach Festival, beginning in 1997
(9) Sing with Yale Russian Chorus, beginning in 1964
(10) Previously sang with Musica Aeterna, Boulder, 1993-2002
Molly Hardman
Edward McCue
Following horn performance and architectural engineering degrees from the University of Colorado, as well as sojourns at German universities in Regensburg (musicology) and Göttingen (room acoustics), McCue has developed an international consultancy in the design and construction of conservatories for music, theatre and dance. New to the board of the Boulder Bach Festival, he has devoted years of study to Joseph Haydn’s performance environments and is currently working with the International Opera Foundation Eszterháza and PERSPECTIV – Association of Historic Theatres in Europe to reconstruct Haydn’s opera house in western Hungary and establish there an academy for eighteenth century acting and stagecraft. Other interests include the restoration and editing of audio recordings, organic gardening, fine food and wine.
Jim Topping
A long-time resident of Boulder, Jim Topping has been active in community affairs having served on City Council, the Boulder Planning Board and the City’s Housing Authority. Jim has sung with the Boulder Bach Festival for most of its thirty year history and has also sung with the Boulder Chorale and the Colorado Chorale. Using his financial management skills, Jim has served as Budget Officer for the University of Colorado President’s Office and has also served on the boards of many community non-profits including several years as Treasurer of the Colorado Music Festival. Since joining the Board of the Boulder Bach Festival in 2009, Jim has served on the Strategic Planning and Finance Committees and recently co-chaired the successful search for the Festival’s new Music Director.
Larry Worster
Larry Worster is a Professor of Music History at Metropolitan State College of Denver. He served the college for two years as Director of Student Services Technology and Assessment from 2006-2008. He taught previously at the University of Colorado, Regis College, and Denver University. He performed for ten years (1984-94) in the Irish folk ensemble Colcannon. Dr. Worster has been active in the leadership of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the College Music Society, the Society for American Music, and the Board of Directors of the Boulder Bach Festival. He is the author of Cecil Effinger: A Colorado Composer published in 1997 by Scarecrow Press. His ChartCreator software is published as shareware at www.chartcreator.com. Six customized sets of ChartPlayer software for the support of general studies music textbooks have been published by McGraw-Hill. His current project working as a co-author with Jean Ferris on her textbook Music: The Art of Listening, published by McGraw-Hill. In his spare time, he teaches golf.
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