I had the pleasure of watching a master teacher at his finest during the warm-up and then the actual concert we, the Bemidji Choir, gave at the Minneapolis Convention Center for an audience of music teachers. Curiously, it was during the warm-up that he really got us.

We had a half hour period on the stage, before they opened the hall to the audience, when we could try brief starts and get a feel for the sound of the room. He talked to us about the beginnings. The talk was the best of the year. All year he speaks with precision, showing meticulous planning of every lesson. This time the planning was clear--he had a couple of pages of notes prepared--but added to it was controlled emotion. Perhaps that is what we mean when we speak of teaching with passion. It is emotion, but not raw emotion. Directed emotion. He so wanted to let us in on the music and how to let it work. He wanted us to have that magic experience that can happen in a choir when you pull together while using your bodies and minds, striving for some approach to perfection in the execution of thought and feeling. His desire for our accomplishing that joy was so evident that he stirred our response.

In the actual concert, his face went through gradations of pleasure and welcome. The beginnings he'd demonstrated set up the middles which pulled us to starled realizations of having finished this song and then that one. There were moments when we got so lost in each other and the sound that the audience could have been on another continent as far as we were concerned. The music, our bodies and breath, the sounds around us, and his face and hands replaced the world.

Passionate commitment to the creation of art--that's what a fine teacher in his richest moments can inspire.