Yeah I Always Knew He Was the Greatest

So a WSU alumna just won a Grammy.  A grammy.  She's the director of a choral group that won for best small ensemble performance.  And when the paper interviewed her she credited my dad and his mad music-teaching skills.  

Here's an excerpt: 

Singing for Henderson

Rugen earned a bachelor of arts in music at Weber State, and credits Henderson with much of her success since.

"Dr. Henderson is amazing" she said. "He approaches things from the body, mind and spirit."

She said Henderson talked a lot about flow: "He'd say, 'Don't just sing the notes on the page -- you are not just reading the music, you are feeding into some larger artistic explosion.'"

To help the students connect fully to what they were doing, Henderson had them doing some fairly strange exercises, Rugen remembers.

"If anyone walked into the room just then, they would wonder, 'What is wrong with these people?' We'd be moving our arms to the music, mirroring each other -- people who glanced in might think we were doing some weird Druid ritual or something," she said. "But it really got you to think beyond just singing the notes, giving a far better understanding of the music's meaning."

...On reflecting on why Bruffy [her current supervisor] is so successful at getting the best from his singers, [grammy winner] Rugen likens him to her former professor, Henderson.

"It seemed like in college, in all my other classes, I was asked to intellectualize. With Dr. Henderson, it was about moving beyond that intellectualization, into what the music was really about."

Yup that's my dad. So proud.