Steve Schaffner taking over as Southeast Missouri Music Academy director

After 19 years as director of the Southeast Missouri Music Academy, Rebecca Fulgham is stepping down Friday.

Along with being director, Fulgham is a piano teacher, which she will continue to do from home when she leaves. She has 15 students and said she hopes to increase that number.

"I'm not sitting home eating Bon-Bons yet," Fulgham quipped. "This will give me an opportunity to focus a little more on that than I have in the past."

Rebecca Fulgham

The Academy, part of the Southeast Missouri State University Department of Music, offers music instruction to students of all ages and backgrounds.

Fulgham said the new academy director will be Steve Schaffner, who retired in 2013 after 22 years of conducting the orchestras at Central Junior High School and Central High School.

"He is the perfect person to come in here. I was so glad, so happy he's coming here," she said.

Schaffner said he starts his new job Tuesday. Since his retirement, he's kept playing in the Paducah, Kentucky, and Southeast Missouri symphonies, offering a youth symphony in Paducah on Sundays and performing gigs with his band Manitou, a dance group that plays everything from country oldies to fiddle tunes.

He plans to keep active in those endeavors, even in his new job, which he is looking forward to starting.

"There's a whole skill set you develop communicating and working with kids. It's a skill set I didn't want to lose or let go dormant," he said.

Fulgham served as academy director from 1991 to 2002, leaving to become director of the Southeast Missouri Council on the Arts for four years. When the director's job reopened, she returned in 2006. The academy recently moved from Brandt Hall to its new quarters at the recently completed River Campus Complex.

The people are what she'll miss most.

"The faculty, the board, the kids and the parents have all been great," Fulgham said. "I've just met a lot of wonderful people."

Started in 1985, the music academy has averaged 210 students.

"It's a huge age range," Fulgham said. She said the academy teaches all band and orchestra instruments, piano, voice, guitar, harp -- "just about anything."

The academy has 22 faculty members, but has had as many as 30. Faculty numbers could rise this year as there are "very full areas" such as piano, Suzuki violin and voice. Faculty includes student teachers from the music department, professional faculty who are teachers in the community and university faculty members.

The lessons are mostly private, but students participate in a weekly musicianship class. In those, students learn music theory and a bit of music history. In the spring semester, students undertake a composition project to learn how to write music.

"It's amazing what these kids can come up with," Fulgham said. "They are so talented. It's very unique. We finish the year with a young composers concert."

The students' work is selected for performance, but some compose pieces that are too technically difficult for them to perform, so teachers do it.

"That's one of the things I've enjoyed. I've gotten to play several of my students' compositions."

Wesley Garner, who studied piano with Fulgham, stopped by her office Wednesday to ask a question. He's now a student teacher for piano and a pre-med student with a music minor at Southeast.

"I loved working for her. She was always helpful and willing to answer questions. ... All in all, she was an amazing teacher -- just her enthusiastic personality. She's fun to be around and fun to learn from," Garner said.

rcampbell@semissourian.com

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