ane Skinner Hardester loved choral music with a deep and abiding passion, and through it illumined the soul and gave a distinctive voice to her singers.

Dr. Hardester earned her Bachelor of Arts at College of the Pacific and Master of Arts and Doctor of Musical Arts in choral music from the University of Southern California. From 1962-1998 she served on the faculty at El Camino College in Torrance where she developed an outstanding choral program. Throughout her career, choral organizations under her direction (including the El Camino College Chorale and Lyric Singers and her semi-professional chorale, The Jane Hardester Singers) performed for regional and national conventions of the American Choral Directors Association. Jane served as Director of Music at United Methodist Church of El Segundo from 1995-2000, and co-founded the South Bay Children’s Choir, sponsored by El Camino College, in 1996. 

Jane served on the boards of the California Music Educators Association, the Southern California Vocal Association, and the American Choral Directors Association, serving as ACDA Western Division President 1971-1975. She has been recognized for her contribution to choral music by the city of Torrance as well as the Music Educators National Conference and the Southern California Vocal Association. She was named an Honorary Life Member of SCVA in 1973. In 1993 she was the recipient of the Howard Swan Award presented by the California Chapter of the American Choral Directors Association. She was honored again for her dedication to the choral art at the Western Division convention of ACDA in 1989.
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Jane served as a conduit for the choral art, transmitting her artistic vision to her choristers and to her audiences. She saw to it that all singers who came within her choral compass would be deftly guided into experiencing what it meant to sing from the heart and the soul – a communion of the ages through song. Her favorite quote was from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: “Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.” Jane passed from this earthly life on October 23, 2006, having devoted herself to the task of insuring that all who met her through the choral art would have experienced the joy of singing and expressing all of the music within them. She was an extraordinary choral conductor, teacher, and founding member of the American Choral Directors Association.

A native Californian, Dr. Arthur E. Huff was born in Whittier to Floyd and Agnes Huff and sang his first public solo at age 4. In elementary school in Millbrae he studied Piano and Baritone Horn while continuing singing. At Burlingame High School, he was introduced to some major choral literature by Elmer Young including cantatas and oratorios in which he was a soloist. After service in WWII in the Army’s Mountain and Winter Warfare Unit (Ski Troops) he returned to the San Francisco bay area to study music – majoring in Voice at San Mateo JC, and then completing BA and MA degrees with minors in Drama and PE at San Jose State. Next he taught junior high vocal music in Santa Cruz and then taught at the College of Idaho before returning to California to teach at Porterville High School and College for 8 years. In 1964 he began his teaching at Fresno State directing the Concert Choir, Madrigal Singers, and Men’s Chorus, as well as teaching Conducting, Choral Arranging, Voice, and supervising student teachers in music. His doctorate was completed in 1971 at the University of Arizona with vocal study with Professor Eugene Conley and additional study at Stanford University.

Dr. Huff served as Vocal Representative to the Boards of the California Music Educators Association and the California branch of the American Choral Directors Association. He was elected Vocal Representative, and Vice President of CMEA and President of ACDA.

David Thorsen is Professor Emeritus, and a founding member of the School of Music at California State University, Fullerton. He served as Coordinator of Choral Music and Director of the University Singers from 1960 until his retirement in 1995. He is a Past National President of the American Choral Directors Association, the National Association of Church Musicians, and served on the Board of the International Federation of Choral Music.

Professor Thorsen has conducted All-State Honor Choirs in Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Iowa, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Hawaii, Alaska, and California. In 1987, the Cal-State Fullerton University Singers performed at the ACDA National Convention in Dallas, and represented the United States at the first “World Symposium on Choral Music” in Vienna, Austria. The Singers have sung with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Mehta and Carlo Maria Giulini.
In the summers, Professor Thorsen taught, conducted, and organized music festivals. Fifteen summers were spent with the Oregon Bach Festival, five with the Alaska Music Festival, and five with the International Bach Academy in Stuttgart, Germany.
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Since his retirement from CSUF, he performs and teaches “sleight of hand” magic at the Academy of Magical Arts in Hollywood, California. He has also appeared as a professional magician on several TV specials.

Rudy Saltzer describes himself as a conductor, violinist, lecturer, singer, and crippled piano player: one of the keyboard challenged. He was born in Los Angeles, a small town in southern California in 1922, the year of his birth. Rudy was introduced to music at the age of five, when he started lessons on a 1/4-size violin.

After two years of college interrupted his education, he joined the Navy in WW II, and mastered the use and maintenance of an exotic secret weapon ~ Radar ~ at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. He loved San Francisco and vowed to one day make his home in the Bay Area. Upon graduation, he was deployed to the Pacific and served on a specialized tanker for three years. Late in the war, he received his officer’s commission, whereupon the Japanese surrendered.
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He returned home to complete his studies at UCLA. After graduation he performed as a professional violinist and taught choral music in high schools and junior college. Concurrently, his appointment as assistant conductor of the Roger Wagner Chorale launched his professional choral conducting career. He later formed his own ensemble, which performed in the renowned Monday Evening Concert Series with Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, as well as in theater, movies and TV.

Rudy earned his Doctorate in music from the USC School of Music, cum laude, and taught at Cal State Hayward, thus enabling him to keep his vow to return to the Bay Area, his home ever since. He was Professor Emeritus at Cal State East Bay until he passed away in April 2015.

He has conducted and lectured as a guest professor at more than a dozen colleges and universities, including Arizona State at Tempe, Brigham Young University, St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles, Roosevelt University in Chicago, U.C. Berkeley, and the Fromm Institute at USF.

Mrs. Haines was born in Selma, south of Fresno, on Jan. 28, 1914. She moved to Ceres, where she began singing in musicals while attending Ceres High School. She continued to star in productions at San Jose State College, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in general education with a music specialty.

One of her first jobs after graduation was teaching a sewing class in Empire, and it didn’t take long for Mrs. Haines to realize it wasn’t her calling. “She had to ask the students how to do the next stitch before she taught the lesson,” said her daughter, Claudia Saunders, 64.
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Mrs. Haines moved to Modesto in 1946 and began what would be a 30-year career as a music and voice instructor. She started as a music teacher in Ceres and in 1953 began teaching music in Modesto City Schools. She spent 15 years as a director of vocal music at Downey High School and traveled across Europe with the school’s choir. Mrs. Haines’ students made several appearances at the International Youth and Music Festival in Vienna, Austria, and also traveled to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and Budapest, Hungary, to sing. She also directed 14 musical productions at Downey.
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Dawn Peterson was one of the Downey High School choir members who traveled to Vienna with Mrs. Haines. Peterson, 53, is a private voice instructor and credits Haines with pushing her to continue her singing career. Peterson said Mrs. Haines’ “horribly funny” sense of humor reminded many people of Lucille Ball, not to mention her bright red hair, manicured nails and exquisite jewelry. “She looked like she stepped out of a Chanel store,” Peterson said. “She was elegant and sophisticated, but she had an edge about her. She was a fireball; she wouldn’t accept anything but perfection.” Mrs Haines served on the Modesto Symphony board of directors beginning in 1948, and was named president in 1974.
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In 1993, the theater at Johansen High School was dedicated to Mrs. Haines, as the Eleanor McKnight Haines Performing Arts Theater.

Ben Denton has arguably, although humbly and quietly, had one of the strongest impacts on high school choral music in the San Francisco Bay Area. Born in Colony, Kansas in 1918, he had a musical family: his mother played piano for silent movies at the local theater, and his older brother was an accomplished violinist in the Phoenix – Mesa AZ area, where they moved when Ben was a young adult. 

Ben attended Arizona State Teacher’s College in the late 1930s (the pre-cursor of Arizona State University) and following graduation, later studied at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Boston, refining his talents as an accomplished baritone. He enlisted in the Army in July of 1941, just months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. During World War II he served in Europe as a mortar captain, returning to Arizona after the war where he met and married Shirley Ellsworth.