Retiring LFHS Choir Director Conducts 111-Part Final Performance

LAKE FOREST, IL — A couple years ago, Lake Forest High School Choir Director Tim Haskett could have retired. But he still loved the job he had held since 1987, and the group of students in their second year — the class of 2020 — was a special one.

“I thought, gosh, if I retire in two years I can take these guys on another trip then I can retire with this senior class because they’re so talented, but even better they’re just really, really nice people,” Haskett told Patch. “So the seniors were the reason that I prolonged my retirement for two years, which is ironic, because here we are.”

Heading toward his June 5 retirement, Haskett planned final concerts in March and May, on either side of a planned tour of Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic with 56 students in what would have been his 19th choir trip to Europe. Instead, the final nine weeks of school have been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

During spring break, Haskett found himself forced to find a way to cope with working electronically and from home, which he estimated made it about 50 times more difficult.

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“Our trip was canceled. Our concert’s canceled. We probably will have the rest of school canceled. I said, ‘I’m 61 years old. How am I going to do all this technology stuff? This is just crazy,'” he said. Haskett said he received encouragement to conduct a remote choral performance from his wife, Gretchen.

“Just jump in,'” he recalled her saying. “‘It’s your last year but let’s go for it.’ So with that encouragement, it was like, ‘Alright, I’m going to take on something that I don’t know if I’m going to be able to really do.'”

So began a six-week process to put together the final choral performance of Haskett’s LFHS career — an arrangement featuring all four years of students singing “Light in the Hallway” by Pentatonix.

Appropriately, given the state’s ongoing stay-at-home order, the song includes the following lyric: “Count your blessings every day / It makes the monsters go away / And everything will be okay / You are not alone / You are right at home.”

Haskett decided to split of the song into eight-measure portions and assign them to individual students, who ended up with a week to submit their portions of the song.

Of his 128 students from freshmen to senior, 111 submitted eight-measure contributions to the project, a notably high response rate considering the challenges associated with recording at home, Haskett said. A few of the seniors provided supplemental sections to round out the sound.

“When you sing in a choir, in a rehearsal room or a concert, you’re sitting next to a person, blending. It’s just so much easier in that situation,” he said. “The more you have together the easier and more confident they feel, and they sing out well. When you’re doing that to a computer, it’s like singing solo.”

Members of the choir recorded on their cellphones and laptops to the accompaniment of a piano track provided by accompanist Natasha Mah, and they were spliced together with the help of his wife and Ed Ingold, Haskett said.

The finished product, a six-and-a-half-minute video, was published online Monday to an immediate flood of acclaim, he said.

“I won’t even get to say goodbye to these kids,” Haskett said. “It’s bittersweet, but in some ways, this virtual choir project, in a strange way, is helping us fill that kind of void right now.”

Haskett started his teaching career at Northwestern University during his graduate studies there. He then taught at LaSalle-Peru Township High School for three years before joining the faculty in Lake Forest and moving to Gurnee. He described Lake Bluff and Lake Forest as fantastic places to teach.

“The parents really value music,” he said. “The people are very welcoming, and very nice and very supportive of the arts.”

Haskett said his 37-year teaching career has witnessed drastic changes to the way students communicate and receive information.

“Just trying to find a way to make your program and make education work with those challenges, to me that’s the real interesting thing about education,” he said. “Finding a way to work through all these other things that are happening that you’re kind of competing against.”

And with most of his students sticking with the choral elective throughout their time in high school, Haskett said he had a chance to help contribute to the development of his students’ characters.

“I think the older I got, the more I would tell my kids that I’m not here to teach music, I’m here to help instill into you that you need to be a good human being and you need to give back to the community,” he said. “I’m not worried about your education right here just as music, I’m concerned about what kind of person you’re going to be in college, what kind of person you’re going to be when you have your family.”

Haskett said he and his wife are considering suggestions from children who live in Colorado and California to move west after retirement. They have yet to make any final decision on what’s next.

“It’s been a ride,” he said. “I don’t think anybody would want to finish their 37 years of teaching like this, but yesterday was worth it all, to see how many people were happy seeing the video.”