(Irma) We have played for weddings, birthdays, funerals, house parties, business parties, church events, and many other occasions. We have a great passion for teaching and performing, and bringing others into musical communities.

In our teaching, we've seen youths formally disinterested in everything find a nitch, taking off like rockets. We've seen widows/widowers find new motivation for living, as well as a new community with whom to share life's experiences. At medical facilities, we've seen patients thought to be unreachable light up and interact through the power of music, terminal patients make peace with this world, and family members' burdens lifted, if for only a moment. The power of music...a wonderfully consuming facet of our marriage and our lives.

We both started performing out while still in high school. We met in college through our love of music, and have been performing together since 1977. We are both accomplished vocalists, love arrangeing, and we each play an ever increasing stable of music instruments. We have performed many styles of music including barbershop, country, country gospel, folk, cowboy, old-time, blues, jazz, rockabilly, Celtic, traditional and contemporary Christian, pop, bubblegum rock, classical, light opera, and opera.

As we’ve gotten more and more into unique folk instruments, we’ve found great enjoyment in playing traditional Celtic tunes (Irish, Scottish, other) blended with our own particular flair. Our audiences regularly express their delight in our musical art of arranging, often seeing particular instruments for the very first time. Irma grew up with old-time country music. Having left that genre for half a lifetime due to other musical interests, we find ourselves performing more of these tunes. It is worthwhile to note that this American tradition developed from the tunes our ancestors brought over with them from Europe, and there are many common tunes and style similarities, even today. We continue to cherish classical pieces that have touched us all of our lives, pop songs from past decades to the present, and new and old songs associated with the Christian faith. We have a smattering of jazz pieces in our repertoire, and choral pieces that we adapt to our current interests and distinctive instrumental accompaniment.

The Musical Past

(Scott) Our lives are strongly centered around music, well beyond the business. We led weekly church music for 35 years beginning in the early 1980s, giving us vast performance experience and opportunities to constantly evolve the technical and artistic aspects of our musical interests. Irma is a gifted choir director, always had a choir going at the churches we belonged to, as well as being music administrator. She continues to teach and direct choirs in various contexts. Besides performing in school stage bands, vocal quartets, choirs, and musicals, I was in several bands in high school with friends, various ensembles through the years, as well as choirs including those directed by Irma.

I was into electronic and pipe organs as a kid, and played piano and keyboard in Jazz Band in high school. The summer after graduationl, I had a Christian all-electric band, Sweetlife, that focused on original material. While still in high school, Irma directed a boys’ choir at a local church. She then started a primarily acoustic evangelical folk band, Sonshine, which I joined when we first met. She kept Sonshine together throughout our college days. It was through this experience that I fell in love with her energy and passion for music, her organizational skills, and her beautiful smile and voice, wanting to sing with her the rest of my life. Irma did musicals in college, and later sang with opera and light opera companies. One of her favorite things in the early 1980s was singing torch songs with the Michael Iatauro Jazz Quartet for an annual international golf tournament reception. Over the course of our days, we’ve formed many bands and instrumental and vocal ensembles, to include the Royal Ensemble (the two of us paired with two talented college-age musicians in the late 1980s/early 1990s), other groups where we were mentoring young and not so young musicians, Sounds of Grace, a 6-member women’s group that ran about 9 years that did exquisite vocal numbers, cowboy bands that did country gospel, silver screen cowboy, and fiddle tunes, various pairings with other musicians of all sorts. Besides the endeavors we’ve created ourselves, we’ve invested decades under other directors’ supervision in a wide range of other musical adventures.

Teaching

(Scott) We understand how incredibly valuable music is for many folks at different stages in life, and how music can radically add to the value of life for those that take the leap for the very first time. Irma has kept up a regular schedule of teaching since a teen, and she encouraged me into teaching decades ago. Beyond simply teaching instrument and vocal technique, there has been a heavy emphasis on teaching musicality, stage presence and performance skills, repertoire selection and arranging, playing from the heart, and depending on the student’s persuasion, making music in determined Christian ministry. We have mentored many that have become very successful musicians, and it brings us great joy to be keeping live music alive. We rejoice that God has permitted us to touch and help change lives through our own passion and calling. You can read more at Teaching.

Some Past Music Performance Venues