Lyndon Lawless

Music Alumnus of the Year

This school year, Mr. Lawless is beginning his eighth year of teaching at the Youth Performing Arts School (YPAS) in Louisville. He was born in 1945 in Tulsa, Oklahoma where he also spent his childhood. His father was a high school band and orchestra teacher. Mr. Lawless studied violin, viola, and clarinet and was a member of the professional Tulsa Philharmonic viola section in his last two years of high school. In 1963, he began his college career at the University of Michigan School of Music in Ann Arbor where he performed in the band (clarinet) the first three years and in the orchestra (viola) during his final year. In 1967, Mr. Lawless graduated from U of M with a Bachelor of Music Education. From there he went on to teach public school orchestra for two years on Long Island. In 1970, he returned to Ann Arbor to found a semi-professional chamber orchestra. This group eventually became a professional ensemble performing 17th and 18th century music on period instruments. During his 18-year career in Ann Arbor, Mr. Lawless developed this chamber orchestra, Ars Musica, into a touring ensemble under prestigious New York management (Harold Shaw). At its height in 1985, the orchestra performed a fifty-concert season in concert halls from ChicagoÕs Symphony Hall, to college and university series across the Midwest and Southeast, to three-concert series in both New York City and Washington, D.C. Mr. LawlessÕ roles with Ars Musica encompassed musical entrepreneur, artistic director, conductor, and performer (on harpsichord, viola, and primarily baroque violin). Another chamber ensemble founded by Mr. Lawless, American Baroque Ensemble, toured for 26 days in Japan in the spring of 1988. In 1988, due to a dramatically escalating increase in the ongoing financial difficulties common to most non-profit artistic ventures, Mr. Lawless left the music business andbegan a seven-year career as bookkeeper and computer programmer for a small non-profit organization in Danville, Kentucky. In the spring of 1996, at age 50, he became inspired to return to music as a teacher and began post-graduate work at EKU at that time in order to gain a Kentucky teacher's certificate. Almost simultaneously, he was alerted by his EKU advisor that the orchestra job at YPAS was open.