Julianne Vanden Wyngaard is a musician for the ages. She’s played piano for the Grand Rapids Symphony, Circle Theater, and even the Kitten Club in the early 1960s. The club, located in the Morton Hotel, featured bustier-clad women wearing kitten ears. And a young piano player who made more money in three or four nights than she made working full-time in the payroll department at Meijer.
She left the piano keys of the Kitten Club in 1966 after her second marriage, built a house with her husband, and planned to be a housewife. But someone who heard her at the Kitten Club said he needed an accompanist out at Grand Valley State College in Allendale. She accompanied the choir and various concerts, and ended up coming on full-time in 1967 to teach music theory, piano and more.
“I got to watch Grand Valley grow to what it is today. It was a miracle out there in the corn field,” said Vanden Wyngaard. “I want to see it continue to prosper and grow.”
Vanden Wyngaard was the natural person to go to when GVSU President Don Lubbers brought a carillon to campus. She could play the piano, after all, so why not a series of 23 bells played with a keyboard-like series of batons depressed with a closed fist. She leapt at the chance to learn, attending the Netherlands Carillon School over four summers.
She learned the history of the carillon—it goes back to the 16th century—the mechanics, how the bells are made, and showed her Netherlands-born husband the bells he had heard ringing his whole life. Vanden Wyngaard has played both GVSU carillons, at the Allendale and downtown campuses, and carillons all around the state. She served as vice president, and later president, of The Guild of Carillonneurs in North America.
Vanden Wyngaard has seen huge changes in Grand Rapids throughout her 86 years. She spent her early years on a farm in Rockford, moving to Grand Rapids after World War II. She attended Franklin School and graduated from South High School in 1955. After graduating from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, she moved back to Grand Rapids where she still lives, now with her daughter in an apartment overlooking downtown.
“Women everywhere are participating in every walk of life. When I graduated in 1955, many young women went to work at Bell Telephone. Now women are more adventuresome than we were,” said Vanden Wyngaard, the daughter of an accomplished piano teacher.
She acknowledges that for musicians, if you had the chops, it didn’t matter your gender or race. “It truly was a matter of what you could or couldn’t do. That’s probably why the arts are so integrated. I didn’t experience any difficulties,” said Vanden Wyngaard.
She adds, “So much ground has been broken. Young women need to continue to prepare themselves to do what appeals to them or they have an aptitude for. For women willing to do the work, there is no door that isn’t open.”
GGRWHC Annual Reception
The Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council holds its Annual Reception on March 12 from 5:30 to 7 pm GVSU’s L. William Seidman Center, Rm 1008. Included is a conversation with carillonist Julianne Vanden Wyngaard and local historian Cindy Laug.
Visit www.ggrwhc.org for details and to register.
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