Piano teacher earns national music award

One of the Flathead Valley’s best-known piano teachers in recent decades has earned national acclaim.

Kay Lund has received the prestigious Music Teachers National Association Foundation Fellow Award for her contribution to excellence in music education.

The Foundation Fellow program honors deserving individuals while supporting the association’s Foundation Fund through a donation in an individual’s name. Each year new fellows are recognized at the national conference.

Lund, 81, of Whitefish and now a resident at Brendan House in Kalispell, started taking piano lessons at age 6 from Helen Dickson in Great Falls, and continued to study under Dickson until she went to college. She played many performances for the Tuesday Music Club, at local churches, weddings and receptions in Great Falls.

In 1948 Lund took the Great Northern Railway with steamer trunk in tow to attend The Juilliard School in New York City, where she earned a degree in piano performance. She studied with Sasha Gordanitsky, Irwin Freundlich and Joseph Fuchs, and she kept in close contact with all of them through the years.

Lund spent much of her teaching career in Denver, where she was on staff at Colorado Women’s College, then at the University of Colorado in Boulder and also taught at Rocky Ridge Music Center in Estes Park, Colo.

In the early 1960s she was a member of the Denver Trio with Robert Rosenthal on the violin and Mykolas Saulius on the cello. From 1955 until 1975 Lund taught piano and judged numerous competitions. She was actively involved with the Denver Symphony.

Lund moved to Whitefish in 1978 and continued to teach piano. She immediately dove into the local music scene. She was a founding member of the Whitefish Chamber Players in the late 1970s and many of those musicians became active with the Glacier Orchestra. She also was active in the Flathead Festival.

She was president of the Montana State Music Teachers Association in 1987 and mentored many younger music teachers and helped them through the process of gaining their state association certification.

Lund found a performing partner in Dr. Robert Hager, a Columbia Falls chiropractor and classically trained pianist. Together they regaled audiences at recitals.

Ruth Ann Hager once wrote that as Lund sat down at the piano, “every molecule of that entire nine-foot grand began to stir. A dormant giant was awakened with that very first note. It knew that at last a master was there — commanding total response — and respond it did, swelling like an ocean, moving from the deepest of deeps, pouring forth with mighty waves of glorious music cascading out and sweeping us all up into the skies to soar with her. An unparalleled experience!”