John Ludeman is one of Northwest Sound’s most active leaders. Since joining in July 2005 John has been President, Music VP, Membership VP, Marketing VP, and Board Member At Large. John and the other former presidents collaborate to keep an eye on how things overall are helping the chorus. This level of oversight helps Northwest Sound maintain a strong organization.
While performing in a community theater production of The Music Man, where he played the part of Charley Cowell, Adrian Leontovich introduced John to Northwest Sound. His prior singing experience was in a church quintet and a little bit of community theater. He didn’t really start singing until his daughter started taking singing lessons when she was 11 or 12. John would take her to her singing lessons and began having lessons with the same teacher. It seems to have been all uphill since then.
John has sung in two previous quartets, “Just For Kicks,” and “Upbeat,” and has sung at the District contest several times. His third quartet, “Square One,” has qualified for the 2016 District contest.
In his current position of Music VP (2016), John runs the Music Team, is the primary contact with the director, and helps with rehearsal programming, show content, the overall arc of rehearsals as you look at time, setting up coaching, providing feedback to the section leaders, recording and providing feedback to members to allow them to self-coach, and maintaining high music standards, i.e. what is the standard, how long should it take to learn a part, are we comfortable with section unity, how do we feel about how members are learning, and who needs help.
John feels that administrative and organizational strength is something to really try and cultivate. To develop leaders within the chorus who can step up and contribute makes them feel better and more involved. It’s a very important value and supplies examples for everybody else. So cultivating leadership is something John and the leadership think about a lot. Who is close to joining who has either prior experience in leadership or who is interested or ready to step in to a leadership role? That makes all the difference. And, not the least, also trying to off-load the amount of work that the chorus ends up doing.
John was born in Florida but moved to Tacoma when he was two. He counts himself as a Washington native. He attended Western Washington University where, during his junior and senior years he interned at Microsoft. That led to a 26 year career there. Now he is Director of Engineering for Nutanix a startup company in Seattle.
John has two children. His daughter graduated from Tufts University an d is now studying Psychology at the University of Washington and his son is a senior in high school. So, in 2016 John is helping look at colleges. In what remains of his spare time John does a lot of quartetting, mountain and road bicycling, and photography.