44 Millennium - A Marquis Who’s Who Magazine ARTS, MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT JOHN THOMAS LANGFELD, BS, MM MUSICIAN, AUTHOR, EDUCATOR (RETIRED) Westchester, IL John Thomas Langfeld has garnered over four decades of professional expertise in music education and performance, with a career marked by innovation both inside and outside of the classroom. Following his formal retirement, he has remained dedicated to authorship, having written several essays and poems that have appeared in diverse journals and anthologies. Throughout his longstanding career, Mr. Langfeld maintained a consistent focus on personal and professional growth in his students, which was met with enthusiasm as students learned to appreciate music. As an educator, Mr. Langfeld commenced his early career as a band director at a junior high school in Beloit, Wisconsin. During this time, social and political climates were marked by tension due to historical events such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and Mr. Langfeld leveraged the influence of these events to tailor his lessons, which resonated with students. As time progressed, he went on to serve as a band director in other school systems, where he learned to teach nonperformance arts classes that inspired him to develop a comprehensive curriculum book on modern music education. To this end, Mr. Langfeld compiled around 350 pages of lesson plans and pedagogical insights, which he cites as one of his most significant career accomplishments. From 1990 to 1994, Mr. Langfeld served as executive director and curriculum founder for the Illinois Summer School for the Arts (ISSA), where sight, sound, music and language were studied, explored and experienced as essential expressive tools. Students explored those tools with the guidance of arts education specialists in music, theater, creative writing, dance and the media arts. Notably, the ISSA became the seminal environment in which Mr. Langfeld explored interdisciplinarity. Alongside his prominent work in performance education, Mr. Langfeld is a talented musician on both the clarinet and recorder. He played the clarinet in concerts and recitals throughout Wisconsin in his early years and has maintained a lifelong passion for the recorder. Remarkably, for more than a decade, he conducted a series
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