SLU Public Information
President's Awards for Excellence
Unparalleled Impresario
by Christina Chapple
It's easy to discover in the young wife and mother living in Europe forty
years ago the roots of what Harriet Vogt is today--Southeastern's unparalleled impresario.
Vogt is a founder and the decade-long force
behind
Fanfare, Southeastern's acclaimed arts festival. For her achievement in making her community
"artistically richer," she has earned the 1996 President's Award for Excellence in Artistic
Activity.
"In Europe," said Harriet Vogt, who lived in Germany and Italy for 14 years, "the arts are
available to everyone. Everybody from the streetcar conductor to the shoe repairman has a
subscription to the opera and they all go. They're much more knowledgeable about culture than
we are."
"Why shouldn't we be able to be like that?"
She and two faculty friends tackled that question in 1986 when they began Southeastern's
annual October festival of art, children's programs, dance, film, jazz, lectures, music and theater.
Their immediate goal was to raise morale on a campus suddenly deprived of a traditional fall
diversion--Southeastern football. But for Vogt, Fanfare fulfilled a bigger mission. She wanted
her Southeastern students in general--and everyone in particular!--to love and appreciate the arts
as much as the people in Europe do. Availability, she feels, is the key.
"When I first came to Southeastern (to teach voice in 1973), I used to get a whole lot of
student tickets to the New Orleans Opera and drag all the kids down there. I wanted them to be
exposed to that. That's what sort of started the idea for Fanfare. I wanted to do an arts festival
where we could bring things to campus for our kids."
"Music," said Vogt, a mezzo-soprano, "has been a part of my life from the very first." She
grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, but her parents frequently took the children to Oklahoma
City to experience the arts. "I came from a very musical family. We all played the piano and we
all sang," remembered Vogt. "My oldest brother, who is a lawyer, played the mandolin and he
used to go around and serenade his teachers hoping he would get a better grade! When we get
together today, we still sit around and harmonize."
Her earliest singing experience was at three years old. "They stood me up on a table at
church and I sang ÔJingle Bells,'" she laughed. "I sang in church from that time on. I sang in the
school choirs, started studying voice when very young."
As she continued voice training in college, Vogt planned on a professional singing career.
She was selected for television star Dinah Shore's road show, which "toured around the U.S. in
these big white Chevys," she said. "I would have gone off and done that right out of college,
which would have been fun, but I got married and went to Europe instead."
Vogt married her college sweetheart, baritone John Wiles, who had a Fulbright to study
in Italy. "I did sort of subjugate my own ambitions to help my husband--as women did in those
days," she said. "That was fine with me as long as I was actively a part of what he was
doing."
In Italy, "It was like we both had a Fulbright," Vogt said. She sang, studied voice, learned
the language. Those "fun and exciting times" ended when her husband was drafted, sending the
couple home to America for two years. After his discharge, Wiles got another scholarship to
study in Germany, where they stayed for 12 years.
Europe, said Vogt, was "where you had to go to start an opera career. All the theaters in
Germany were filled with Americans." Some American singers made lifelong careers abroad.
Others--such as a young soprano named Marilyn Horne, who was Vogt's son John's babysitter--
translated their early success in Europe to worldwide fame.
Vogt remembers her years in Germany as "very productive." "I sang when I could, but
basically I was raising my kids, learning the language, going to the theater three and four times a
week. I performed my first Messiah with orchestra--in German, which was quite an experience! I
learned an awful lot about the country and it's culture and music."
Being around professional musicians also gave her "a knack" for organizing that has
served her well as Fanfare's director. "We always had friends who were touring who made us
their headquarters. Since I knew the language and area, I found myself helping them," she said.
"One time someone came up and asked me if I was a group's manager. And I thought, 'For
heaven's sakes, I'm just a housewife!'"
Her housewife days ended in 1971 when she and Wiles divorced. As a single mother of
three, "My goal was to find a teaching position so I could take care of my kids," she said. She
earned a master's degree in voice and was hired at Southeastern. She returned briefly to Texas
with her second husband, attorney Frank Vogt, but came back to Hammond when he died. "I've
been here ever since," she said. "I've enjoyed Hammond," she said. "I've immersed myself in the
community and everyone has been so nice to me. I didn't see any reason to move."
:There are tremendous advantages to being in the classroom," Vogt said, "and one of
them is to become acutely aware of our student's capabilities. They're good kids, but many of
them were arriving at Southeastern appallingly lacking in knowledge of the arts...I don't care if
you're majoring in business or math or nursing or what, to be an educated person you must be
knowledgeable in these things. I don't feel like we're doing our job as educators if we let them
graduate like that."
Thanks to Fanfare, Vogt said, "It's taken a long time to see the results, but we really
finally are. The community loves it and the students are getting the hang of it. They groan and
moan when required to go, yet they're astounded that they enjoyed it!"
She's especially proud of Fanfare's education outreach, which has brought thousands of
school children to campus events and countless visiting artists to their schools.
When recently she asked a group of junior high band students how many had attended an
orchestra concert, several hands went up. "I asked them where, and they said, Fanfare. I was
thrilled," Vogt said. "We are making a difference. They are our future customers and if they don't
develop a love of the arts, who's going to buy a ticket?
:That's the real secret to it all--exposing school children to the arts, so they don't grow up
thinking ballet is funny or never seeing a live play," Vogt said. "You have to get them over the
hurdle of the fear of the unknown and, if you can, they find out that this is pretty nifty stuff."
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