Twenty years ago, the last time the director of choral activities job came up at Central High School, Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS) hired a crosstown alum to fill the role. Now, West Senior High is returning the favor.

At their meeting last month, the TCAPS Board of Education formally approved the hire of Duncan Cooper as West’s new vocal music director, a job he’ll take over from the outgoing Erich Wangeman. For Cooper — and the TCAPS music program more broadly — it’s the truest of full-circle moments.

Cooper graduated from Central in 2009, and was heavily involved in the music programs there, playing in band, singing in choir, participating in musicals, and serving as drum major for the Trojan marching band. On the choral side, Cooper was part of the first class Central choral director Tamara Williams ushered all the way through high school, after being hired at the school in 2006. Williams herself is a TCAPS alum, having gotten her start in choral music under the direction of Russ Larimer at West. She graduated high school in 1999.

“I just can’t wipe the smile off my face,” Williams says, when asked about how it feels to have one of her own students coming back as a colleague. “It’s just the complete circle.”

Cooper earned his music education degree from Michigan State University and completed his student teaching at Ann Arbor Pioneer, but left Michigan after college to take a long-term substitute teaching job in Denver. In 2018, he and his wife Emma – also a northern Michigander – relocated to Napa Valley, California, where Cooper led the Napa High School choral program for six years. More recently, Cooper’s been directing the choir at Napa Valley College and singing as part of Aeternun, a Napa-based professional choir.

Through all those years and jobs, Cooper says he always had one big dream lingering in the back of his mind: a return to TCAPS to lead one of the district’s extremely esteemed high school choral programs.

“When I went to college to be a music educator, that was absolutely the dream job,” Cooper tells The Ticker. “But I also knew that those jobs are highly sought after in the choral world, and that they only open up, historically speaking, once every 20 years. So, I never had any expectations that it would actually happen.”

Well, it happened.

In December, Cooper “heard through the grapevine” that Wangeman was planning to retire after 13 years with the district, and that the West job would be opening up. He decided to apply, assuming the highly-coveted nature of the position would make a job offer hard to come by.

But while Williams confirms the position drew a slew of “incredible candidates,” she says the decision to hire Cooper was ultimately “a no-brainer.” His knowledge and lifelong love for the TCAPS music program, she says, amounted to an X-factor no other applicant had.

“When we saw the live in-person interactions between the West singers and the candidates that came in, there was just this natural connection with Duncan,” Williams says. “I think he and the students really clicked, and everyone really felt comfortable. And as a result, Duncan was able to get some incredible music and incredible singing out of the students.”

For her part, Williams wasn’t surprised. Even as a high school choral student 20 years ago, she says Cooper already had a music educator’s instincts.

“What I remember the most about Duncan as a student was the crazy amount of energy that he possessed, and it was positive energy,” Williams says. “When he came in to interview, I told my colleagues, ‘Oh, he was my right-hand man as a student,’ because he was an incredible role model – not only to choral students, but also to his band friends. He always had a way of making his peers feel encouraged, and he just led with so much positivity.”

For Cooper, the thought of coming back home to the school district and music program that built him is an honor and responsibility he doesn’t take lightly.

“It’s not lost on me, the legacy of the program,” Cooper says, noting he’ll be only the third person in West Senior High’s three-decade history to hold the choir director job. “TCAPS music – not just the high schools, but the entire K-12 ecosystem – is probably one of the most robust experiences any student can have in the state of Michigan, and I would go as far as to say in the entire country. It’s a really, really high-level community, and the district is so heavily invested in it.”

While upholding West’s reputation for choral excellence is obviously a priority for Cooper, he sees it as just one piece of the puzzle.

“I still have so many close friends that I keep in touch with because we were in high school choir together,” Cooper says. “There aren’t a lot of school programs that have the ability to do that. I know a lot of people who don’t really have high school friends anymore, because they didn’t have the experience I had of getting to perform at a high level, traveling and gigging with a choir full of friends. So, I’m also looking at the job from a community building perspective, because the power music has to unite students from different backgrounds is really powerful. And when kids feel safe and connected to one another, that’s when they’re going to make the best music together, anyway.”

Cooper will start the job at West this fall.

Pictured: Cooper today (left) and in his Central High School choir days (right)