World premiere of “Adelia!” in honor of daughter of former EASCD band director to be performed during spring concert this Monday

Original composition commissioned in memory of Adelia Dundas will also be live-streamed

by Julie Berg-Raymond

This is a story that resonates on so many levels, it’s difficult to know where to begin its telling. On one level, it’s about the world premiere of a new musical composition being performed by band students in grades five to eight at a small middle school in rural Iowa. On another, it’s a story about how that small rural school district - Eastern Allamakee - embraced a just-out-of-school-himself band teacher and his young family in a way that would touch many hearts and traverse many years, and about how that family and that school district have since both given so much to the other.

This story is about all those things. At the center of it all, though, is a young girl named Adelia.

Adelia Dundas was born in La Crosse, WI March 11, 2011, eight weeks premature and weighing 3 lb. 5 oz. Her family tells people that Adelia was known right away for her “fiery red hair, contagious smile, and joyful presence” - and that, if one quality typified her attitude about life, it was her “infectious enthusiasm.”

Indeed, it would be that quality that would inspire not only her family and friends through her 10 years with them; it would inspire, as well, a musical composition commissioned in her memory and in celebration of her too-short life and titled, simply, “Adelia!”

Adelia Dundas died Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at just 10 years of age.

THE DUNDAS FAMILY AND KEE
Adelia’s mom and dad, Kelsey and Christoph Dundas, had moved to Decorah from Minnesota in 2009 so Kelsey could finish her senior year at Luther College. “The only band job open within driving distance of Decorah was the position at Kee,” Christoph recalls. “I was fortunate to be offered the job and taught there for three years (2009-2012) while living in Decorah, De Soto and Viroqua.”

Adelia, born during Christoph’s second year at Kee, would face issues with her health beyond her premature birth; but she and her family would not face them alone. “The three years I taught at Kee were very influential both for me as a starting-out band teacher and for us as a family,” Christoph says. “The school gave me a chance to start a teaching career with no experience, and the Lansing and New Albin communities welcomed us with open arms. When Adelia was born prematurely during my second-year teaching there, the school staff collected cash to help us with meal expenses at the hospital, and with gas to drive back and forth to La Crosse. They helped in many other ways so I could be at the hospital and stretch my time off to be able to work two to three days per week until Adelia came home after five weeks in the NICU.”

At the end-of-year concert that year, Christoph gave the band seniors their graduation cards since he wasn’t sure if he would be able to get to graduation parties. “The band seniors decided to collect some of the graduation money I had put in their cards, and they gave it back and told me to save it for Adelia’s first band instrument,” Christoph says. The students gave the family $80 toward that future day. In the summer of 2012, when Adelia was 15 months old, Kelsey and Christoph moved back to Minnesota to be closer to family, among other reasons.

ADELIA’S HEALTH ISSUES, AND HER LOVE FOR LIFE
Prematurity was the first concern with Adelia, Christoph says; and “she was born with an extra thumb that got geneticists looking for things.” Over time, he says, her doctors (first at Gundersen-La Crosse, and then at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN) kept finding things that impacted heart, eyes, ears, hips, ankles, brain, and more, along with a chromosome deletion. Around age four she was officially diagnosed with Aicardi Syndrome, a rare genetic condition that affects less than 400 girls in the United States.

“Adelia’s genetic deletion was unmatched, as her medical teams couldn’t find another person in the world with the exact same missing genes,” he adds.

Adelia had a myriad of medical conditions, and Christoph says that many girls with Aicardi have very limited life opportunities due to thin or missing corpus callosum (connecting the two halves of the brain). “However,” he says, “Adelia overcame every challenge to be able to live a semi-typical life. She was able to go to school, learned to read, and ran around everywhere - to the extent that if you saw her out in public, you probably wouldn’t know right away that she was battling so many medical things.”

At home, Adelia’s favorite thing to do was to listen to music on her CD player, Christoph says. “Her favorite was the ‘Frozen’ soundtrack, and her three siblings remember Adelia waking up before 6 a.m. on Saturdays to wake us all up by playing that CD at full volume!” He says Adelia also liked playing in the sandbox, reading books, watching Disney movies, playing outside at her grandparents’ farm and sledding.

“Adelia loved school,” he says. “She was excited to see her friends and classmates, her teachers, and her school helpers; she would be sad when school breaks lasted a full week. Her favorite food was chocolate ice cream. A favorite story from siblings is that Adelia never ate very big meals, but when we made tacos, we would get all of the kids dished up (starting with Adelia), and one time we had everyone dished up and I was about to start eating my taco when Adelia asked for ‘more taco, please’ - and she had eaten her whole taco in the time it took to dish up everyone else. We all still laugh about it; and it became pretty common for her to finish off a whole taco and need a second one before anyone else had started eating.”

Adelia’s diagnosis with Myelodysplasia - a rare bone marrow cancer - in November 2020 “really came out of nowhere after a genetic consult for something completely different,” Christoph says. “When they found it, it was a very short timetable to try a bone marrow transplant to save her life.” The family was never given a time frame if nothing was done; but, Christoph says, “some research showed that kids with no other medical conditions would have one to two years or less, without a transplant. It probably would have been much shorter for Adelia with other underlying conditions and an already-dropping white blood cell count stripping her immune system.”

Adelia’s brother, Caleb (eight years old, at the time) was a bone marrow match, and was her donor. The transplant itself was a success; but after three weeks, Christoph says, her new immune system thought her lungs were an invasive pathogen and went on the attack. “As her new immune system grew in, it got strong enough to attack and destroy her own lungs.” Her last 22 days were in the PICU on a ventilator.

FULL CIRCLE
Christoph says they had long planned to get a picture of Adelia with her first band instrument and share it with the “kids” - who would have been 28-29 years old by then - who had given back their graduation money at Kee toward the instrument purchase; but Adelia died two months before her fourth grade class got to pick out instruments for fifth grade.

Instead, he says, they decided to take some of Adelia’s funeral memorial gift money to donate $800 to the Kee Band program. That number - $800 - came from the family having multiplied the students’ original gift of $80 by 10, in honor of Adelia’s 10 years.

“I spent a long time thinking about how to use the money,” says current Kee Band Director Elizabeth Bahr. She and Christoph developed, he says, “a gradual back-and-forth discussion from the initial idea of a donation, through various ideas of where the money could be best used.”

In the end, Elizabeth felt that the best way to have Adelia’s memory live on was through creating a piece of music just for her. Though this would be the first time she had ever commissioned a piece, Christoph had been part of a few commissions before as a band teacher, including a few consortium-commissions (multiple schools working together) and two commissions that he’d organized himself, both initiated by donations from families in memory of former music teachers. She found a composer; and everyone decided to have the piece written for a young band because, Elizabeth says, “the money that inspired the donation was intended for Adelia’s first band instrument.”

Christoph says they had briefly discussed a heavier emotional piece for high school band. “But we all really felt that we wanted to both have an upbeat/positive focus on Adelia’s life and personality, and to commission music for students around her age (Adelia would have been a sixth grader this year). There is always a need for new music for beginning bands, and this feels like a way that we can - all at the same time - honor Adelia, share her story, give something back to the Kee community, and contribute something to the world of band music,” he says.

MEETING THE COMPOSER
Born in Milwaukee and raised in Madison, WI, Justin Marshall Riley graduated from the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point with a Bachelor of Music degree in music education. He taught band and general music for six years and worked in local TV broadcasting for seven years. He now composes, arranges and produces music full time. He lives with his wife, two children and two dogs and cat in Jefferson, WI.

“(Elizabeth) told me the story of Adelia Dundas and told me she was considering commissioning a piece of music dedicated to her memory,” Justin recalls of their first meeting in the summer of 2022. “I was very moved by the story and was honored to be asked to compose this piece. She put me in contact with the Dundas family, who told me the whole story over a video chat.”

Christoph remembers that video-chat as being “the biggest emotional moment so far … Kelsey and I got to share Adelia’s story with (Justin),” he says. “We expected a 20-30 minute chat and ended up talking for almost two hours. It is very touching to know how invested Justin is in sharing Adelia’s life through music.”

COMPOSING “ADELIA!”
“The first thing I ask is, ‘What do I want the audience to feel when they listen to this music?’ For ‘Adelia!’ ‘infectious enthusiasm’ was a phrase Adelia’s father, Christoph, used to describe her personality,” Justin says. “Once that is clear, I try to generate as much material as possible that would suggest infectious enthusiasm. Melodies, rhythms, textures … I make a mess! Then I go about developing that mess into some kind of cohesive and coherent form or pattern. For music for young bands, I first work in a three-voice score which just means three single staves of music. Once I have the entire piece written in that format, I start assigning instruments in the band to play each of the three voices. That is how the full score (which just means the sheet music that has all the instruments on one page) comes to life. Once that is ready, then I extract the sheet music for the individual players.”

Justin’s inspiration, he says, was found in Adelia’s own love of music. “Her parents told me that she loved to sing,” he says. “Anything from ‘Frozen,’; and her favorite hymn was ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ I decided to play with the melodic material from that hymn tune and, pretty soon, I had a beginning written.”

WORKING WITH THE COMPOSER
During a recent Wednesday morning, Elizabeth Bahr’s fifth grade band students were warming up and doing their exercises, getting ready to do a run-through of the “Adelia!” piece they’d been working on for a couple of months by then. This time, though, they’d be working with the man who composed the piece, as Justin Marshall Riley made a visit to the school in Lansing.

“I was nervous,” says fifth grader Raymond Weymiller. “I just wanted to show that we can actually do it.” Noah Mauss says he, too, was “nervous - and a little excited.” Josy Connelly, a sixth grader who joined the younger band members for an interview, says she “wanted to get it perfect for her (Adelia).”

The band students had first heard Adelia’s story in December and are aware of the significance of this new piece that has been written in her memory and that they will be performing for the first time - along with the entire Kee Middle School Band - during their spring concert Monday, April 24. “I was a little sad about the story, but also excited about doing a new piece,” Raymond says. “This is a really fun song,” he adds.

“It’s a really fun and challenging song,” Noah says. “And I love challenges.” Josy says she appreciates the composer’s effort: “You put a lot of work into it, just for her.”

Justin, the composer, says he was pleased with the students’ work. “They did wonderfully,” he says. “These kids were so well-prepared, and so willing to learn, and so much fun.” Their band director, too, was happy with their effort. “I thought they did really well,” she says. “They are just really hard workers and rise to every challenge I’ve given them.”

LIVESTREAMING
Christoph and Kelsey Dundas are also parents to Adelia’s three younger siblings: Caleb, now 10; and Jacob and Emmaline (eight-year-old twins). The Dundas family will be coming down to Lansing on the afternoon of the performance this coming Monday and staying in town that night. “I know at least a few of my former students will be there and we are excited to have time to connect with people April 24 and 25,” Christoph says. Adelia’s grandparents will be there too, along with “at least some of her aunts/uncles/cousins” - with, he adds, many more watching the livestream.

The concert featuring the “Adelia!” premiere is scheduled for this coming Monday, April 24 at 7 p.m., and the live stream link will begin 10 minutes prior to the performance, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7apN5fAnus. The link also will be available on the Eastern Allamakee Community School District Facebook page.

CLOSING WORDS
“We are so grateful that the Dundas family reached out and trusted us with this donation in memory of Adelia,” Elizabeth says. “Adelia’s life was full of joy and tenacity, and her spirit will live on a little in the song ‘Adelia!’”

Christoph says the family plans to spend the next decade or so giving away more of the funeral memorial money. “I think it is absolutely fitting that our first ‘big project’ in her memory is for Adelia to continue to share the gift of music.”