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Caroline Kraft, University City High School

Beginning Men’s Choir and Women’s Choir, Advanced Choir, Show Choir and Voice

Six years out of college, Caroline Kraft still has the energy of a girl—one who just wants to have fun. “I don’t want a regular job,” she says with a laugh. “I want to be around music.”

Little did she know, when she decided to double-major in vocal performance and education, what “just being around music” would do. Kraft has coached a high proportion of her choir singers—including Aloha Mischeaux, a young St. Louisan who made it to Hollywood on American Idol and now has a recording contract—to the All-District level and beyond.

Kraft once “wanted to be a star” herself. Her high-school choir director asked her to join the class as a piano accompanist, but “one day she heard me humming along and said, ‘Uh-uh. No piano anymore. I need you singing.’ I started taking private voice lessons from her, and that was that.”

Now Kraft laughs about the parallel with her star student, a senior All-State tenor and Opera Theatre apprentice. “As a freshman, he really wanted to be in jazz band. There were already three upperclassmen on piano, though, so he begged me: ‘Please let me play for your class.’ Then one day I overheard him humming and singing—and that was that!”

Kraft gives free private lessons to him and to any other student who wants advanced musical training, all the while co-directing, publicizing and rehearsing the school musical. That’s just during regular hours: Kraft sings with the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus and a national Catholic church choir on weekends. Yet she shrugs off admiring words about her dedication and denies having a pure work ethic. Music is not about duty, she says.

“I do it because I love it. I get to have fun every day.”