Mr. Austin Boncher, Mastersingers conductor, is one of the founders of the Appleton Boychoir and a 1963 graduate of Lawrence's Conservatory of Music.  He has been a guiding and inspiring presence in school and community music and arts programs in the Fox Valley since his graduation from Lawrence. Between 1963 and 1970 he was, successively, choral director at Xavier High School and Einstein Junior High School in Appleton and band director at Menasha High School.

He held the position of director of music — later renamed supervisor of music and fine arts — for the Appleton Area School District from 1970 until his retirement in 1998. Through his efforts, devotion, and leadership and owing to the excellence of the teachers and musicians he hired and mentored, the school district and the Fox Valley as a whole have become a cultural center that is known, admired, and envied throughout the state.

Arts organizations in whose creation and development he was a key figure include the Fox Valley Symphony, Youth Symphony, Junior Symphony, and Symphony Chorale; the White Heron Chorale; and the Appleton Boychoir. He was involved in the formation of the Lawrence Arts Academy, now the Lawrence Academy of Music, and has been director of music and senior choir at Trinity Lutheran Church since the late 1960s.

An enterprising and effective manager and an accomplished fund-raiser, he wrote successful grant proposals that brought opera, ballet, instrumental, and theatre performing groups to the elementary schools, as well as beginning a Suzuki string program and organizing summer school music-lesson programs.

In 1993, he received the Renaissance Award, given by the Fox Valley Arts Alliance to one who has devoted substantial time, energy, service, and financial resources to the advancement of the arts in this community.

In March 2003, he was honored with the Hanns Kretschmar Award for Excellence in the Arts, for which he was nominated after heading up "Sing for the Cure," a breast-cancer musical benefit held at the new Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in December 2002.

 

The Appleton Boychoir is a proud member of: