| Summary: | 3 theconcordian.org • Sept. 24, 2015 THE CONCORDIAN BY KATELYN KASELLA kkasella@cord.edu Concordia, a school in which one-third of the student body is involved in musical activities, has increased private lesson fees and implemented choir and band ensemble fees this year. For the Concordia Orchestra, the Concordia Choir and the Concordia Band, an ensemble fee of $175 per semester for students was instituted this fall semester. For the rest of the 16 ensembles, a nominal fee of $75 per semester has been implemented. Applied lesson fees increased from $450 per credit hour to $500. A cap of $325 was also implemented for students involved in several ensembles. Dr. John Roberts, chair of the music department, said that the music department’s budget was cut by 12 percent this year, along with every other department on campus. According to Dr. Michael Culloton, assistant professor and choral music conductor, the purpose of the ensemble fees is not to make up for the drop in music program funding but rather to help the whole college’s budget – a decision made by the enrollment team. “There’s a lot of tough decisions to be made, but this one was hasty and I wish we would have had more time as a faculty to debate it and be able to really study the impact of it,” Culloton said. Since the new fees have been applied, student participation in many ensembles except for the Concordia Orchestra, the Concordia Choir and the Concordia Band appears to have gone down. Exact numbers of how many students are involved in ensembles and how many declared a music major or minor this year compared to the past few years will be available in a few weeks, according to Roberts. Culloton said it is hard to tell if decreased involvement in ensembles is from the new fees or from the low enrollment of this school year. According to Culloton, Chapel Choir is down 14 singers from last year. The sophomore class, which traditionally makes up a large portion of Chapel Choir, is smaller than in previous years. Männerchor, an all-men choir of mostly first-year students, is also down eight singers from last year. There are only 210 first-year men and around 100 of them are involved in athletics; football, basketball and Männerchor practices overlap, according to Culloton. Students have ambivalent feelings about the fees. “The ensemble fee could easily be seen as unfair to those students who participate in music,” Culloton said. “We’re raising money on the backs of the students who choose to come here for our music program.” Music students were informed of the fees about two weeks before classes ended last year, Culloton said. Many upset students attended the meetings that were held at the end of last school year to discuss expenses. Each student was faced with new challenges and reacted differently to his or her new financial burden. Sophomore biology major Matt Nelson has taken voice lessons and participated in Männerchor because of his passion for singing. At the end of the 2015 school year, Nelson auditioned for Chapel Choir and got in but decided over the summer that, with the fees, it was not worth it. “When you take into account Concordia’s tuition, it’s cheap as far as private schools are concerned but I can still barely afford to go here, so any extra fees is going to be ‘Well I can either participate in choir or I can get another textbook,’” Nelson said. “I can’t just throw money around.” Sophomore Greg Fensom, who experienced a $50 increase in the cost of voice lessons and an added $75 fee for Chapel Choir, was not surprised when the fees were announced. “Either things are getting cut or becoming more expensive, so I thought it wouldn’t be long before the music program was affected,” Fensom said. Fensom never considered dropping Chapel Choir or voice lessons, partly because two years of lessons are required to uphold a music scholarship, and partly because of his love for singing. “In reality, it’s the same amount as donating plasma a few times or buying an expensive concert ticket,” Fensom said. “The price is affordable for the experience I get.” Other students are paying higher amounts since the addition of ensemble fees and the increase in private lesson fees. Sophomore music major Breck Cogswell is enrolled in two credits of voice lessons, one credit of piano and the Concordia Choir. She is now paying an extra $325 per semester, which will amount to $1,950 by the time she graduates, if she continues with all her activities. “Although it is a shocking number overall, I still think these things are worth the money,” Cogswell said. “It’s not too scary of a number because I have a music scholarship, but I know a lot of people who have to pay that amount without a scholarship.” For students who do not have a music scholarship and are not majoring in music, they have a different perspective. “I think it was a poor decision especially because a lot of people who do music here don’t study music,” Nelson said. “They’re asking people who are interested in biology, like myself, to pay money to sing in the choir and it just isn’t worth it.” A lot of the financial issues come back to enrollment, Roberts said. With fewer students comes less revenue and the missing revenue has to be accounted for somehow. “We’re helping the college the best we can,” Roberts said. “But I can’t emphasize enough that we are going to closely monitor [how the fees are affecting students] throughout the next few weeks.” New music fees, no class credit Music faculty and students react to changes in ensembles MADDIE MALAT The students in Jazz Ensemble I who are willing to pay the ensemble fees. ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Fossils from a unique plant-eating dinosaur found in the high Arctic of Alaska may change how scientists view dinosaur physiology, say Alaska and Florida university researchers. A paper published Tuesday concluded that fossilized bones found along Alaska’s Colville River were from a distinct species of hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur not connected to hadrosaurs previously identified in Canada and Lower 48 states. It’s the fourth species unique to northern Alaska. It supports a theory of Arctic-adapted dinosaurs that lived 69 million years ago in temperatures far cooler than the tropical or equatorial temperatures most people associate with dinosaurs, said Gregory Erickson, professor of biological science at Florida State. “Basically a lost world of dinosaurs that we didn’t realize existed,” he said. The northern hadrosaurs would have endured months of winter darkness and probably snow. “It was certainly not like the Arctic today up there — probably in the 40s was the mean annual temperature,” Erickson said. “Probably a good analogy is thinking about British Columbia.” The next step in the research program will be to try to figure out how they survived, he said. Mark Norell, curator of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said by email that it was plausible the animals lived in the high Arctic year-round, just like muskoxen and caribou do now. It’s hard to imagine, he said, that the small, juvenile dinosaurs were physically capable of long-distance seasonal migration. “Furthermore, the climate was much less harsh in the Late Cretaceous than it is today, making sustainability easier,” he said. Most of the fossils were found in the Liscomb Bone Bed more than 300 miles northwest of Fairbanks and a little more than 100 miles south of the Arctic Ocean. The bed is named for geologist Robert Liscomb, who found the first dinosaur bones in Alaska in 1961 while mapping for Shell Oil Co. Liscomb thought they came from mammals. They remained in storage for about two decades until someone identified the fossils as dinosaur bones, said Pat Druckenmiller, earth sciences curator at the University of Alaska Museum. Researchers over the next 25 years excavated and catalogued more than 6,000 hadrosaur bones, far more than any other Alaska dinosaur. Most were from small juveniles estimated to have been about 9 feet long and 3 feet tall at the hips. “It appears that a herd of young animals was killed suddenly, wiping out mostly one similar-aged population to create this deposit,” Druckenmiller said. They initially were thought to be Edmontosaurus, a hadrosaur well-known in Canada and the U.S., including Montana and South Dakota. The formal study of the Alaska dinosaur, however, revealed differences in skull and mouth features that made it a different species, Druckenmiller said. Researchers have dubbed the creature Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis (oo-GROO’-nah-luk KOOK’-pik-en-sis). The name means “ancient grazer” and was chosen by scientists with assistance from speakers of Inupiaq, the language of Alaska Inupiat Eskimos. The dinosaurs grew up to 30 feet long. Hundreds of teeth helped them chew coarse vegetation, researchers said. They probably walked primarily on their hind legs, but they could walk on four legs, Druckenmiller said. The Liscomb Bone Bed during the Cretaceous Period was hundreds of miles farther north in what’s now the Arctic Ocean, Druckenmiller said. University of Alaska Fairbanks graduate student Hirotsugu Mori over five years completed his doctoral work on the species. The findings were published Tuesday in “Acta Palaeontologica Polonica,” an international paleontology quarterly journal. Researchers are working to name other Alaska dinosaurs. “We know that there’s at least 12 to 13 distinct species of dinosaurs on the North Slope in northern Alaska,” Druckenmiller said. “But not all of the material we find is adequate enough to actually name a new species.” They have found no evidence of crocodiles, turtles, lizards or other ectotherms, the cold-blooded animals that depend on the sun or another external source of heat to regulate their body temperature. “It tells us something right there about the biology of these dinosaurs,” Erickson said, an indication they were more like birds and mammals. New duck-billed dinosaur found in Alaska, researchers say
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