Peter Christian Lutkin

He was born on March 27, 1858, in Thompsonville, a Racine County hamlet inside what is now the village of Caledonia. His parents, Peter Christian and Hannah Olivarius Lutkin, had left Denmark in 1844. The family moved to Racine when he was one and to Chicago when he was five.

He sang in the choir of St. Peter and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church by nine and was its chief organist by fourteen, after both parents died when he was thirteen. Chicago public schools and early church work carried him to a piano instructorship at Northwestern at twenty-one, then to Berlin’s Royal Academy of Arts, where he was the only foreigner admitted that year. He returned to Chicago posts at St. Clement’s and St. James and to the American Conservatory before Northwestern brought him back in 1891. He became the first dean of the School of Music in 1895 and held the post through 1928.

In 1906 he founded Northwestern’s A Cappella Choir and spent decades arguing to the Music Teachers National Association that unaccompanied singing was the point. The national music honor society Pi Kappa Lambda took its letters from his name. Library of Congress counts put him at more than thirty hymn tunes and sixty-five anthems; he also co-edited a Methodist hymnal. He married Nancy Lelah Carmen on October 27, 1885. He died of a heart attack at his son’s house in Evanston on December 27, 1931, and was buried at Rosehill in Chicago. Thompsonville is the birth claim; Chicago raised him after age five.