Along with launching Susquehanna University’s sesquicentennial celebration, the Carnegie Hall performance served as a grand farewell to Cyril Stretansky, distinguished professor of music and director of choral activities, who retired after 35 years of service at the end of the academic year.

“It was kind of a thanksgiving thing to me,” Stretansky says, “knowing that the university felt I would be capable of conducting there. In my retirement year, it just adds a wonderful glow of satisfaction.”

Stretansky was particularly moved by the university’s outreach to alumni. “It brought a lot of alumni together with current students to create the sense of a real strong Susquehanna,” he says. “That feeling of belonging and caring, in addition to the intrinsic learning experience of the music, created a wonderful opportunity for our students.”

The familial aura surrounding Carnegie Hall on March 7 was indicative of what students experience back home on the Susquehanna campus, particularly in programs such as music, where hands-on learning with faculty mentors is a requirement for academic success. “It’s a little different than being a lecture professor,” Stretansky says. “It’s not that those professors don’t have opportunities to have close relationship with their students, but having students in rehearsals and on tour with you, sometimes for as long as four years, you get to know them very well. And they get to know you very well, too. They get to know if you have a hole in your sock, if you know what I mean, and so it becomes more of a family-oriented thing.”

Stretansky’s family scrapbook spans more than three decades of choral performances with Susquehanna University’s choir, chamber singers and masterworks chorus, as well as community and international choral groups. For 24 years, he served as music director and conductor of the Susquehanna Valley Chorale and Orchestra. During those years, he conducted more than 70 major choral works scored for soloists and chorus with orchestra.

His experiences as a guest conductor, a choral clinician, an adjudicator and a baritone soloist are extensive and encompass a wide geographical area including 14 states, Canada, Mexico, France and Italy. He has conducted massed festival choirs at such world-renowned locations as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice and the ancient cathedral of Mexico City. In addition, he has toured Europe four times with the Susquehanna University Choir and once with the university’s Symphonic Band. He has also toured Mexico with the choir, which has recorded 18 volumes of choral literature through the years.

Through it all, Stretansky says he’s been driven by “a love of the choral art and wanting students to experience it and produce choral art with the dignity it deserves.” This love — and the discipline it takes to nurture a career in the fine arts — will carry over into his life after Susquehanna as well.

“Once you discipline yourself and experience the beauty in a fine art, a deep sense of ‘feeling fullness’ happens. Then I think you set the table nicer at home,” Stretansky says.