A little fanfare, if you please: a trumpet’s flourish for our Director of Music Education Julie Carter, who is celebrating her 10th year at the Joy of Music School this fall.

“Ten years. Can you believe it!?” asks Julie.

Yes we can—and we’re ever so grateful for them.

“Julie cares deeply about the kids, their families and the results, which go beyond the musical,” says Executive Director Frank Graffeo. “She is helping our teachers improve young lives. She is generous with big hugs to celebrate the triumphs. She holds little hands when a performance doesn’t go as planned. Julie supervises a first-class operation.”

Today Julie oversees a music program that includes 106 volunteers teaching 215 students in 21 different instruments, plus outreach programs reaching an additional 1,000 kids throughout our area. We had just 18 teachers and 45 students when she started in 2005.

Julie, who has a bachelor’s in music from the University of Tennessee, with additional studies at Juilliard and Stetson University, was working as part-time music teacher at Greenway School back then. She heard about an opening at the Joy of Music School and decided to apply.

Julie knew about the School because her mother had taught piano lessons to our founder, radio station pioneer An Anniversary of Note and philanthropist James A. Dick. But not everyone else in Knoxville was so familiar with it. One of her first projects was finding violin teachers for 25 students whose instructor had left. “That was really hard,” she says. “We didn’t have the kind of public awareness that we do now.” In typical fashion, she jumped right in and started fixing the problem. “

I got my daughter, Lili, to teach three of them and we just gradually started building up the teacher roster,” she says. The School’s “awesome” staff, a group that has been in place for the past few years, makes Julie’s job a lot easier these days, she explains. “They’ve taken a lot of stuff that I used to have to worry about off my desk.”

Now she can focus on our music programs themselves. As she puts it: “matching the students to volunteers, making sure they have the instruments and music they need, running the classes (we have five of them), and managing the outreach program, which has grown exponentially.”

The best thing about her job? “The people I meet,” she says. “The volunteers, the board members, the staff, the families, and the kids. My favorite is getting to meet all these people who love music and love kids and are right in there swinging for them.”

It’s safe to say nobody cares as much about them as Julie, and for that we say, THANK YOU!