Alex Munson, 5, has fun at home in Bowling Green with his parents, Mark and Paula, and sister, Sarah. For 10 months, beginning in July, home for the Munsons will be Höör, in southern Sweden.

Trading places:
BGSU music professor swapping jobs, homes with Swede

In mid-2004, approaching his 15th year on the music faculty at BGSU, Dr. Mark Munson was ready for a change.

A year later, he and his family are preparing for an extended trip that fills the bill.

Munson; his wife, Paula; their son, Alex, 5, and daughter, Sarah, 3, are leaving Bowling Green July 26 to spend 10 months in Sweden. The move is part of an exchange with Lena Ekman Frisk, a Swedish university professor whose husband and three sons are coming with her to Bowling Green.

“We’re swapping jobs. What she does there is what I’ll do, and vice versa,” explained Munson, music education. That extends to living in each other’s homes, with the Munsons taking up residence in Höör, in southern Sweden.

About half the size of Bowling Green, Höör is centrally located between Malmö, where Munson will teach choral methods at Lund University’s Malmö Academy of Music, and Kristianstad, where he will instruct about 100 students ages 11-16 as well as conduct a 40-member community chorus.

Ekman Frisk, meanwhile, will assume Munson’s BGSU duties, which, in addition to teaching, will include directing the Women’s Chorus and supervising student teachers.

Hitchhikers' guide to the Great Lakes: Lena Ekman Frisk (center) and her family thumb a ride in their 2004 Christmas card to the family of Mark Munson, Ekman Frisk's partner in a 2005-06 faculty exchange that will take the Munsons to Sweden. The Swedish family coming to Bowling Green also includes (left to right) sons Edvin and Olle, husband Per and middle son Albin.

An email exchange set the stage for the faculty exchange, which Dean Richard Kennell believes to be the first of its kind in the College of Musical Arts.

Looking for possibilities in European countries where he could teach in English, Munson enlisted the aid of Dr. Per Broman, music theory, who is Swedish. Broman helped his colleague find the Lund University Web site, where he first saw Ekman Frisk’s name. When Munson emailed 60-70 choral conductors in England and Sweden, the only response, last July, was from her.

“I sent the email that described my position and what I would like to do,” he recalled. Replying that her job is different—in part because higher-education faculty in music education or performance must also teach younger students in Sweden—she wondered if he would still be interested. He was, he told her, pointing out that he had taught in public schools for eight years—most in his native Pennsylvania and one in Ottawa Hills—and that he had started the Bowling Green Children’s Chorus, which he directed for four years.

But the clincher, Munson said, was Ekman Frisk’s response to his question about how her husband, Per, and sons Olle, Albin and Edvin felt about the switch. “Per said, ‘We have to do this,’” she wrote.

Munson spent a week with the family at the end of May. Among the places he visited was the Kristianstad school, which is one of only 30 in Sweden that offer music classes. It’s similar, he said, to an American “magnet school”—children must audition at age 9 or 10 and, if they show musical promise, they can enroll.

“The biggest surprise to me,” said Munson after his “whirlwind” visit, “is how fluent everybody is in English. They’re not hard to understand.” The Swedish way of life isn’t that foreign, either, despite noticeable differences in such areas as architecture and, due to the popularity of train travel, transportation. “It’s more the same than it is different,” he said.

Like their exchange partners, Munson and his wife, who have been taking Swedish language lessons, are looking forward to the move.

Mark, who holds a doctoral degree in choral conducting from the University of Cincinnati, said Sweden has been on the cutting edge of choral music since World War II. The Scandinavian nation was neutral during the war, and some of the funds not spent on that front went instead to the arts, he noted. With the establishment of the government-sponsored Swedish Radio Choir, composers were virtually assured that anything they wrote would be sung, he added, citing a “wealth of choral literature from Sweden the last several decades.”

Thanks to the exchange, Kennell said, both Munson and BGSU music students will have direct access to that rich choral tradition. “It’s a win-win situation,” the dean added.

“It’s great being over there,” said Munson about Europe, which he has toured twice with both the BGSU Collegiate Chorale and the Ohio Ambassador Chorus, a high school ensemble. His first European excursion, however, was a trip to Northern Ireland when his future wife, then a first-grade teacher in Oak Harbor, was part of a yearlong educational exchange sponsored by the Fulbright Program.

“Since I did that, I’ve always wanted to go back to Europe,” said Paula Munson, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education from BGSU.

Only “one minor complication” remains, Mark Munson said—he assumes the presidency of the Ohio Choral Directors Association this month. But his main duty is planning the annual OCDA conference for June 2006, and he figures that can be done yet this summer. “I can do it via Internet,” he said with a smile.