A Life: ‘All of us were better for having known’ Becky Luce

A fixture in the Upper Valley music community, Becky Luce, shown directing in 2018, taught music in the Lebanon, Plainfield, Windsor, and Hanover school districts. She served as Director of the Upper Valley Community Band and the Upper Valley Music Center’s Children’s Chorus. (Family photograph)

A fixture in the Upper Valley music community, Becky Luce, shown directing in 2018, taught music in the Lebanon, Plainfield, Windsor, and Hanover school districts. She served as Director of the Upper Valley Community Band and the Upper Valley Music Center’s Children’s Chorus. (Family photograph) Family photograph

Becky Luce loved walks in the woods with her dog, Odi, including in May 2021, shortly after her last of many radiation treatments. The treatment, she wrote at the time, was “the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through.” (Family photograph)

Becky Luce loved walks in the woods with her dog, Odi, including in May 2021, shortly after her last of many radiation treatments. The treatment, she wrote at the time, was “the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through.” (Family photograph) Family photograph

Becky Luce in 2020 at the High Horses Center for Equine-Assisted Services in Sharon, V. An avid equestrian in her early life, Luce returned to her love of horses in recent years, volunteering her time at High Horses. (Family photograph)

Becky Luce in 2020 at the High Horses Center for Equine-Assisted Services in Sharon, V. An avid equestrian in her early life, Luce returned to her love of horses in recent years, volunteering her time at High Horses. (Family photograph) Family photograph

Becky Luce enjoyed a breadth of interests in addition to her passion for music. She was an avid birder and photographer. She poses in oversized boots that are part of a Lowcountry art installation in Beaufort, S.C. (Family photograph)

Becky Luce enjoyed a breadth of interests in addition to her passion for music. She was an avid birder and photographer. She poses in oversized boots that are part of a Lowcountry art installation in Beaufort, S.C. (Family photograph) —

By CHRISTINA DOLAN

Valley News Staff Writer

Published: 01-19-2025 6:01 PM

Modified: 01-20-2025 7:54 AM


LEBANON — Rebecca “Becky” Luce inspired generations of students to love music and believe in their own potential, even at stages in life when self-confidence seemed in short supply.

“She was the kind of music teacher you see in the movies,” Luce’s former student Sarah Moffitt Teeven said by phone recently. “The ones who teach more than how to sing a song or play an instrument.”

A fixture in the Upper Valley’s music community for nearly five decades, Luce taught music in the Lebanon, Plainfield, Windsor and Hanover school districts. She took a teaching job in the Lebanon School District in 1976 and retired from the Ray School in Hanover 2023, living in the Upper Valley until her death in December at age 70 after a battle with cancer.

Among her many roles outside the classroom, Luce served as director of the Upper Valley Community Band and the Upper Valley Music Center’s Children’s Chorus. She also directed the children’s choir at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Hartford.

“She did everything musical in the Upper Valley,” Nan Munsey, a former colleague at Lebanon Junior High, said.

Born in South Carolina, Becky Luce’s family moved to Martha’s Vineyard when she was 8. Growing up on the Massachusetts island, she became interested in horsemanship, earning a college scholarship in equine studies. Instead, though, she pursued a degree in music education at Keene State College.

“She was so in love with her profession and so passionate about teaching music and developing relationships with kids, she wrapped them up in the music,” Luce’s friend and former Lebanon teaching colleague Donna Largent said.

“And music saved a lot of kids.”

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Luce had a particular gift for connecting with middle school students.

“It takes a special person to teach junior high,” Munsey said. “You either have it or you don’t. She had it four hundred percent.”

The music room became a sanctuary for many students, especially the shy ones who needed a place to express themselves.

In 1983, Teeven heard about auditions for a summer stock production of the musical “Annie” at the New London Barn Playhouse. She desperately wanted to be in the show but was met with ambivalence and even discouragement from friends and family.

“But not Becky. Becky was like, ‘You’ve got this’,” she said.

Luce and Teeven worked together after school on the audition material, and Teeven earned a role as one of the orphans. On opening night, Luce was in the audience, waving.

“When you’re a 12-year-old girl and you’re sort of shy and awkward, and someone believes in you, it changes your DNA a little bit,” Teeven said.

That feeling of being believed in has stayed with Teeven throughout her life. “I’m sure she did this for thousands of kids. I know she did. But it made you feel like you were the only one,” Teeven said.

Nick Lacasse thinks about Becky Luce whenever he watches the movie “Jaws.”

“It’s my all-time favorite movie,” he said, because Luce is his favorite music teacher.

Luce was an extra in the film in the summer of 1974. For just a few seconds, she can be spotted in a crowd scene where the myopic mayor of Amity urges beachgoers toward the ocean.

Lacasse enjoys pointing her out to his kids when they watch the movie together.

“Everybody thought she was cool,” he said.

A 1986 graduate of Lebanon High School, Lacasse met Luce as a shy third grader at the Seminary Hill School.

“She would make you feel like you were the most special person in the room,” he said.

Lacasse began singing in the school choir in elementary school and later earned a spot in the New Hampshire All-State Choir two years in a row.

“I was a soprano the first time and a tenor baritone the second time,” he said, laughing at the impact of puberty on his singing.

“I would have never done it if it weren’t for her encouragement.”

Luce was part of a close-knit team of teachers in the Lebanon district, and that collegiality wasn’t lost on their students.

“Our teachers were all friends, and it was like you were with family when you were with them,” he said. “It created a really warm, wonderful environment for kids.”

Luce’s boundless curiosity led her down many paths and enriched her music teaching.

She organized an exchange program between music students from Martha’s Vineyard and the Upper Valley. On long bus rides for class trips to Montreal or Massachusetts, she would often be found leading students in song to pass the time.

“A note by itself doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning,” Upper Valley Music Center Executive Director Benjamin Van Vliet said.

But Luce’s breadth of interest, curiosity, and ability to make connections “came together in the music and that’s what made it so special,” he said.

She was a giving person who didn’t seek an easy path through life.

“She was courageous, not just in her teaching life,” Largent, one of Luce’s former colleagues, said.

In 1986, Luce left her position in the Lebanon schools to travel to Honduras to undertake teaching and missionary work at a school in San Pedro Sula.

“My decision to go on this mission was entirely a personal one,” she told the Valley News in the months before her trip. “I felt I had all I wanted materially but wanted something more spiritually,” she said.

Her missionary work was funded and sponsored by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in White River Junction, where she was a congregant as well as a choir director.

In 1989, she adopted a 4-month-old boy, Aaron, becoming the white parent of a Black child in a region with limited racial diversity.

“He is the joy of my life,” she told the Valley News in 1992. “I worry that if Aaron continues to be tall and strong that people will be afraid of him.”

Efforts to reach Aaron Luce for this story were not successful.

Around 2018, Luce rekindled her interest in horses and began working with the High Horses Center for Equestrian-Assisted Services in Sharon.

There, she volunteered her time assisting with the horses, the clients and the trainers.

“I was amazed at how she could take any situation and find and spread joy and empathy,” High Horses Executive Director Alex Keats said.

It was at High Horses that Luce found her empathy and ability to form deep connections extended to horses in a way that she had not encountered in her previous riding experience.

“She found a home here,” Keats said. “It was a whole missing piece that she hadn’t had access to.”

In 2022, when her cancer returned, Luce transitioned from a volunteer to a client.

She worked in a therapeutic capacity with Kora, a warmblood horse that despite herself enduring injury and hardship, was “beautiful and amazingly sweet,” Keats said.

Luce was buried with a bit of Kora’s mane and tail, a tribute to the profound connection between the two.

“All of us were better for having known her,” Keats said.

Luce loved animals, especially her dog, Obi, and was a talented photographer and avid birder.

“She wanted to experience things,” Munsey, one of her former colleagues, said. “She could take a small event and appreciate it one hundred percent.”

Her illness did not diminish her capacity for empathy and relationship-building.

“Even when she faced things like cancer, she looked to who else she could help,” Largent said, raising money for cancer patients and reaching out to help wherever she could.

“She was one in a million; a bright light,” Lacasse said.

The battle with cancer was one she’d fought and won once before, completing a grueling 31 rounds of radiation therapy for breast cancer in 2020.

The treatment was “by far the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through,” physically and emotionally, she wrote on social media a year later.

But to her friends, nothing seemed to dampen her spirit.

“She approached everything with enthusiasm and joy and you couldn’t be in her presence and not feel that and want it for yourself,” Teeven said.

Christina Dolan can be reached at cdolan@vnews.com or 603-727-3208.