By David A. Sargent,Special to the Sun Journal
Lewiston native’s interest in the church and music leads to a medieval passion.

LEWISTON – The field of medieval music is not an ordinary career path.

Nevertheless, sometimes the pieces can fall in place for a lifelong but highly unusual interest to become a life’s work.

That’s happening for Robert C. Lagueux, son of Lewiston residents Ray and Susan Lagueux.

Last summer, Lagueux accepted a position as director of the Office of New Millennium Studies at Columbia College Chicago. It has been a direct result of following interests that had their seeds as far back as fifth grade when he learned to play drums and a few years later as he participated in the Lewiston High School marching band. He became deeply interested in both music history and church history.

“It dawned on me with college coming along that my combined interests added up to medieval music history,” he said.

“I started to think of myself as a medievalist,” Lagueux said. “The more I did that, the more I realized how exhilarating it was to combine all these things.”

He earned his master’s degree at Harvard University in 1997 and graduated magna cum laude in music and history, later receiving his doctorate from Yale University.

His research and studies have included music in French liturgical drama, ballets and Balinese music, as well as the medieval music played at clerical feasts at early Christmas celebrations in the French city of Laon.

Lagueux said he has researched more modern expressions of theology and spirituality including the social role of these themes in the Andrew Lloyd Webber rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

“Other popular music interests of mine include geek rock’ and the way in which specific pop groups define their audiences with overt or covert appeals to the esoteric,” he said.

In addition to being an experienced percussionist and able pianist, Lagueux has strong language skills in French, German, Latin, Italian and Spanish.

Lagueux was delighted to land the Chicago position that allows him to continue work in his special fields of interest.

The course material he has put together for the Columbia College Chicago seminar he’s teaching illustrates the eclectic approach he takes. Reading assignments include selections as diverse as Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

He is also qualified to teach course in ethnomusicology, particularly in the music of Java and Bali, and 20th-century American popular music including jazz and musical theater.

“I believe that education is not preparation for life; education is life,” he said. “What you don’t forget is the way you acquire the facts and what you do with them.”

Lagueux said he would like to return to New England, but he enjoys the Chicago area – although it was difficult several months ago to realize that calls of “Go Sox” referred to the Chicago White Sox and not the Boston Red Sox.”

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