LFHS Graduate Carl Seale Passes

Former Valley Symphony Orchestra conductor, composer, UTPA music professor dies at 78

Carl Seale, a pioneer in the Rio Grande Valley arts community and longtime conductor of the region’s orchestra, died Wednesday afternoon. He was 78.

A University of Texas-Pan American music professor and prolific composer and visual artist, Seale helped oversee the evolution of Pan American Orchestra into the Valley Symphony Orchestra. He died of Parkinson’s disease, according to an obituary from his family. Seale’s impact on the Valley was “monumental,” said Marian Monta, a former UTPA colleague.

“He kept the symphony alive and thriving long enough for people to realize how necessary it was,” she said. “He helped to develop people’s taste and interest.”
Born in 1936 at Athens — a town southeast of Dallas that dubs itself the “Black-Eyed Pea Capital of the World — Seale grew up in Fort Worth and moved with his family to the Valley in 1951. He graduated from La Feria High School in 1954. The first in his family to attend college, Seale eventually earned a doctorate in music from North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), and other music degrees from Baylor University and the University of Louisville.

In 1971, he returned to the Valley to take a job teaching at UTPA, where he stayed for the next three decades. For Seale, the Valley was integral to his identity.

“He really loved the Valley,” said his son Erren. “Both he and my mother are talented and could have chosen to live in other places and could have chosen to do other things with their art, but they were devoted to this area.”

Carl Seale is survived by his wife of 56 years, Jan Epton Seale, who was the Texas poet laureate in 2012. Seale headed UTPA’s music department for eight years. Upon his retirement from the university in 2001, he was awarded the titles of conductor emeritus and professor emeritus. But even with his honors, he was fond of enjoying less highbrow pleasures.

“He was more fun-loving than people would think,” Erren Seale said. “If he had an excuse to dress up for a costume party or a silly church function, he would come up with a good costume. He was not always the distinguished gentleman.”

Over the course of his 20-year struggle with Parkinson’s, Seale was forced to give up making music. But he still composed and turned much of his attention to the visual arts.

He was featured in a 2007 Monitor article about how he turned palm fronds and seed pods into art.

“The pods will sort of dictate for me what they are going to be,” Seale said at the time. “I made a large elephant out of several of them, combined several of them using different pods.” But music was his true passion. In his early years as a composer, he also worked odd jobs behind the scenes of the symphony to ensure its success. That included driving the equipment truck and arranging chairs and music stands for concerts. His efforts were not in vain.

“We have a symphony, and we have things to thank for that,” Erren Seale said. “He was the conductor of that symphony for (more than 20 years). And he brought it into what it is today.”-courtesy of The Monitor.