Bowling Green, Ky. - Two new members will be inducted into the Western Kentucky University Music Department’s Wall of Fame during Sunday afternoon’s annual Homecoming Concert.

This year’s inductees are Sheila Harris Jackson, a 1978 WKU graduate, and Franz Joseph Strahm, director of WKU’s Music Department from 1910-1935. The Wall of Fame, which began in 1997, is located on the third floor of the Ivan Wilson Fine Arts Center.

The University Choir and the Symphonic Band will perform the Homecoming Concert at 3 p.m. at Van Meter Auditorium. Admission is free.

Strahm, a native of Germany, studied piano under Franz Liszt before coming to the United States in 1891 to play in a Nashville orchestra and teach at the Nashville Conservatory of Music. He became director of Western’s Music Department in 1910, a position he held until 1935, and taught on the music department faculty until his death on June 26, 1941.

In 1926, Strahm’s teaching assignments included serving as the first faculty director of the Western band. Active throughout his life as a composer, his numerous compositions included the “Kentucky State Normal March” (1911), the “B.G.B.U. March” (1919), written for the Bowling Green Business University, and the music to Western’s alma mater “College Heights.” During his distinguished career he was a director of bands, orchestras, choirs, a concert pianist and an organist.

At Western, Jackson studied with Ohm Pauli, a 1998 Wall of Fame inductee. The native of Franklin later attended the Curtis Institute of Music where she was a student of Todd Duncan, the original Porgy in Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” Dr. Vladamir Sokoloff and Sylvia Olden Lee. She was an award winner in the National Association of Teachers of Singing competition, the recipient of the William Paterson University Scholar’s Award, the Lincoln Foundation Scholarship Award, the New Jersey Governor’s Teacher Award, the Western Kentucky Vocal Music Scholarship, and a complete Scholarship and Stipend to the Curtis Institute.

A noted operatic soprano, Jackson has appeared with the Houston Grand Opera, the New York City Opera, the Pennsylvania Opera, the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Academy of Music, the Bermuda Fine Arts Festival and in the off-Broadway musical “Spectrum.” She has given performances at the Teatro Real (Madrid, Spain), the Bellini Opera House (Italy), the Bregenzer Opera Festival (Austria), Samedis Musicaux de Chartres (France) and Carnegie Hall. Her career has allowed her to work with conductors Andrew Litton, Leonard Bernstein, Gian-Carlo Menotti and Christopher Keene.

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For information, contact John Carmichael at (270) 745-3751.