Catherine Jeanette Brown Lang Titus

1933 -  

Catherine Lang Titus, organist and choir director, was extensively involved in music for over twenty years as a serious music student and as a teacher in the Seventh-day Adventist school system at all levels. She then graduated from law school and practiced law full time for over two decades.

Catherine was born in Loma Linda, California, one of two daughters born to Delmer J. and Marion Sanderson Brown, and spent her childhood and teenage years in Takoma Park, Maryland; Parkersburg, West Virginia; and Orlando, Florida. Both parents were physicians and involved in music, her father being a pianist and her mother a singer and choir director who directed church choirs wherever she lived.

Catherine started piano lessons with her aunt, Frances L. Brown, at age six and in seventh grade added lessons on organ. She subsequently played multiple instruments during her high school years at Forest Lake and Collegedale academies in Florida and Tennessee, respectively, graduating from the latter in 1951.

She attended Southern Missionary College, now Southern Adventist University, for two years and then transferred to Emmanuel Missionary College, now Andrews University, where she completed a B.A. in music in 1955 with organ as her primary performance area. While at EMC, she studied organ with Verne Kelsey and piano with Perry Beach.

Brown started her teaching career at Mt. Pisgah Academy in North Carolina in 1955. In 1958 she accepted a teaching position at Union College in Nebraska, where she taught organ, music theory, and counterpoint for two years. In the summers of 1958 and 1959, she pursued graduate study at Columbia University Teachers College in New York, studying with noted organist Marilyn Mason, who was on leave from the University of Michigan. She was inspired by this experience and has kept in touch with Mason since that time.

In 1959 she married Darrell W. Lang, and a year later Stephen, the first of three children, was born. From seventh grade until this time she had played as a church organist wherever she lived. Her role as mother to Stephen and then Gregory and Caralynn, later Offenhauser, who were born in 1963 and 1968, restricted her involvement in music for most of that decade.

Lang returned to teaching, giving organ lessons to academy students at Vallejo Drive SDA church in Glendale, California, while also serving as minister of music and director of the fifty-member choir at Eagle Rock SDA Church from 1972 to 1976. She also taught elementary school music in grades 5-8 at Glendale Academy in California from 1970 to 1972.

At this time Lang attended law school and, beginning in 1978, practiced law until 2000, when she retired. From 1982 to 1986, she was listed in Who's Who Among Women in Law. She married Edward D. Titus in 1990 and they were living in Glendale, California, when he died in 2003. She still resides there.

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Source: Information provided Catherine Brown Lang Titus, May 2011.