Jean Marie Widaman passed away peacefully on November 30, 2024, at age 81, after a brave battle with Alzheimer’s Disease. Jean was a member of the St. Mark’s Choir from spring 2019, when she moved to Berkeley, until autumn 2023, when she needed to move into assisted living, requiring relocation to Oakley, CA.
Jean was born in Phoenix. AZ, and grew up in Santa Monica, CA. She graduated Occidental College with a BA in English Literature, gained her secondary teaching credential at the University of Southern California, and was later awarded her Ph.D. in Music History from Brandeis University in MA. After post-doc work at M.I.T. and Boston College, she taught Music History at the University of Kansas, Bowling Green State University, and the University of Oklahoma. Homesick for Big Sur, where she’d lived in the early ’70’s, which felt like home to her, Jean packed up and moved back in 1991.
In Monterey County, she taught music in several K-8 school programs, lectured at U.C. Santa Cruz, and taught older adult music classes through Monterey Peninsula College. Jean was choir director for CSU Monterey Bay and the Naval Postgraduate School, as well as All Saints Episcopal Church in Carmel. She wrote and gave pre-concert lectures for the Monterey Symphony, Chamber Music Monterey Bay, and the Carmel Bach Festival.
Jean loved to sing and might be heard spontaneously breaking out into song anywhere, at any time. She loved poetry, nature, trees, flowers, the ocean, and beauty which she found in many places. Her final few years were difficult, discovering the day she moved to Berkeley that her breast cancer had recurred, then to be hit by the pandemic and its isolation as she was trying to make connections in a new community. She struggled with cognitive decline, progressing into Alzheimer’s, and needed increasing help to remain safe and healthy. Thanks to all of you who were her friends, her village.
Jean is survived by her birth-son, Steve Elbrecht, whom she loved dearly.