Lynn Kraehling

Director of Music

Lynn Campbell Kraehling was born in Quincy, IL, to a Presbyterian mother and a Lutheran (MO Synod) father and was raised in the small farming community of Warsaw alongside the Mississippi River.  He began singing in a children’s choir before he could read, and by the age of 12 began playing organ for services at both his parents’ churches.  By the age of 14, he was studying privately with the Professor of Organ at Western Illinois University, and it was with this professor’s family that he first traveled to Europe.  Lynn’s family moved to the Twin Cities before his last year of HS, and there he attended Macalester College, studying organ with Edward Berryman and singing under the choral direction of Dale Warland, a protege of Robert Shaw.  Before pursuing his MM in Organ Performance at the Manhattan School of Music, he lived abroad in Zurich and Berlin, where he sang with the Heinrich Schütz Kreis.  In NYC, Lynn sang with the Sine Nomine Singers and worked as a media print buyer/planner for the world’s largest ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi.  Eventually, he moved to the Bay Area, where he sang with the SF Choral Artists and worked as the Director of Music in several Bay Area parishes before joining the faculty of Ave Maria University as an Adjunct Professor of Music and University Organist.  At AMU, he was received into the full communion of the Catholic Church and was subsequently recruited by the Ford brothers to become Director of Music at Star in 2017.  Notably, many of the congregational Psalm Refrains sung at liturgies have been arranged by Lynn.