My grandmother, Anna Jean Hershey Myers (1926-2012)

I sat down to write this blog and I can't help but find myself drawn to a personal event that recently occurred in my life.  I meant to write about my upcoming concerts with Meredith Mecum and the practice that is going in to learning four new pieces in a short amount of time, but I'm drawn back to this recent event. I had trouble typing the first sentence without spontaneously bursting in to tears.

On February 15, 2012, my grandmother, Anna Jean Hershey Myers, died. She was 85 years old.  Anna Jean was an incredible woman. She was born in western Pennsylvania, grew up in York Springs, PA where her father, Moses Samuel Hershey, began a chain of stores, Hershey 5-10¢ (five and dime), which eventually grew to cover a large portion of northeastern states.

After graduating from Penn State with a degree in Home Economics (she could butcher a cow and sew a dress, probably at the same time) she married my grandfather, whom she grew up with and who was, himself, a Penn State grad (and one of the first Penn State tailgaters -- so there ya' go) and who became an executive in the Howard Johnson hotel/restaurant chain. They raised their four children (two sets of two, ten years apart), Cindy, Rick, Candra (my dear mommy), and Mark in cities all over the east coast: Philadelphia, Syracuse, Atlanta, Mechanicsburg, to name a few.

Anna Jean with her ten grandchildren.

She had ten grandchildren, Alysia, Allyson, Allan, Ben, Kate, Brennan, Cullen, Hannah, Mia, and me. Just before she died, Ben and his wife Beth had a daughter, Claire, which finally put a stop to her incessant, "I sure would like a great-grandchild soon," talk.

My grandmother loved to sew, knit, and make all of the things. For one, each grandchild received a knitted Christmas stocking. Sometimes Anna Jean was a bit slow getting these things done.  You see, she had a lot on her plate, what with her crossword puzzles, Jeopardy watching, newspaper reading, and…nope, that's it.  I'm not sure that Hannah and Mia (the youngest of the grandchildren) ever received their own stockings from grandmother. Or maybe they were half-finished? When I needed to make a small pad that protects the back of my cello, Grandmother helped me pick the fabric, make a pattern, and sew it together.  I use that small, maroon, velvet pad when I play the cello today. My mother and Cindy like to joke that she never vacuumed because she was "allergic" to the dust (really, she was just allergic to vacuuming) and when Cindy came to visit, the vacuum cleaner was sitting in the foyer, plugged in, ready to go, so that Cindy could vacuum her way in to the house.

In my own mind, Anna Jean is the reason that I'm a musician. Before I began playing the cello, I played the violin, and I tried desperately to fit my tiny little arms and fingers around my grandfather's full size instrument. That didn't work so well, and I eventually switched to the cello. In fourth grade, I picked up the saxophone to play in the band. My grandmother thought this was just wonderful as she had played the saxophone in the York Springs elementary school band, sometime around 1930. Somewhere in my apartment is a photo of this band, with both my grandmother and grandfather clutching their instruments.

The thought of Anna Jean honking away on a saxophone is one of the more hilarious images of her that I have in my mind. The other (which demonstrates how sheltered and protected she was as a child) is of her roller skating: Grandma Hershey, Anna Jean's mother, would only allow her to skate with one skate on, afraid that she'd fall and hurt herself if she wore both.  For those who know my mother, aunt, and uncles, it's clear that Anna Jean "protected" the first set of children (Cindy and Rick) in this same way, and left it up to fate with the second set (my mother and Mark), figuring, "hey, we got it right with the first two, the second two should turn out fine...?" For those who don't know my mother, aunt, and uncles: the first set are responsible and thoughtful, and the second set are wild and CUH-RAAAZY!  (and mildly responsible, harharhar)

All of that said, Anna Jean wasn't always wild about the music I was playing.  My youngest brother, Cullen, has been telling a story all weekend about a recital that I gave at Penn State that Grandmother came to. First, I should give some back story: Grandmother was never rude, she was always the perfect guest.  Usually, when she was out visiting with friends or family, she was was dependent on someone else to drive her home. When she was tired and ready to leave, she simply picked up her purse and held it on her lap. That was the signal.  Grandma was ready to go. Though I don't remember this, Cullen claims that I walked out on stage, sat down, and began to play my first piece (I know that this would have been the Hindemith Solo Sonata, which wasn't the easiest piece for my dear Grandmother to listen to).  About ten seconds in, Grandmother reached down, picked up her purse, and set it on her lap. She was ready to go.  Cullen claims that I saw this, and there was a noticeable sigh from the stage while I was playing.

She's a pirate!

Anna Jean was never unsupportive of any of her grandchildren.  She was always thrilled with our many accomplishments and eager to brag about us.  She was always so incredibly happy to see us when we stopped by.  Because the ten of us are spread out across the country, we didn't always make it to Mechanicsburg to visit.  A few years ago, we organized a Myers family reunion on Seabrook Island near Charleston, SC.  For the first time in a long while, Grandmother, her four children, and her ten grandchildren were visiting together at the same time.  As was usually the case, Grandmother was dressed up in some embarrassing outfit, a hula skirt or a pirate's garb.  She smiled the whole way, and only worried that her hair was mussed.

Anna Jean's entire family.

At her funeral, my uncle Mark said that in her last few months, when she was feeling worse and worse, she would still get her hair done, and when you came to visit and compliment her new hair-do, she would smile, strike a pose and just beam with delight.  One week before she died, Cullen and his girlfriend, Taryn, stopped in while home from Penn State.  Though she was exhausted and weak, she managed to gather all of her strength to smile and say hello, tell them how happy she was to see them, and ask them to come back soon.

My grandmother was an extraordinarily calm, patient, and kind person. I will miss her tremendously.

The Fifth Floor Collective and Queering the Pitch

What an exciting few weeks and months I’ve had! I haven’t updated this blog since Thanksgiving and life has been a roller coaster!  This post won’t be so “instructive” or hypothetical as my last few posts. Instead, I want to share what I’ve been up to and what I’ve been working on for the last two and a half months!

My first concert of the new year, 2012, was in Boston performing a special engagement concert on The Fifth Floor Collective’s second season. The program was a mixture of works that will be presented on my next Queering the Pitch (solo cello) program and two premieres for solo cello by Joseph M. Colombo and Andrew Paul Jackson, both members of The Collective.

Preparing these works was fascinating as these were the first pieces that I explicitly commissioned to be premiered as the part of a pre-determined concert. The two premiere pieces, Not I by Mr. Colombo and You are missing here. by Mr. Jackson, are starkly different in character and compositional style. Take a listen to both pieces on my SoundCloud page.

Joseph Colombo’s Not I is a work that I believe is very affectual, different for each person!  About the piece, Joe writes:

Not I plays with and is consumed by small melodic fragments that build up to larger structures of varying degrees and contours. Its primarily quiet dynamic plays against the intense and obsessive character of the music while momentarily giving way to shouts of hysteria. Instead of conveying a narrative, Not I expounds upon a single manic affect throughout its roughly ten minute duration.

From a cello standpoint, the piece is ridiculously difficult to both practice and perform. Though the composer notes call for the piece to be performed from memory with some small theatrics, I chose to perform the work with the score displayed on my computer screen with page turns made by the click of a foot-controlled pedal. This always seems like a fine idea, but never seems to work out perfectly in the end.

A quick aside: When I perform from my computer screen, I first learn the music from a paper score, so that it’s easier to make notes, add fingerings and bowings, and generally remind myself of the paper-ness and the organic nature of the score. Once I’ve learned the piece, I create a PDF of the marked-up document and read that document from my computer. Unfortunately, the timelines for many of the performances that I’ll be playing this winter/spring are quite short, and I never have more than a week to learn to play a piece from the computer. Tapping a pedal to turn a page is surprisingly difficult - it’s a motor skill that I didn’t learn in school!  Many things are bound to go wrong!

excerpt from J.M. Colombo's Not I

Back to Joe’s Not I: the piece moves consistently. It is obsessive and manic (which Joe marks in his instructions) and doesn’t let up more than a handful of times during the entire piece!  This makes it doubly difficult!  Not only is the piece extraordinarily difficult to perform from a right- and left-hand perspective, one must be extremely focused for the entire length of the performance. And this brings me back to the computer!  Pedal clicks which are too early or too late, unintended page skips (turning more than one page at a time and needing to quickly turn backward!), or a computer skipping to screen saver are all potential obstacles. I had to deal with some of these issues at multiple points during the Colombo work. That said, the piece was incredibly well received and was a mental joy to work on. I am a more focused performer having played this great piece. 

Andrew Paul Jackson’s piece, You are missing here., is quite different. The piece utilizes different sound worlds that split from the Colombo work (which is exactly what I wanted commissioning the guys to write these pieces)!  You are missing here. is a personal piece for Mr. Jackson:

Like most pieces I write, You are missing here, is not simply drawn from a single impetus, but is a confluence of strands as the piece was conceived during a long period of time in which the person most dear to me, my wife, was absent for long stretches of time due to her own exciting artistic pursuits.  In her absence, I found myself dusting off my cello and re-familiarizing myself with the instrument. After brushing up on solo works that I had once played, works by Hindemith, Rachmaninov, and of course, Bach, I began to view my time playing on the instrument from a creative guise. I started to communicated not just a feeling of solitary melancholy in her absence, but also capturing moments of joy and exhilaration that I wished to capture and share after the fact, like my trip to St. Petersburg that she unfortunately couldn’t join.

In effect, the piece became a deeply personal journal in which I was conveying a myriad of emotional states through the more visceral vantage of performer, rather than my more typically cerebral role of composer. In the absence of one partner, I became reacquainted with another and wrote a piece about - what else?...the absence of my other.

Practicing Andrew’s piece was not as “straightforward” in practice principles as the Colombo. There are many different techniques and tricky spots that one must execute - strings of false harmonics, strummed pizzicato in perfect fifths and extended positions, driving rhythmic sections that include tricky (but not nearly impossible) string crossings, fast finger changes and replacements, and strong chords which can’t be over-played, but still must be extremely present.  Breaking down sections in to smaller bits, and doing very little “full-piece” work makes learning a piece much faster and makes the learning more permanent. 

The two concerts that I played in Boston for The Fifth Floor Collective were a wonderful experience. I was able to be back at The Boston Conservatory for a performance in one of my favorite places, The Concert Room. The next night, I played a salon style concert at Carroll & Sons Art Gallery. This kind of concert is something that I’d like to do more of. In fact, I’ll be playing in another alternative venue in March, at Avant Garden in Houston, this time, my Queering the Pitch recital program.

My cello is happy to be in
Florida!

And what a wonderful transition (and shameless self-promotion)! This week I was a guest artist at the University of South Florida (USF) School of Music in Tampa, FL.  I arrived mid-week for a Queering the Pitch concert which featured the typical program that I’ve performed around the country over the past year, plus a new addition, the fantastic Tarantella for solo cello by the awesome composer, Dominick DiOrio (and played an encore by Marcos Balter)!

USF School of Music - yes, that's
my finger in the upper left

USF has just built brand-new facilities and their concert spaces are outstanding! I performed in Barness Recital Hall, a small recital space which has the best acoustics of any hall that I’ve had the opportunity to perform Queering the Pitch in! I was able to spend time with the cellists in Scott Kluksdahl’s studio after the performance and hear a number of them play the next day (I probably shouldn’t mention the beer garden they took me to after my performance)!

These young musicians were amazing to work with and talk to. Part of my time at USF was a lecture, something that terrified me to no end!  While I’m good at talking about myself (har har har!), who I’ve performed with, and what I’ve been doingI wasn’t sure if students who didn’t know me would be interested in hearing all of that talk!  They had some fantastic questions about commissioning new works, establishing a concert series locally and nationally, and how one promotes oneself in a world that is saturated with talented musicians. I was also privileged to hear a number of students in masterclass and individual lessons. Their responsiveness and musical maturity were astounding and I will be looking for a number of them to show up on my cellistic radar in the near future. To put it simply, the students at USF were a joy to work with and I look forward to returning next year!

With Scott and USF cellists

The past few weeks have been stressful and, simply, terrifying for me as a performer. I have jumped a few hurdles in a few short weeks that were daunting and unprecedented in my own young performance career.  I was able to reconnect with a dear friend at USF, get to know a few colleagues better, and meet new friends and colleagues in the cello studio!

OMG - That's my face!

Up next is the second round of Queering the Pitch recitals, this time with Meredith Mecum. We will be permiering new works by Dominick DiOrio, Brian Kelly, Steven Knell, and Bruce Trinkley. All of the works are in, all of them fantastic, and I am tremendously excited to begin practice this week. But not before a few days of well-deserved (if I do say so myself) relaxation - and classwork that I need to catch up on...doctorate, be damned!!

Some Yogi tea wisdom of the day: Be kind and compassionate and the whole world will be your friend.

Until next time, y'all!

Justin