2016 Student Commencement Speech: Daniel Hersog

"Mostly I’ll Miss the Soundtrack"

Graduating Master's Jazz Composition Major Daniel Hersog Was Selected as Student Speaker for Commencement 2016

Good afternoon parents, family, distinguished guests, and faculty. Most importantly, a good afternoon to my fellow graduates of 2016. We are the 144th graduating class at New England Conservatory. A lot of things have changed since NEC's first commencement exercises, but some things have remained the same. Our passion for music, our drive for success, our inability to pass solfège exams the first time round, and the hourly rate for an on campus job has remained consistent. We haven’t had it easy my friends, as a class we have faced our fair share of adversity. We’ve looked Stratis square in the eye, steadied our breathing, and sight read melodies in alto cle … Or at least I think it was an alto clef. We created a semester’s worth of poems in our last 12 hours of Ruth Lepson’s class. With our heads held high, we submitted our fifth paper revision to Helen Greenwald … even though we knew it was identical to our fourth. We learned about retrograde inversion, 12-tone matrices, harmonic displacement, hypermeter, metric superimpositions, and up until the exams we even thought we understood these concepts. We slowed down John Coltrane solos to 10 percent, in a fleeting effort that our transcriptions would be accurate enough to pass the scrutiny of Brian Levy. We maintained a complex mental rolodex of who had the most meal plan money left on their cards, because some days it was a free lunch made everything else possible.

New England Conservatory has been my musical home for two years now. And putting it very lightly, I’m going to miss it. I’ll miss my friends, I’ll miss my teachers, but mostly I’ll miss the soundtrack. When I arrived here two years ago, NEC was making T shirts that said “fight the silence.” Well the verdict is in, and I think we have won that battle. I experienced many things in my two years at NEC, and I don’t think silence was one of them… I’m not talking about a certain Peruvian trumpet player whose wide vibrato bounced through the halls of our residence hall, or the 7am jackhammering on St. Botolph. Rather I’m talking about Pictures at an Exhibition, Ravel’s Bolero, and Mahler 5. I will miss hearing violinists deftly execute the Scottish Fantasy, hearing arias sung in Italian French and German, I will miss hearing classical saxophonists work on their extended techniques. OK, I take that back…… I could absolutely live in a world where I didn’t hear classical saxophonists work on their extended techniques, that actually sounds fantastic. I will miss hearing pianists play Goldberg Variations, jazz majors playing Charlie Parker, CI majors singing Tom Waits, and I will miss the fact it was all the in same building, on the same floor, and all in the same hallway. Friends, many of us are entering a world where you can’t sing a scat solo on an elevator, do a vocal warmup in a cafeteria, and where there is little if any tolerance for free buzzing.

I enrolled at New England Conservatory looking to be challenged, seeking inspiration, and hoping for world-class mentorship. I found those things, and so much more. I thought attending an elite conservatory meant getting yelled at by tyrannical professors, practicing night and day in an effort to avoid public humiliation at rehearsals, and trembling with fear before private lessons. Instead I found the opposite. I found teachers invested in their student’s success, teachers whose skills extended far past their own instrumental virtuosity, their talents reaching beyond the stage and into their classrooms and studios. I found peers eager to tell you how well they thought you played, and even more eager to lend a kind word when frustration got the better of you. I saw Rebecca Teeters stand on this stage and state that NEC is a family, and that means we will still love you, even when you’re out of tune.

To be truthful, I am very daunted at the prospect of being this year’s commencement speaker. It’s easy to feel unworthy to represent this group of students. I can’t begin to comprehend the breadth and depth of the skills my fellow students possess. I will graduate with improvisers, historians, theorists, percussionists, wind players, brass players, opera singers, string players, composers, and conductors. I have a very simple message for all of you … and that message is "thank you."

Thank you for your concerts in Jordan Hall. I don’t know how many times I left a concert with a renewed sense of focus and enough inspiration to get me through the week. Thank you for your fearless improvising, your perfect ensemble playing, and your inspiring compositions. Thank you for your recitals. Thank you for staying up late and practicing. When it was 12:30 on a Monday night, and I thought about going to bed, I only had to listen down the hall for the motivation to keep going.

I would like to leave you with an excerpt from a previous year's commencement speech. In 1910, George Chadwick stood on this stage and delivered this eloquent phrase. 106 years later, this idea perfectly sums up my feelings about this event today.

“The representatives of this class, who have done themselves and their Alma Mater such great credit to-day as singers and players, may have long and successful careers, but it is not probable that they will often exercise their talents under more auspicious circumstances, or before a greater assembly of their friends and well wishers, than are here at present.”

Photo by Miro Vintoniv