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A 'legacy' for student musicians in Joliet

Alumnus will direct Joliet Central High School symphonic band in unique composition

By DENISE M

November 08, 2019 at 5:30 am CST

The concert will feature the concert band performing under the direction of student-teacher Alexis Sujka. The symphonic band, under the direction of Don Stinson, will also perform movements from Martin Ellerby’s Paris Sketches, Michael Markowski’s The Cave You Fear and Tempus Motus, written and conducted by Joliet Central choir director Steven Pyter. A meet and greet with Stegall will follow the performance.

The concert will feature the concert band performing under the direction of student-teacher Alexis Sujka. The symphonic band, under the direction of Don Stinson, will also perform movements from Martin Ellerby’s Paris Sketches, Michael Markowski’s The Cave You Fear and Tempus Motus, written and conducted by Joliet Central choir director Steven Pyter. A meet and greet with Stegall will follow the performance.

Stinson, who contacted Stegall about commissioning a piece for the band, said it's highly unusual for a school band to perform a piece composed for the band by an alumnus. As an aside, Stinson said another alumnus – Warren L. Wood, who later because speaker of the house for the Illinois House of Representatives – composed the JCHS loyalty song in 1927. And then in 1936, lawyer and businessman Charles S. Belsterling reworked a march he had composed for the JTHS band after being impressed with the quality of their music when it performed in New York. In terms of diversity, Stinson feels Stegall's contribution is also historic.

"Some of our students with similar backgrounds to Stegall can now say, 'Oh, well, I can do that, too,'" Stinson said. According to a news release from JCHS, Stegall is currently participating in the Universal/Dreamworks Film Music Diversity Initiative where he works closely with the film music teams of Universal Pictures, Focus Features and Dreamworks Animation. In 2016, he was selected as a Sundance Composer Lab Fellow held at Skywalker Ranch and has worked closely over the years with some of Hollywood's biggest composers, the release also said. In 2018, Stegall was asked to conduct the Camila Cabello orchestra live at the American Music Awards performance of her single "Consequences," Stegall said in an email. This year (2019) Stegall was asked to conduct the youth orchestra that closed the live telecast of the 2019 ESPY awards hosted by Tracey Morgan, he added.

Stegall said his upcoming projects include a short film titled “Canvas" for director Frank Abney, who works as one of the top animators at Pixar Animation Studios. Stegall is also scoring a feature film for Paramount Pictures due in theaters in 2020, he added. But although Stegall received his musical start at Joliet, first at Hufford Junior High School and then JCHS, where he participated in the symphonic band under the direction of Ted Lega, Stegall wasn’t thinking “composing” at the time. “I wanted to be on the radio playing sax,” Stegall said.

Stegall’s father had played bass, stepping away from music in favor of raising a family, Stegall said. And in eighth grade, Stegall received a Louis Armstrong jazz award, which fueled the notion Stegall could make a career out of playing the saxophone. But Stegall and his family had another pastime that also influenced him: watching movies. “Between junior year and my senior year in high school, we probably went to the movies one to three times a week,” Stegall said. “We saw a lot of movies in theaters and we rented a lot of movies. Sometimes we rented seven movies at a time from video stores. So there was a super-saturation of ingesting media at that time.”

Consequently, Stegall began collecting CDs of soundtracks. He can recall the first time the synchronization of music with a movie’s story made sense to him. Stegall was watching “Apollo 13” the summer of 1995 while preparing to attend graduate school The following year, Stegall liked the music to “Scream” so much, he sat through the ending credits just to get the name of the composer for the score: Marco Beltrami. Fast forward, after Stegall graduated from University of Southern California for film scoring, he served as Beltrami's intern for “I, Robot," he said. Stegall's been writing film scores for nearly 20 years now, he said. How does Stegall combat writers block? Consulting storyboards, listening to music and jumping rope. “I gets the blood circulating,” Stegall said about jumping rope. “It’s so randomly different than the actual task.”

Stegall said he is looking forward to Nov. 17. “I’m really excited about the opportunity,” Stegall said. “It’s such a rare thing for any school to be able to have a composer that’s an alumni to come and write a piece for their band. I hope people like the piece.” Stegall asks parents to encourage their children in their interests – whether it's music, math, politics or science – and provide the necessary tools to develop those interests. "Both my parents supported the decision to invest fully in the things I was clearly passionate about and it made all the difference you could hope for," Stegall wrote in an email.

KNOW MORE Wish list: “It might sound materialistic, but I’d love to record in London with the London Symphony Orchestra. That would be exciting.” Saxophone: “I still play the sax every now and then but not as much as I used to. I’m looking at it now; it’s nearby. But the purpose of the sax for me right now is telling a story. If the story I’m currently telling requires a sax, I’ll pull it out.” Words of wisdom: “Find something that speaks to your core in terms of the value and importance of why you want to do it. The 'why' can seem fleeting but if you figure out the 'why' behind it, it could help sustain you during the hard times and all the obstacles, because the obstacles are unavoidable.”

#Artworks Joliet Jermaine Stegall Don Stinson Joliet Central High School film score composer Hufford Junior High School Denise M. Baran-Unland