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Four years ago, Greg Jukes tested acoustics at The Music Center at Strathmore in Bethesda as a Montgomery Blair High School senior. Last week, Jukes was back at Strathmore teaching second-graders about music.
The school's math, science and computer science magnet program in Silver Spring demanded a senior research project — and Jukes, who played vibraphone in the jazz band, worked with architects comparing sound data from the completed hall with corresponding data from a scale model.
The spring of his senior year, Jukes, 22, a North Potomac native, made his concerto debut in the venue after winning grand prize in the National Philharmonic and Maryland Classic Youth Orchestra's first concerto competition.
Last week, Jukes performed before 10,000 second-graders from Montgomery County Public Schools over three days at the 6th annual Strathmore Student Concerts.
Students heard the National Philharmonic play Leonard Bernstein's "Overture to Candide," "Little Train of Capaira" by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and other compositions. Jukes narrated Russell Peck's "The Thrill of the Orchestra." He describes the piece as "a more contemporary version of Benjamin Britton's ‘Guide to the Orchestra,' which for a long time was the go-to to piece for introducing young audiences to the instruments of the orchestra and the orchestra itself."
As narrator, Jukes explained how the instruments worked as musicians played — brass instruments "have coiled metal tubes" and musicians "make their sounds by bumping their lips," for example.
When he described the woodwinds, musicians held up flutes, oboes, a piccolo, an English horn, clarinets and bassoons as the brass family and percussionists played in the background.
The goal: To help the young audience gain an understanding and excitement of the orchestra.
"The words themselves shouldn't really be the focus of the piece," said Jukes of his eight-minute theatrical narration. "They should be directing the ears and the eyes of the audience to what they're experiencing."
Jukes began playing drums at age 5 and piano lessons a few years later, he said. He joined bands at Rachel Carson Elementary, Ridgeview Middle School and Blair, where he played drums and vibraphone. By 12, he played in the Montgomery County Youth Orchestra and in high school he performed with the Wildwood Summer Theater Company, an all-youth theater company in Washington, D.C.
He attended the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University then joined Tales & Scales, a professional theater, dance and musical group in Evansville, Ind., where he now lives.
An "all-around percussionist," Jukes now plays "everything from snare drum, timphony, marimba, vibraphone, xylophone and all the little toys in between, maracas, tambourines, triangles," he said.
Along with second graders, he enjoyed hearing performances by this year's contest winners — Rhea Chung of Potomac, a violinist and freshman at the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda; Lauren Song of Potomac, a violinist and junior at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda and Josh Chik of Rockville, a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville.
