New Hyde Park Memorial High School has welcomed a new orchestra teacher, Mr. Kramer, marking a new era of musical productions and music-based clubs in school.
Before his time at NHP, Mr. Kramer started his career in the entertainment industry with musical direction/show writing & arranging for theme parks like Hershey and Six Flags. After this, Mr. Kramer returned to his classical training, performing with several professional orchestras, including the Wausau Symphony Orchestra and the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra. He later came to New York City, where he appeared as an onstage performer with the North American tour of the Broadway production “Johnny Cash: Ring of Fire,” as well as in “Cirque Dreams Jungle Fantasy” at the MGM Grand.
He has also performed alongside Debbie Gibson in her Sony Japan music video “I Love You” and later joined Gibson and Tiffany on the “Journey Through the ’80s” tour. Though his main instrument is violin, he is proficient in many instruments, such as the fiddle, piano, guitar, mandolin and jaws harp.
“I LOVE music. ALL music. ALL music is valid. In orchestra classes across the country we typically focus on classical music. This is very important and also sets up great technique to be carried into all genres. HOWEVER, I made most of my living playing pop, rock, country, bluegrass, broadway, etc. in addition to classical orchestras. I wanted to have a way to teach students how these other genres of music are typically taught, learned, and performed. This is NOT the same way as a classical orchestra. I think it is important to teach ALL genres of music. This is a great way to do that,” Mr. Kramer said.
This versatility has inspired Mr. Kramer to form ABC: Anything But Classical, which is a new club that has shifted students to playing a new style of music. It has also become proof that the students of New Hyde Park can play more than classical music. On December 9, ABC made its debut with an interactive performance. The club did a “name that tune” game with the audience, where they played a few seconds from a song and had the audience guess. This game featured songs such as “Let It Go” from “Frozen” and “Happy” from “Despicable Me 2.” The club also played pop songs, “The Middle” by Zedd, “Party Rock” by LMFAO and even student composed works such as “67” by senior Taylor Li.
“Prior to our concert, I had never composed music a day in my life. I knew if I genuinely composed it probably wouldn’t sound good, so when Mr. Kramer asked for student compositions I thought I would troll,” Li said. “I composed my piece because I didn’t want to do my Calc homework (sorry Mr. Sime) and wanted to throw some fun at my fellow musician’s orchestral habits. It turns out Mr. Kramer really liked my piece and we ended up playing it at our concert. ABC introduced me to a new style of music that I had the privilege to write and perform.”
“It taught me new genres like we’re starting to look into jazz, free improvisation, and pop violin. For our last concert we did a little improvisation and it was a solo for Jason and it sounded amazing. In the same concert, we did guess the movie and played short bits of movie songs like from ‘Wicked,’ ‘Frozen,’ ‘Greatest Showman’ and plenty more. Aside from the exploration of orchestral genres NHP classes don’t cover as much, ABC gave me one of the most rare concert experiences with how our last performance was interactive with the audience for our guess that movie event,” senior Andrea Ross Pineda said.
While they have only performed at two concerts so far, there is still more to see from the new ABC club. Many NHP students have referred to it as a chance to step out of the world of classical music, letting their audience enjoy a new sound at the same time.
