Student Spotlight: Nigel Floreska, Trumpet
If sophomore Nigel Floreska's father hadn't missed the mail-in deadline, Floreska would have never been born. His father was a high school band director at the time, and had been applying for Essentially Ellington, the nation's most prominent high school jazz competition. But since he missed the mail-in deadline, there was no other option but to hand it in in person to the program director, Floreska's mother.
"My dad was a music educator and played in Jimmy Heath's jazz band and through that knew a lot of members in the JLCO," Floreska said. "My mom was the JLCO's director of education for about 14 years. I grew up going into the city for early childhood jazz education classes, hanging out with my mom's colleagues. Members of the band would babysit me while my mom had to go do stuff."
The music environment Floreska grew up in allowed him to have a unique experience.
"The environment I grew up in was very consummate about music," Floreska said. "Everyone in the family plays a little bit of piano and has an instrument of choice. In a literal way my dad being a brass player (bass trombone) and a music teacher assured me that my embouchure would be as perfect as it could be. There was a very high achieving culture and a lot of high expectations, but a lot of opportunities. Being a part of a musician family helps you to appreciate the value of having a skill, understanding that it's important to have something you care about."
When the MMB got to collaborate with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) during the 2022 season, Floreska saw his two worlds collide. But he had to overcome another challenge: he did not make block for the show.
"That was a really hard show to not make for me," Floreska said. "It would have been easier if it had been any other show. I felt like I had disappointed them. Being on the reserve field gave me that chance to interact with them more. It was a total collision of every world I had been a part of: my childhood, my mom's early career, my great uncle who was president of UMS (University Musical Society) arranged the meetings with JLCO every year, and my dad was there. It was quite incredible."
The reserve members at the Penn State game made the performance possible. Together, students moved over a thousand pounds of equipment onto the field and set up all necessary tech in under 30 seconds.
"We had six or seven risers that needed five people each to carry them and had chairs, stands, the piano, speakers, the drum kit, audio equipment," Floreska said. "The amount of coordination that went into everything was insane. The first time we did it, it took three minutes. We had a special tech rehearsal after everyone else was gone. At first only three tech people were wiring all the sound. It took them four minutes to set up everything, so I went up to Dr. Frey and asked about helping them to cut down time. I said I wanted to do this for a career, and they asked if anyone had experience. There were a few people who played guitar and bass and knew what to plug in, so we got five to ten more volunteers to help. That's when I ended up wiring Wynton Marsalis' mic."
In his senior year of high school, Floreska attended Interlochen School for the Performing Arts. While the school has stellar music programs, they do not have a marching band.
"2022 was my first year in a marching band," Floreska said. "Putting together halftime shows and marching in formation was not something I could imagine. It was a challenge to have faith that the work I did was helping; having four days to learn traditional step, marching, lock step and then learning dots. I was given a piece of paper and didn't know what any of it meant."
During his junior year in high school, Floreska took a physics class and realized he had an interest in STEM. It was this physics class that gave him the confidence to apply to Michigan's College of Engineering.
"I don't have a single family member with a career in STEM," Floreska said. "No one in my family has taken calc three before. I had been so involved with trumpet for the majority of my life. While at Interlochen, I decided I didn't just want to pursue trumpet performance as a career by itself. During covid, I got into music production, recording tech and synthesizers. I spent the whole year studying nothing but music, aside from two half-credit English courses and part of AP Calc. I had been doing so much music for so long, I wanted to try something a little different: the opportunity to meet non-musicians and build skills that are necessary to augment whatever career I wanted. Now, I have the music skills from Interlochen and tech skills from my experience in engineering."
The Performing Arts Technology (PAT) program is a program within SMTD that explores concepts of sound engineering in the performing arts and music technology and production. Within the PAT program, there is a production and technology bachelor of science that has an electrical engineering component built in. In the winter of 2024, Floreska was accepted into the program to pursue a degree in Sound Engineering.
Floreska is also a part of the ArtsEngine Living and Learning Community. ArtsEngine is a program housed in Bursley founded in the collaboration of the Art and Engineering schools at Michigan to give students an interdisciplinary education.
"In ArtsEngine, I learned about the things that I'd tried to teach myself, like Max/MSP, a fully customizable modular synth coding language," Floreska said. "I loved the community that formed in the hall. I also loved the collaborative creative project. My group had three of my great friends from the program already, so our meetings were fun. The whole concept of the project was to bring attention to falsified green energy projects. We came up with an insane idea of making electricity with pickles and then created devices that we presented as refined versions of pickles; pickle energy, green energy things and wrote an exposé exposing the lie. We had access to the creation space in Bursley; a sewing machine, 3D printer, fabric, drawing equipment. We got to make fake advertisements for the company. Having resources and the opportunity to work on something like that was great."
Floreska served as a rank leader in the 2023 season and as a part of the 2024 Michigan Winter Ensemble.
