11 minute read
Gen O
quartet of D notes, followed by C, a B-flat, and two more D’s dips into an F, up to an A, and down for a pair of G’s. This sequence fills the opening moments of video recorded in the lobby of Omaha’s Majestic Theater on November 3, 2018. Awestruck moviegoers were filmed slowly entering the theater, their numbers swelling with the music. Transcribed into verse, the notes read: “Mama…life had just begun…”
Behind the purling keys of a grand piano sits Luke Eckles. His skill, focus, and showmanship are on full display—as thousands more will see after the video’s upload to viral media outlet, NowThis News. As the rendition of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” waxes and wanes over widening eyes, the video frame reveals a puzzling vacancy: the shelf. Queen’s progressive, six-part suite—intro, ballad, solo, opera, interlude, and coda—is being performed, con brio, sans sheet music. Guided by memory alone, Eckles reaches the final, lingering keys; their plaintive toll quickly devoured by roaring applause. The then 14-year-old takes a bow. “I got Luke when he was probably in first grade, 6-years-old, little bitty thing,” recalled Cindy Wrenn, who’s offered private piano lessons for 18 of the 25 years she’s performed secretarial duties at Grace Abbott Elementary. “He had already taught himself to play with one finger, and he would peck out the ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ or ‘There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.’ He really loved that one!” “I thought to myself, ‘boy, do we have a lot of work to do with that fingering,’ but it was an easy switch-over for him,” she said. “He was just driven, you know? He was always self-motivated.”
Under Wrenn’s weekly tutelage, Eckles made tickling the ivories the cornerstone of his life’s ambition, one he’s continued building upon with tireless enthusiasm. While the burgeoning pianist possesses the foresight— and the towering ability—to peak over the horizon, his gratitude for Wrenn’s seven years of support remains down-to-earth. “Cindy helped me scope the meaning behind the music I was playing,” Eckles affirmed. “We would go in-depth about, not just what I was playing, but why? Why this note was here instead of here, why this chord resolved to this chord—she really helped me understand these musical patterns that’ve built up to the music I’m playing now.” “I could tell he had the gift,” Wrenn said, “and then after a point, it became obvious, he became better than the teacher.”
“He plays everything by memory. Everything. It’s amazing, he doesn’t use sheet music,” she replied when pressed on the quality of his talent. “His [memorized] repertoire is immense, just fabulous…I would consider him a prodigy.” Wrenn, and Eckles’ mother, Tracy, initially encouraged him to pursue more advanced private tutorship through middle and high school. But the preteen decided to shelve the strict legacy of classical training, if only temporarily, for something more flexible—or, at the very least, more colorful. “Between the ages of 12 and 17 I was completely on my own,” Eckles said. “So I started learning covers of popular classic rock songs and pop songs, which started getting me these corporate gigs around town.” After his breakout performance at the Majestic, Eckles began playing the lobby regularly. Tips, and more lucrative still, business cards, filled a bowl set out by bartenders working the theater’s Take Five Lounge. “Champion’s Run hired me to play a lot, their Christmas events,” he continued, “and another notable one, Berkshire Hathaway, has a corporate party for Christmas and they’d usually book me for that. The American Heart Association, their Heart Ball, I was one of the main musicians for that, too.”
“Really, it just kind of spanned out from the theater [performances],” he said. Viral fame, high-profile events, not having to buy denim pre-ripped because the money’s already burnt holes in his pockets (having a bit of fun there), and all by virtue of freewheeling musical talent. Throw in a drop-top Camaro—or maybe it’s a Playstation 5 these days—and the teenage fever dream is realized in glorious technicolor. Yet, as Eckles’ senior year at Millard North High School drew to a close, college beckoned, and so too the old, familiar notes of Bach, Beethoven, and Dubois.
“Yeah, the college admission process, that’s pretty much exclusively classical music,” Eckles said. “I had to take the time—basically my whole senior year—to learn the classical style, and I did that pretty all from sheet music books. By May or so, I had a full 45-minute classical recital, and I had it memorized.”
Now, in his freshman year at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, double majoring in piano performance and mathematics, he embodies a synaptic crossfire that’s peppered history with musical triumph time and again. “If your brain has the ability to instantly recognize patterns, the correlations between different things, that will benefit you, both in the spheres of music and math,” he noted. “But the people I’m going to be learning from, just going to college, it’s going to open up a whole new lens.” For now, the college freshman maintains a grounded perspective toward his career after graduation. “Overall, I’m just going to be happy if I’m playing piano somewhere and making a stable income, though I would love to play in a Broadway pit orchestra,” he said. Despite his open-ended ambitions, Eckles doesn’t intend to go “anywhere the wind blows.” Rather, it’s anywhere his passion grows. “You really, just, got to give it your all if you’re passionate about it. Don’t let society tell you, ‘oh you have to do this,’” he urged. “Everybody says it’s a cliche at this point, but it’s a true one…”
“Find what you like, and do it.”
Visit YouTube to watch Eckles' "Bohemian Rhapsody" performance.
FEATURE STORY
DWAIN HEBDA
PHOTOGRAPHY
BILL SITZMANN
DESIGN
MATT WIECZOREK
D R. JOANNE LI B S S O SHE’S THE SETS HER PRIORITIES
Ask Chancellor Dr. Joanne Li about her plans to lead the University of Nebraska at Omaha into the future and she’s a tour de force, rattling off ambitious goals and the strategies needed to reach them. Ask her how the University must change to meet the demands of the modern-day college student and she’s equally at the ready, detailing opportunities and challenges with ease.
Ask her what it feels like to make history and you’re met with a brief, awkward silence. It’s not that she’s unaware that she’s the first Asian American executive and the first woman of color to serve as chancellor at UNO, she just doesn’t see why it’s such a big deal. Or at least, she didn’t before a chance encounter on campus following her confirmation as chancellor last spring. “Honestly, I don’t feel any different. On a given day, work has to be done and I just feel very fortunate to be able to serve alongside a lot of great people in this community,” she said. “But I remember one encounter I had when I first came here last June. I met this young lady, and if I remember correctly, she was of Vietnamese descent. She was so overwhelmed with joy, she just choked up in tears to see an Asian woman in this role.”
Li continued, “I think through her eyes I understood. And I now have a profound appreciation of how, even though I don’t think of myself as a big deal making history, I understand the significance to many constituencies. If it just happened that I represent that, I am proud to be that.” Whatever significance Li’s gender or ethnicity may carry, it’s merely icing on a multi-layered professional cake, having served with distinction in leadership roles over 15 years in higher education. She started as an associate professor in the Sellinger School of Business at Loyola University of Maryland, then chaired the Department of Finance at Towson University. From there, she served as dean and professor of finance at Wright State University in Ohio before taking over as dean of the College of Business at Florida International University, where she boosted graduation rates and vastly improved faculty diversity. None of which is lost on University of Nebraska System President Ted Carter. “We went out on a national search and had an incredible response,” he said. “A lot of people saw the value of a metropolitan campus. We had well over 60 qualified candidates and it was very difficult to narrow that search down. “When we came out with one priority candidate, I was personally involved in the interviews and had not met Dr. Li prior to the interview process. I was blown away. She’s got just the right energy, the right talent, the right life story. I immediately saw her as a natural leader in the academic space.” Given all that, it doesn’t take much to see why UNO was eager to hire Li. But with her lack of connection to the area, it begs the question: what stood out to Li about UNO? “What really caught my attention was, being a finance professor, I know Omaha is a very special place,” she said. “It has Fortune 500 companies, it has Fortune 1000 companies, it has Berkshire Hathaway. It’s Warren Buffett’s town, it’s Walter Scott’s town. That’s number one. I’m a finance person. “But what really caught my eye about UNO is, I really do believe higher education is and will be defined by urbanization. An urban university is a fountain of knowledge, and in close proximity to a bigger population we’re able to create a fountain of new discoveries and innovations. Going forward as an urban university, we can create pedagogy and learning modalities that can influence other parts of the state or out-of-state or even internationally.” Li comes to the role at a time when the higher education landscape is shifting underfoot. Changing student demands and wider online learning options are completely redefining the so-called “traditional college student.” Students are also expecting more for their tuition dollar.
“More university students are not following the traditional route,” she said. “They have family obligations. They’re just taking classes part time, they cannot take full time, but they still expect to optimize the experience not in five years, not in six years, but maybe four and a half years. “So, learning through higher ed institutions is changing. Our job is no longer, as an urban university, just to prepare people pursuing a degree, but to get into the marketplace. It’s what I call stackable knowledge, and the stackable degree is one space where UNO is going to go forward.” Li’s vision for such learning is revolutionary in its hyperfocus and short classroom time. Curriculums that used to span 16 weeks have been condensed into three or four by targeting very specific elements to meet very specific demands. “It may not be the whole curriculum within the school; maybe just two elements or maybe an element very specific to an employer or very specific for the candidate to re-skill and up-skill,” Li said. “Going forward, UNO cannot just think we’re going to produce a degree candidate. We should think about how we can retain the current workforce that’s already in Omaha, who intend to stay in Nebraska. What can we do to continue to provide a sustainable career path for these people?
“Our goal for the future is to explore credentialing, micro-credentialing, certification, and areas we think can be stackable knowledge for candidates. That is really very attractive.” Above all, Li relates to the potential an urban campus such as UNO has for promoting a diverse student body. At the same time, she recognizes the range of disparities that come with it. A native of Hong Kong, Li is a first-generation college student who well remembers arriving in the United States and having to borrow $600 from a friend to pay for her first semester of community college. Whatever formal education her subsequent coursework taught her—from graduating summa cum laude with a finance degree in 1992 to earning her doctorate in 1997 (both from Florida State University)—it’s these real-life lessons that stick with her the most.
“As a first-generation college student, as someone who relied all through my academic career on scholarships, I recognize the issues of underserved communities,” she said. “That’s one of the things that I relate to very much with UNO, because we do serve a high percentage of students who require a lot of help to finish their journey. “When a university arrives at a certain threshold, it has a responsibility to scale the reach of higher ed, meaning reaching into areas, communities, and populations that in the past may not have had easy access, whether because of affordability or geography or modality. I really think we will be able to reach into those communities by using technology or by thinking differently about pedagogy. I do believe UNO has the potential to do that for the community.” She pauses a moment. “I feel like someone gave that to me and I’d like to pass it forward to some other family. I see the impact UNO can have if we do things right.”
Visit unomaha.edu/about-uno/chancellor
