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“I have such fond memories of SUNY Adirondack and had a great experience here.”
Jeremy Duers was visiting a friend at Manhattan School of Music, when he heard a percussionist in a rehearsal room play a complicated sequence flawlessly. “My friend then told me it was sight-reading day and, at that moment, I thought, ‘I’m not going to be competitive in this field,’” remembered Duers, coordinator of Adirondack Peer-toPeer Support Services, a PFC Joseph P. Dwyer Project, at SUNY Adirondack. “I was a decent musician, but I wasn’t a phenomenal musician.”
Duers attended SUNY Adirondack as a high school student, earning dual credits, then transferred to Crane School of Music to study orchestral percussion. He left the SUNY Potsdam program when his father died, attended classes at Schenectady County Community College for a while and performed with area symphonies. After the difficult realization that music might not be a career for him, Duers enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. His late father was a Marine, as were his two brothers, his grandfather and a brother-in-law.
“The recruiter asked me, ‘Have you been to college? Do you have any skills?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m a musician,’” Duers said. “He told me no one ever passes the audition.” But Duers did and was offered the opportunity to choose his duty station, so he headed to Albany, Georgia, where the Marines maintain a 50-member Marine Band. “I loved it, it was a great gig,” he said. “We trained a lot, were active with the Marine Corps martial arts, pistol training. Some people think the band just plays instruments all day, and that’s not all we do. We’re warriors and musicians, a special breed.”