Young cellist hopes to fill Lincoln venues with new music

He asked them to bang coffee mugs, beer bottles or whatever on tables, to yell and to just get into the moment.

It was, in a word, different.

“He was more enthusiastic than the crowd,” said Lepard’s friend and fellow musician, bass player Max Stehr of Omaha. “That was sort of to be expected.

“But (Justin) gave it his all, and it was a refreshing thing. You’ve got to do that if you’re going to play that kind of music.”

“That kind of music” is contemporary classical, which Lepard, who graduated this month from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, hopes to bring more of to Lincoln.

His new music series, “On the Edge,” debuted May 13 at Crescent Moon, a coffeehouse in the Haymarket, and featured a wide range of modern music, from Lepard playing “Classical Gas” solo on his cello to a jazz trio to four percussionists using bows to play a vibraphone.

Heck, one musician even spun quarters on his snare drum. That wasn’t the strangest thing he did during his performance. He also leaned in and spoke into the drum.

“The goal is to offer a new type of performance to Lincoln,” Lepard said. “You don’t have to hear the same style of song, one right after another. You just have to hear a flow to the music and stay into it and feel that energy.”

The second performance of “On the Edge” is set for 8 p.m. June 17 at the Bourbon Theatre.

“As a musician, we have a duty to play new stuff and promote new music,” said Stehr, who, at Crescent Moon, performed in a jazz trio and played alongside his wife, April, on David Saperstein’s “Duo for Vibraphone and Acoustic Bass.” “Lincoln is not the first place that comes to mind when you think of new music.”

But Lepard hopes to change that. It’s the second of two things he saw missing from Lincoln’s music scene.

“We certainly have a lot of great acts come through Lincoln, but it seems they’re coming through Lincoln as part of their larger tours,” he said.

“ … I don’t think (artists) think about Lincoln as a mecca for music, the way they think about Austin or Nashville. I don’t think Lincoln is too small of a city for that to happen. If we give (Lincoln) something interesting enough and get funding enough to bring artists here, then what we do is slowly create a culture nationally that Lincoln, Nebraska, is a place to go to do something interesting.”

“Interesting” for Lepard is contemporary classical music, the No. 1 thing he said he sees missing from the city’s music scene.

“I’m not seeing people regularly performing this,” he said. “I would see students at school interested in it and occasionally perform a modern work, but there was no context for it. They would do it, but there was no ability for people (outside of UNL) to appreciate it or critique it. There is no community to perform in an ensemble and play bigger works. And there is no venue for it to attract audiences.

“I’ve been passionate about contemporary classical music for years, and I really want to bring it to my hometown.”

Lepard, 21, began playing cello at 3 years old, learning the instrument via the Suzuki method (playing by ear). He studied locally with Leslie Tien before Gregory Beaver, cellist for the nationally acclaimed Chiara String Quartet in residence at UNL’s Glenn Korff School of Music, took him on at age 16.

Beaver said Lepard is the real deal, having enough talent to land at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York City, where Beaver studied, or the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

“I scored by getting him to come to UNL,” Beaver said.

At UNL, he studied classical with Beaver, jazz with Darryl White, UNL’s trumpet professor, and began dabbling in improvisation and modern music. He believed a career as a classical musician is what awaited him.

“When I really got into cello, I was very serious about classical music, but I was hitting a brick wall,” Lepard said. “I would try and play Haydn and it really just wasn’t working.”

Beaver knew it, too, but he needed Lepard to figure it out for himself.

“He wasn’t a classical cellist,” Beaver said. “He wasn’t drawn to classical music the way I’m drawn to Beethoven, Bach and Brahms. It’s what gets me up in the morning.”

The summer following his freshman year at UNL, Lepard discovered his passion. He attended New Music on the Point, a contemporary classical music festival in Vermont. There he played alongside the JACK Quartet, a string quartet dedicated to classical contemporary music. Founded in 2007, the quartet is made of four musicians who met while attending the Eastman School of Music.

“This legitimized it for me,” he said. “Up until then, I had been thinking classical music is the safe route. This weirder music is not really viable. After this camp … I thought ‘Wow! This is something I could really do.'”

In summer of 2014, the Lucerne Festival Academy, a new music festival in Switzerland founded by world-renowned composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, invited Lepard to participate. There he met Tod Machover, a composer who is considered one of the visionaries in music today.

Machover chose Lepard as one of 10 ensemble soloists to perform a new work to debut next fall on a tour of Switzerland and again in March 2016 on a broader tour of Europe. Lepard traveled to Switzerland this past March to work with Machover and the ensemble on the piece, which will feature hyperinstrument technology developed by Machover.

“He’s just drawn to the craziest kind of music,” Beaver said about Lepard. “When he performs it, it’s very compelling. It sounds to him, the way Beethoven sounds to me. His understanding of it is at a high level.”

In creating his new music series, Lepard said he realizes audience education and accessibility is important. At Crescent Moon, he performed a solo cello version of well-known “Classical Gas” before giving way to the vibraphone played with bows and a snare drum solo that included spinning quarters, whistling and talking.

“Wasn’t that something,” Lepard said after the snare drummer finished his piece.

“I’ll keep the weirder stuff to about two-thirds of the way through,” he said. “I’ll tell a story about the weirder pieces to make it more accessible to the audience.”

Stehr, who is working on his music doctorate at UNL, believes Lepard might be on to something for Lincoln.

“Anyone can be open to (contemporary classical music),” Stehr said. “The challenge will be finding an audience to support it. That being said, a number of new music concerts, for the most part have been well received around here and have been pretty successful. So I believe there can be an audience for it.”

Lepard does, too. He’s also found musicians who want to play the new music -- even for free. (He hopes to eventually pay them if the series catches on.)

“Lincoln is so starved for modern music,” he said. “Musicians who have been available to perform are eager to do so. Like the ones who came down from Omaha. For them, (Crescent Moon) was a great experience. Originally, they would learn that piece for just one performance. It’s sad to learn a piece for one performance.”