An all new “Music, Maestro, Please!” will introduce the younger set to the joys of vocal and instrumental music. The Mercer County Symphonic Band presents this lively interactive children’s concert at Kelsey Theater on Saturday, March 20, at 2 and 4 p.m. The theater is located on the Mercer College Campus, 1200 Old Trenton Road, West Windsor. Tickets may be purchased at www.kelseyatmccc.org or by phone at 609-584-9444. All tickets are $8.
Under the direction of Lou Woodroff, this band of talented local musicians presents a participatory concert for children that includes singing, playing an instrument, and learning about music and musical instruments. Everyone receives a souvenir “instrument” to take home.
“This is the third year for the very popular concert,” says band member John Roeder, known to many as the tuba player from West Windsor. “The goal is to play music that kids can relate to.” Last year Roeder read “The Giving Tree” and played the part of the tree.
Roeder first foray into music came at age six, when his parents gave him a pint-size accordion. He didn’t receive the full-sized instrument (which he still has) until he was 12. He took lessons from William O. Doskocil, who his parents had heard worked well with children. “What I will always be grateful to him for is the inclusion of music theory with my lessons,” says Roeder.
Roeder played a small bass when he was ten, but it wasn’t until he was in sixth grade that he began studying his lifelong instrument, the tuba.
He is the only child of George Louis Roeder, who owned a hardware store and later sold real estate and insurance, and Alama Christine Stuckenberg, a stay-at-home mother, both of whom passed away in the mid-1980s. He is married to former West Windsor Township Council Member, Rae Roeder.
Roeder says his father used to talk about playing the violin, mandolin, and guitar. “I’d often hear him striking the C-major chord on the piano, something he told me he had learned from his younger sister Mary.” His aunt Mary, “was an extraordinary piano player,” says Roeder. “I remember that ‘The Desert Song’ was one of her favorites, and I was thrilled when I learned it and could play it with her.”
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he began playing the sousaphone in his high school marching band. He attended Missouri Military Academy, where he played the string bass in band. He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, where he was an ROTC student, followed by two years in the Army doing technical intelligence work in Washington, D.C. He later received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. While in Princeton in 1966, he met his future wife, Rae, who was a junior at Rider College.
Roeder claims that his most exciting musical performance took place when he was part of Eisenhower’s second inaugural parade in 1957. A junior in military school at the time, the band couldn’t find rooms in Washington, D.C. and took the train there in the morning and left by train that evening. It was a long parade, beginning south of the Capitol, on Constitution Avenue, continuing on Pennsylvania Avenue, and past the White House for several blocks. “My left arm was numb,” he says.
Roeder’s musical career since then has been peppered with several high points, including when the Mercer County Band played with the Trenton Symphony and when select community bands were invited to the John Philip Sousa First Centennial Concert.
He has been teaching physics at the Calhoun School on the upper West Side of New York City for 31 years, where he is also an instrumental leader of “Active Physics” — mandatory for all ninth grade students at the school. One of his most famous students, actor Ben Stiller, writes on the school’s webpage, “John Roeder has superhuman powers, possesses the secrets to the universe, and has the ability to ‘walk on water.’”
In 1981, Roeder played with the Monday Night Blues Band at RCA as well as the Windsor Heights Concert Band, a community band directed by Larry Fish, which met Tuesday nights. The Mercer County Band started in 1981 as a student-only band. The following year they opened it up to the community. “The group decided that our musical needs would be better served in the band,” says Roeder. The band changed its name to Mercer County Symphonic Band in 2003.
Besides performances at Kelsey during the year, they play at Mercer College graduation ceremonies. Roeder also plays with the Westminster Community Orchestra and has played in the orchestras for “Oklahoma,” “Wizard of Oz,” and “King and I” at Open Air Theater.
Roeder is treasurer of the Princeton Baptist Church. and treasurer-secretary of the Physics Club of New York.
By the way, he still plays his old accordion — for the Keenagers group and at Easter Sunrise Service at the Princeton Baptist Church.
