Father, Son/Teacher, Pupil
Father, Son/ Teacher, Pupil
Father, Son/ Teacher, Pupil
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck Boston, sending students home for remote learning for the remainder of the semester, most students had to forego face-to-face meetings with their professors and make do with Zoom. Not School of Music trumpet performance major Peter Everson, however. Turns out one of his professors happens to be his father. Terry Everson, a College of Fine Arts associate professor of trumpet performance, is a renowned trumpet soloist, conductor, and composer who has appeared with some of the world’s greatest orchestras, including the Boston Symphony and the Boston Pops (he routinely appears in the Pops annual Fourth of July concerts on the Boston Esplanade).
Peter grew up the only child of two musicians. His mom, Lori, is a violinist. His parents insisted he play an instrument at least through high school. After early stints with the piano (he started lessons at four) and violin, he settled on his father’s instrument. But when he switched to trumpet, it wasn’t his dad who taught him. He never liked practicing, he says, but loved performing, and playing in front of other people helped keep him interested in music through the end of high school.
When it came time for college, Peter decided to pursue his passion for coding, enrolling at Worcester Polytechnic Institute as a computer science major. But he continued to play trumpet in various bands and ensembles at school and pretty soon realized he wanted to pursue a career in music.
When he transferred to BU after freshman year, he and his dad suddenly had a new relationship: teacher and pupil.
Terry Everson, who joined the CFA faculty in 1999, is not only an accomplished artist, but a respected teacher. He won one of the University’s highest teaching honors, the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching, in 2014.
When Peter joined his father’s trumpet studio at CFA, he knew he had a lot of catching up to do. He says he quickly found a home among the other students under his father’s tutelage. “One thing that made it easy,” he says, “is that my dad always tries to cultivate a feeling of family in the studio.”
“They’re all my kids,” Terry says. Peter insisted his dad treat him like any of his other students, and the two easily navigated their new roles.
When COVID-19 struck Boston, Peter was living in an apartment in Allston, but decided to move home to wait out the quarantine with his parents as he finished his last semester. And while his trumpet classmates had to learn how to navigate hands-on instruction via Zoom, Peter was able to continue some classes with his teacher in the room with him.
“He’s always been the person I look up to, the sound that I want to imitate,” he says of his father. “More and more, people have told me I’m starting to sound like him, even in my playing, which is the greatest compliment I could get.”
Now that the new BU grad is about to embark on a musical career of his own, his dad harbors a dream. “Maybe we can play together in the Boston Pops some day…would that not be the most awesome thing?”
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