Music Education Expert who Worked with Queen of Soul Available for Interviews
08/16/2018
Contact: Nancy Cicco, 978-934-4944 or Nancy_Cicco@uml.edu
If you’re a music producer, how do you tell Aretha Franklin you need to do another take?
“You don’t. You just let her do her thing and magic happens,” according to Gena Greher, who worked with the Queen of Soul to produce an iconic Diet Coke jingle for a 1980s commercial.
“We recorded her vocals in Detroit in one of the storied Motown studios – if those walls could talk – which was amazing,” Greher recalled.
After an award-winning run in the advertising business, Greher pursued a career in higher education and is now a UMass Lowell music professor. Reflecting on Franklin’s passing today at 76, Greher spoke about the performer’s enormous voice and lasting influence.
“Students get it,” she said of Franklin’s talent. “I don’t think it matters what kind of music you listen to, I think you recognize what an incredible voice she has.” Her death, Greher said, leaves a “tremendous hole” in the fabric of popular music and culture.
Greher coordinates UMass Lowell’s music education program and oversees the university’s String Project, which provides music education and instruction in classical stringed instruments to young people throughout the Merrimack Valley. Together with musician Herbie Hancock and others, she helped launch Mathsciencemusic.org, a collection of web-based programs that use music to teach science and math to K-12 students.
To arrange an in-person or telephone interview with Greher, contact Nancy Cicco at 978-934-4944, Nancy_Cicco@uml.edu.