He seems to have done it all, but now all he wants to do is play double bass.
Born and raised in Fargo, N.D., senior music and business major Jon Wagenman has seen and done things that most Otterbein students haven’t. He’s lived in New York while interning at RightFlow, spent a quarter in Ecuador and is the national president of the Otterbein Music & Entertainment Industry Student Association. He plans on moving to Nashville, Tenn., after Christmas and starting a career in music, an interest he’s had since he was 5 years old.
“I started playing double bass in fifth grade,” Wagenman said. “My parents pushed me into it. They’re both musical and I stuck with it since fifth grade. Now it’s my major. My sophomore year of high school I decided that I wanted to get more serious about playing bass. I started driving three hours from Fargo to Minneapolis every other Saturday to take lessons with the bass professor at the University of Minnesota. I had to quit playing soccer to be able to travel for these lessons, so that was really the time that I realized music was the most important thing to me, and that I wanted to pursue it as a career.”
Why Otterbein? Wagenman recieved lessons in middle school from current Otterbein professor Jim Bates. Learning from Bates was something that he thought he wanted to do again.
“Dr. Bates is the reason Jon’s at Otterbein,” Marla Wagenman, Jon’s mother, said. “We looked at schools in Montana, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana and Texas. We then looked to see where Dr. Bates was and he was at Otterbein College. We didn’t know much about Otterbein, but they had the exact major that Jon wanted. It was his choice and he was very excited about it.”
Bates taught a remote music camp in northern North Dakota for 18 years. Wagenman visited the camp several summers in a row and received instruction from him there.
Bates said, “It is flattering that a student would hold you in such high regard is quite a compliment. In Jon’s case, the fact that his home is in Fargo also means that he is making an additional serious commitment. In the music field, more so than most I think, teacher/mentors often have the opportunity to work with players over a long span of time and watch them develop. Having that type of influence is a serious matter”.
Wagenman isn’t the only person in his family with a musical background. His older sister, Lynell Wagenman, just graduated with a Master of Music Performance in opera from the University of New Mexico. His father has a Bachelor of Arts in music education from Jamestown College in Minnesota.
“He constantly listens to all different types of music, whether he’s studying or doing whatever,” Jon’s roommate, George Schubert, a senior economics and accounting major, said.
After finishing classes this December, Wagenman just wants to do what he loves every day: playing the double bass.
“Right now, I just want to move to Nashville,” he said. “I don’t really have one particular job that I want to do. I just want to go down there and see what kind of music-related stuff I can get myself into during the next year. More than anything I’d like to find a way to play bass every day.”
Wagenman has a lot on his plate, including being MEISA’s national president. He wants to change the program so that individual chapters and regions take more of the focus and more can be accomplished.
“MEISA as an organization is changing,” he said. “MEEA (Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association), our parent group, has decided to give us a little more power and a little more freedom. This has been my job, as president, to figure out ways for other schools to host regional conventions. One of the things I plan on doing is changing communication. I’m trying to get an email list. MEEA wants us to use Facebook and other social media, but we want to get away from that and be more like a young professionals group.”
During his time at Otterbein, he’s visited Penn State, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Nashville for music or MEISA-related events. But one bit of traveling he’s done that wasn’t related to music struck him the most: the time he spent in Quito, Ecuador, during the summer of 2010.
“Quito was very third world, but it was a lot of fun,” he said. “It was a totally new experience being immersed in a new culture, and I didn’t really know that much Spanish. I really liked their culture, and the people were friendly there.”
Wagenman hasn’t always had the time to do a lot of traveling he’s always had a lot on his plate, even when he was a child. .
“As a child, he was very busy and had a wide variety of interests,” Marla Wagenman said. “He played soccer, played music and collected coins. In middle school is when he became very serious about studying music.”
Schubert agrees with Marla Wagenman. He said, “He’s one of my best friends, but for being his roommate, I don’t see him a ton. He’s super busy. He’s either studying or at the music building practicing.”
While he did have other interests, Jon Wagenman eventually gave up playing soccer so he could make the three-hour drive to Minneapolis to take double bass lessons.
“It’s something you do as parents, you see the talent there and you make your child’s dream happen,” Marla Wagenman said.
