Duquesne student's journey from a cracked violin to master's degree, fellowship

At age 9, Jesse Thompson heard a violin for the first time and was mesmerized by it during a student assembly as a public school student in Williamsport, Pa.

There was one problem.

There were not enough violins in school for him to study it in class.

“I was bawling my eyes out,” he said.

His mother managed to find a violin in a local store, though it had a small crack. The defect didn’t matter to Thompson, who even then knew what the wooden instrument could do.

“It spoke to me,” he said.

Nearly two decades later, Thompson will receive a master’s degree in music performance Friday from Duquesne University’s Mary Pappert School of Music.

The 27-year-old South Side resident is about to begin a prestigious music fellowship in Miami and has aspirations to perform in a symphony. He wants to teach in the future, so he can pass his passion on to future generations.

This weekend, Duquesne and Carnegie Mellon University will graduate thousands of students in fields from robotics to liberal studies. Their degrees represent lifelong devotion to their passion, no doubt.

In some cases, though, their futures received an extra nudge from twists of fate as small as a violin with a crack, and what it meant to someone born to pursue music.

Children and their musical instruments are often fleeting relationships, but Thompson was different.

“It was always the violin,” he said.

“Just the melodic sound. I really enjoyed how it looks. The structure of holding the violin and I really enjoyed the timbre of the strings and how it was able to get the depths of the low G strings up until really high positions into the D string.”

It was an emotional release, he said, much like playing sports.

Thompson trained with instructors in the Williamsport area who saw his potential. He arrived at Duquesne as an undergraduate, receiving a bachelor’s in music in 2019 and an artist diploma in performance in 2022.

While enrolled, he participated in the opening concert for Violins of Hope Greater Pittsburgh, hosted by Duquesne. The performance featured instruments played by Jewish musicians during the Holocaust.

He and others involved in the performance were moved by the instruments and the individual stories they told of those who previously played them.

“It was like touching history,” Thompson said.

The event reflected stories of hope, resilience and perseverance. Members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Duquesne music students and faculty performed.

Thompson, master’s degree in hand, will embark on a fellowship with the internationally acclaimed New World Symphony in Miami.

All weekend long, caps, gowns and families snapping photos will be common sights as Carnegie Mellon and Duquesne honor graduates at multiple events.

At Carnegie Mellon, bachelor’s events will culminate in a commencement ceremony in Gesling Stadium, Carnegie Mellon’s 34-year-old athletics venue.

Throughout the weekend, CMU’s colleges, schools and departments will host diploma and doctoral hooding ceremonies for their graduates.

At Duquesne, ceremonies begin Friday.

The McAnulty College of Liberal Arts ceremony in UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse will include remarks from commencement speaker U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner from Virginia, who chairs the Select Committee on Intelligence and is a member of the Senate Finance, Banking, Budget and Rules Committees.

During the School of Education ceremony on Saturday, also in the UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse, Wayne N. Walters, superintendent of Pittsburgh Public Schools, will deliver commencement remarks.