I have been thinking of posting this for a couple of years, but it seems even too off-topic for "John Spencer is Dead".
I will ask the question first instead of leading up to it. Has anyone here heard of the musician Emily Bear? I figured that there is a chance that some have although I have found very few even remotely close to my age who have. If so, comments are appreciated. I am fairly certain that I would not have heard of her if not for the coincidence in the next paragraph, but I think that those with a broader education than RPI offered in the 1960's, e.g. Ivy Leaguers, are more likely. Then again, Stereax is probably the only one actually younger than Emily.
I have a niece named Emily Baer. For a reason which I have forgotten, I googled her name in the late summer of 2010. All the top matches were for an eight- or nine-year-old child prodigy pianist and composer named Emily Bear. She was only four years old when John Spencer died but had already composed music. I was bowled over by her obvious talent and followed her career sporadically on the Internet, checking every few months. Five-year-old Emily in a matching outfit with someone whom most know of behind the stage of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. https://www.instagram.com/p/CZugLBLvGdu/ It looks like Emily is receiving talent through his fingers. Besides for being a pianist and composer, she is now a songwriter, singer, film scorer, orchestrator, producer, conductor, and probably other things.
I googled Emily's name much more frequently after she graduated high school at age 15 in 2017. (She was home-schooled but went to the local high school for the last two years if I remember correctly.) She decided then to take a gap year before going to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the same place her mentor, the late Quincy Jones, had studied. I have always thought that she was waiting for her older sister, Lauren Bear, to go to nearby BU the following year. College hockey content: Lauren was a member of BU's figure skating club which used BU's old hockey rink, and they won two national championships while she was there. Emily never went to Berklee although she was a student there for a time (on-line?). E.g., the start of this interview https://www.berklee.edu/berklee-now/emily-bear-ventures-pop. Emily and Lauren's brother Benji Bear went to Michigan and is now working for Google DeepMind. Their mother and grandmother also graduated from Michigan (music). For completeness, Emily's father went to Northwestern and Northwestern's medical school.
This Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/DDcd3h4Rqli/ posted in December 2024 gives a short summary of her career with emphasis on then recent events including composing with her writing partner, Abigail Barlow, the songs for the Disney animated film Moana 2 which had just been released during Thanksgiving week in 2024. There are more detailed bios on Emily's Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Bear and her own website which needs updating https://www.emilybear.com/.
I add that Emily has been in New York now for over a month so that she and Abigail can work together on several unrevealed musicals while Abigail is playing the part of Katherine Howard in the musical Six. One of them was listed by the director Rebecca Taichman https://rebeccataichmandirector.com/in-production/ namely "The Invention of Hugo Cabret". It won several Oscars as a movie called simply "Hugo". As an aside, Abigail and her sister Anna Grace Barlow are both making their Broadway debuts. Anna Grace is playing the part of "the girl on the swing" Evelyn Nesbit in the revival of Ragtime.
I do wonder why Emily and Abigail feel they need to be together now to work although it probably makes things easier. They were able to work on Moana 2 in 2023 using Zoom while Emily was the featured pianist on Beyoncé's Renaissance World Tour in Europe and North America. The seventh page here https://www.instagram.com/p/DHHlVmByb6r/?img_index=7 shows Emily participating in a Disney conference on a cast bus returning from a Renaissance performance.
One of Emily's current goals appears to be to become the youngest EGOT winner. As this short video https://www.tiktok.com/@emilythebear/video/7155336825261821230 shows, she has the E and G. The record is slightly over 39 years old. She is working on trying to get the T with Abigail. There was a chance of getting the O for the song "Beyond" from Moana 2. It was not nominated but made the short list of 15 songs. She needs to work on something else.
Although Emily, like me, is Jewish, we are not members of the same Baer family. Her great-grandfather Benjamin Bear shortened his family name from Berkowitz (various spellings) to Bear when he applied for US citizenship. He was from present-day Belarus. My 3rd-great-grandfather who lived in the Großherzogtum Baden (Grand Duchy of Baden) adopted the name Bär (Baer) when Jews there were required to take on family names in 1809 and again in 1815.
It's time that I post this since I keep adding irrelevant information.