Hersch has been heard sporadically over the past two years. This is because Fred is very sick from AIDS and a severe case of pneumonia that the people closest to him, his partner, Scott Morgan, and his brother, Hank, as well as his parents, thought, on the worst of his bad days, that they had seen him for the last time. Early in 2008, the H.I.V. virus migrated to his brain, and Hersch developed AIDS-related dementia. He lived for a time in mental and physical seclusion, hallucinating under the delusion that he had the power to control time and space and that everyone around him was plotting his demise. In fact, he came so close to dying that his paranoia seemed practically justified. At his sickest, Hersch fell into a coma and remained unconscious for a full two months. While incapacitated, he was bound to his bed in St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. He lost renal function and had to undergo regular dialysis, and he required a tracheotomy. He was unable to consume food or liquids of any kind, including water, for eight months. He could not swallow a thing or speak above a whisper. As a result of his unconsciousness and inactivity, he lost nearly all motor function in his hands and could not hold a pencil, let alone play the piano.
Hersch has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning with Dr. Billy Taylor and on a variety of National Public Radio programs including Fresh Air, Jazz Set, Studio 360 and Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz. Hersch has also been awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, grants from The National Endowment for the Arts and Meet the Composer, and six composition residencies at The MacDowell Colony. He conducted a Professional Training Workshop for Young Musicians at The Weill Institute at Carnegie Hall in 2008 and was awarded the Branigan Lectureship at Indiana University in 2004. A committed educator, Hersch was a faculty member at the New England Conservatory for ten years, and has taught at The New School and Manhattan School of Music; he is currently a visiting professor at Western Michigan University and on the Jazz Studies faculty of the New England Conservatory.
This amazing performance can be witnessed Saturday April 17, 2010 in the Performing Art Centers Concert Hall.
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