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Widow to take on conducting job
By DAN DeWITT
© St. Petersburg Times, During a lifetime of directing choruses and orchestras, Pete Ayer developed firm ideas about how music should be played. "His whole approach was to do things the way the composer intended them to be done, with the right note at the right time in the right place," said Carol Ayer, who was widowed when Pete Ayer died in a plane accident July 31. "He really felt that one owes it to the composer to play the work in the proper manner and in the style of the period it was written," she said. "You don't jazz up the Messiah, and you don't improvise with the Star-Spangled Banner." Ayer plans to carry on this tradition by filling her husband's former position as director of the Nature Coast Festival Singers, one of several musical groups with which Pete Ayer was involved. She studied the pipe organ at Beloit College, Wisconsin, where she and Pete Ayer met. She has taught music; and she said, "I've been his assistant conductor for 31 years (in various choral groups), so I really do know how he wanted things done. I really want to carry on what Pete started, and I know all the music." Pete Ayer, a retired music professor from the University of Wisconsin-Washington County, also was an accomplished pilot, a springboard diver and a handgun expert. He was flying a plane owned and built by his friend and only passenger -- Gene Johannesmeyer -- when it went down in the Atlantic Ocean near the Georgia-Florida line. Both he and Johannesmeyer were killed. The U.S. Coast Guard found Johannesmeyer's body but not Ayer's. The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the crash, still has not determined its cause, Carol Ayer said. "They haven't found anything more, and we're still in never-never land," she said. "It's very frustrating." The Nature Coast group was formed about eight years ago, said Dick Desautels, founder and former executive director of the group, to perform Handel's Messiah during the Christmas season. It later added a spring concert of classical music. Not only was Pete Ayer loyal to the creation of the composers, Desautels said, he insisted on precise musicianship from all the members of the chorus. "Carol is just a wonderful replacement for Pete," said Desautels, who is no longer a member of the group. "They worked together, and the chorus is going to represent what Pete started."
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