| |
Comment on this article
Making Music Matter
At a time when classical music is seen to be in crisis, Yale’s School of Music is not. Its blend of conservatory training and liberal-arts education is part of the reason.
Summer 2002
by Peter Hawes
Peter Hawes is a freelance writer specializing in the arts. His most recent article for theYale Alumni Magazine, on new School of Drama dean James Bundy, appeared in the March issue.
There comes the day in their study with oboist and Amherst College music professor Lewis Spratlan when students get The Talk, the one in which he urges them not to go into music—that is, unless they feel they can’t live any other way. “Most of them choose music anyway,” says Spratlan, who is also a Pulitzer
Prize–winning composer. “Which is what I secretly want to happen.”
The story is much the same at Spratlan’s alma mater, the Yale School of Music, where 109 students received advanced degrees in music this year and—driven by some against-all-common-sense conviction that their lives just wouldn’t be complete if they did anything else—walked into a very uneasy job market.
The classical music world for which most graduate students have trained since childhood is in a downturn. Symphony orchestras in San Jose, California, and Westchester County, New York, have folded, while others in St. Louis, Toronto, and Chicago stagger under large deficits. Classical radio stations in New York and Detroit have trimmed programming or switched formats. Hiring by universities has slowed substantially since its last surge in the 1970s, and a doctorate is now required for entry-level collegiate teaching jobs.
Perhaps never before has the core of traditional western music been as shaken, at least in the United States, and never before have the elements of a first-rate musical education in this country been so much in question. “I worry for my students in a way that my teachers didn’t worry about me,” says Martin Bresnick, head of the composition program at the School of Music. “The whole field of classical music has changed. If you’re going to music school today I think it’s fair to be wondering, what exactly is your future?”
Even in a tight labor market, Yale’s training and reputation are such that its graduates seem to get the jobs they seek. But the fact remains that music-school students face a world vastly different from that of a decade or two ago.
“If you’re a great clarinetist, that’s not enough any more,” says James Undercofler '69MM, dean of the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. “An entry-level job in a college or university now requests three or four skills rather than one or two. Orchestras are asking musicians to conduct outreach in the schools, to meet with donors and the boards of directors.”
How does a professional school—especially one whose mainstay has been training top-notch classical musicians and composers—prepare students for today’s realities? In the case of Yale, the answer is: pretty much the way it always has. Indeed, as evidenced by Yale’s track record and changes that are being made by some of the nation’s top conservatories, the approach favored by Yale’s Music School since its founding 108 years ago may be precisely what’s needed today.
By combining a conservatory-like emphasis on instrumental virtuosity with the academic rigor of a liberal-arts university, Yale’s Music School manages consistently to turn out people who make it—in many cases, big—in the music business. Alumni include clarinetist Richard Stoltzman '67MM, guitarists Eliot Fisk '76, ’77MM and Sharon Isbin '78, ’79MM, saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom '76, ’77MM, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis '83Mus, the presidents of Juilliard (Joseph Polisi '73MM '80DMA) and Eastman (Undercofler),
and Anthony Tommasini '70, ’72MM, the chief music critic for the New York Times.
Yale is perennially considered among the nation’s best music schools and one of the hardest to get into. Yale accepted about 25 percent of applicants to the Music School for 2002-03, down from 38 percent from 1995-96, and competition for admission to some programs is even tougher—for example, last year, 84 people applied for four spots in the composition program. Since his arrival in 1995, Robert S. Blocker, the Lucy and Henry Moses Dean, has been steadily reducing enrollment in what he says is an effort to focus on quality and a recognition of what the School’s facilities and endowment can support.
With about 200 students and 60 faculty members, the school is unique in its place as essentially a small conservatory tightly linked to an Ivy League university. It stresses not only musical performance at the highest level but also development of the whole person. Blocker refers to this as “training the cultural leaders of tomorrow,” and it’s a philosophy that both Juilliard and Eastman are mimicking, perhaps more than coincidentally under the leadership of Yale graduates. (Juilliard has a career development program, Eastman an arts leadership curriculum.)
Yale’s graduate School of Music was born in 1958 when it split from a combined graduate-undergraduate school that had been founded in 1894. It now offers four degrees and a performance certificate with majors in every orchestral instrument, composition, conducting, and voice with a focus on opera. Students are required to take music history and theory, along with courses unrelated to the study of their instruments. They’re encouraged to develop their own musical voices and are pressed to take advantage of Yale’s academic and cultural cornucopia. In days that stretch from early morning to after midnight, students take private lessons and attend seminars and coaching sessions. They practice for hours and study virtually everything from astronomy to Zen. They write music for the School of Drama and play for student productions. They teach public-school children and give lessons to undergraduates.
The assumption is that intellectually curious Yale students will seek out a diversity of experiences and knowledge and that their depth and breadth will thus set them apart from other musicians. They’ll have the ability, the argument goes, to be better ambassadors for their art, to raise the level of quality in their field, to collaborate with artists in other domains, to educate the public, to sustain or expand music’s audience, and to lead others to do the same.
Jane Ira Bloom, a jazz saxophonist and teacher at the New School University in New York, credits such an environment with exposing her to new directions and new ideas. “Yale taught me not only how to play, but how to think,” says Bloom, who supplemented her studies with courses in theater, film, and dance. “It’s great training for a world of innovation. Being next to the great minds of the world, you get used to looking for what’s in the cracks. You ask questions like ‘Why?’ and ‘What’s not being thought of?’”
Training at the School is built around the kind of master-apprentice relationship that’s been at the core of music instruction for centuries. Most students come to Yale to study one-on-one with a well-known faculty member, such as Bresnick in composition, Aldo Parisot in cello, Doris Yarick-Cross or Lili Chookasian in voice, Claude Frank in piano, or Thomas Murray in organ. Students also benefit from a larger Yale music community that’s probably best known for its singing, as embodied by the Whiffenpoofs and the Yale Glee Club.
But Yale is also home to the well-regarded undergraduate department of music, a chamber-music society; a collection of more than 1,000 rare and period musical instruments, and a digital media center in whose studios students can learn computer sound, graphics, and video. In a series of renovations (see sidebar), Yale is creating a music complex that will bring the resources of the Music School, the undergraduate department, the Institute of Sacred Music, and other related entities together around Yale’s central campus.
The $26 million-plus investment in upgrades for the first two buildings alone is part of an increased financial commitment to the Music School that has occurred during Blocker’s tenure. While some of this is a result of the booming stock market of the late 1990s and a strong commitment to the arts by President Levin, another factor is Blocker himself, whom one faculty member calls “the best fund raiser I’ve ever seen.”
Under Blocker, the School has garnered at least two multimillion-dollar gifts, nearly quadrupled its endowment, and purchased 38 new pianos and a new inventory of percussion instruments. Robert Van Sice, whom Blocker wooed from the Rotterdam Conservatorium in 1997 to fix a troubled percussion department, recalls sitting down with the dean on arrival in New Haven. “When I came here the percussion collection wasn’t up to the standards of a high school,” Van Sice says. “The dean asked me, ‘What do you need?’ I said, ‘Space and instruments, but it’s going to cost you a lot of money.’ The dean said, ‘What do you call a lot of money?’ I wrote a figure on a piece or paper. He said, ‘Call that doable. What’s your next problem?’”
Although the School’s endowment has grown to $110 million from $30 million in 1995, Blocker said it’s still too small for a field in which the typical graduate student incurs $30,000 to $80,000 in educational debt and is under pressure to work outside his or her art just to repay the loans. “We need an endowment of roughly $225 to $250 million to support the students in the way they should be supported,” he said. Doubling the endowment from its current level would allow the School to give every student a full scholarship—something the conservatories do routinely—and provide additional program funds. About 86 percent of the school’s students receive some financial aid; 25 will have full scholarships this coming year.
Most students use their time at Yale to complete their structured education, to prepare for a doctoral program, or to enhance an already established career. Paul Jacobs '02MM tours the United States on weekends playing marathon nine-to 18-hour-long concerts of the complete organ works of Bach and Messiaen—from memory. Patrice Jackson, a 19-year-old cellist who entered Yale as a performance-certificate candidate straight from high school, recently won top prize in the senior division of the prestigious Sphinx Competition; she spends her free time as a soloist with orchestras in 20 American cities.
The school is full of students like these with aspirations of a traditional nature in classical music. But in places literally high and low—under the dome of Woolsey Hall and in the basement of Hendrie Hall—others at Yale follow a different path. Consider the school’s Center for Studies in Music Technology (CSMT, or “kismet” to its users). There, on Woolsey’s top floor, operations director Jack Vees—an electric bassist and composer fond of Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles—shows students how to use computers to record, compose, and perform music. His tools include a digital piano, a mixing board flanked by racks of gear, a giant video screen, and rooms full of Apple computers connected to electronic keyboards. “A clarinet can only play so many notes, but hook a computer up to it and its possibilities are limitless,” said percussionist Robert Esler '02MM, a frequent CSMT visitor. He believes computers will soon be so pervasive in composition that performers who can’t work in the digital realm will have a large repertoire of music unavailable to them.
In Hendrie’s basement, meanwhile, Van Sice schools his students rigorously in orchestral percussion, marimba, and chamber music while pushing them deeply into the exploration of new music. In addition to sophisticated marimba pieces, his students performed striking new works in their spring recitals—Trent Petrunia '02MM kneeling on the Dwight Chapel floor playing four clay pots with soft mallets while speaking the lyrics of Frederic Rzewski’s 1985 composition To the Earth; MMA candidate Timothy Feeney behind a battery of instruments dancing through Roger Reynolds' Watershed I, and capping his program with a piece written for drum synthesizer and video by Kathryn Alexander, dean of undergraduate studies in the Yale College music department. Van Sice says that with a repertoire that goes back only 50 years, percussionists have a responsibility to push the limits of their instruments and work to get new music written for them.
With the likes of Charles Ives and Paul Hindemith as former professors, Yale’s composition program has long been respected for its innovation as well as its record of success. More than a third of the Pulitzer prizes in music awarded since 1943 have gone to Yale alumni or faculty. Under the direction of Bresnick since 1996, the program requires students to study tonal and non-tonal music, computer music and recording. It encourages them to be competent instrumentalists and conductors and to take as many courses as they can in music history and literature. Bresnick and his colleagues also instill an entrepreneurial fervor in their students; generations of Yale composers have created ways to market outside the network of conventional institutions. One example is Bang on a Can, a composers' collective started by Michael Gordon '82MM, Julia Wolfe '84MM, and David Lang '83MMA, in New York in 1987. They attracted attention by hiring an ensemble to perform their work and staging an all-day concert in New York. They now produce new-music festivals and a summer music institute; the ensemble has recorded seven CDs and tours internationally.
This strategy represents one of the few ways composers of new classical music have to get their work played today. Conventional wisdom says new music challenges listeners too much for big-name symphony orchestras or chamber groups to risk putting it on their programs, which makes life more difficult for those outside an ever-narrowing mainstream.
This is a shame, says Times critic Anthony Tommasini, who believes that the reason for the situation, as well as for most of the problems in classical music, lies in education."The big crisis is the appalling lack of musical understanding and literacy on the part of the general public,” he says. “The field is very conservative as opposed to the visual arts and theater. The talk of every Broadway season is the new plays. The whole New York Times Book Review is about new books, but chances are the news in music is about a new performance of Mahler. The typical audience at the New York Philharmonic, as much as they love music, knows a whole lot less about it than the typical crowd at Yankee Stadium knows about baseball.”
Tommasini says musicians themselves have to draw audiences in by educating them, by demystifying new works, by relating music to things people already know, by creating new outlets, and by encouraging established institutions to take chances. “It takes musicians who are broader than they used to be, who can communicate what they know and are conversant with other fields,” he says. “Yale doesn’t have to push this. The fact that they have all these people in all these different disciplines right there in one place, it just rubs off.”  |
|
