The Ivory League
KOSTELANETZ, RICHARD
The Ivory League Why Juilliard remains America's premier arts college. BY RICHARD KOSTELANETZ For the past century, Juilliard has been the most successful arts college in America. One convenient...
...1 (1937), Roger Sessions's Sonata No...
...1 (1902/1909...
...Was it simply that Juil-liard's reputation as the best music school made it attractive to successive generations of the most ambitious teenage musicians from around the world...
...More important perhaps, aspiring student composers could get equally ambitious instrumentalists to play their scores, so that, as Glass remembers, many years would pass before he would hear his own compositions as often...
...But because of her concentration on bureaucrats, Olmstead is less successful at explaining why it stays so high...
...The latest collection of his essays, More On Innovative Music(ian)s, will appear later this year...
...One of the great American art incubators, North Carolina's Black Mountain College, disappeared in 1957, after only twenty-four years of existence...
...no other will...
...This is big league "spring training" of a sort rarely found in American academia and one of those elements that continue to make Juilliard so good...
...One reason for the school's success has been its location in Manhattan...
...That should be the question taken up in Andrea Olmstead's Juilliard: A History...
...So why has the Juilliard music school been so steadily fortunate...
...Andrea Olmstead—a graduate of Juilliard herself and married to another, the composer Larry Bell—probably knows more about the school's ways than she tells in Juilliard...
...No other institution could have done it...
...Through its music classes alone have passed Richard Rodgers, Van Cliburn, Billy Stray-horn, Philip Glass, James Levine, Miles Davis, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Paul Zukofsky, Peter Schickele, and Midori—which is to say classical composers along with jazz and Broadway greats, avant-garde instrumentalists along with concert-hall superstars and comic geniuses...
...1 (1946), Carl Rug-gles's Evocation No...
...This past season, Bruce Brubaker, who directs the piano department, sponsored "Piano Century," eleven concerts from September to April...
...As at Ivy League universities, there were certain moments at Juilliard in which the students were brighter than the teachers, and the stronger ones often taught the others...
...Richard Kostelanetz is a widely published poet and critic...
...Groups of brilliantly proficient students appeared one after another to play for a few minutes at a time, with slight repetition of personnel...
...Perhaps even more remarkable than Juilliard's achievement is how continuous it has been...
...The annual "Focus" series a few years ago was devoted exclusively to that most severe serial composer, Anton Webern, whose works are rarely heard elsewhere...
...Bach"), taught his fellow students in a course that Glass remembers as among his best...
...This tradition of eager excellence continues...
...The reputation of those students helped Juilliard to reinforce its faculty a decade later with some of the brainiest and most influential composers and teachers in America: Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, and, occasionally, Elliott Carter...
...Her book will be popular with her fellow Juilliard alumni, for it does contain much good material about how the mountain was built...
...One convenient measure is the distinction of its alumni...
...And yet, the city houses other music schools, some more conveniently located near midtown performance venues...
...Initially a violinist and then a musicologist whose previous books were about Roger Sessions, she writes here, curiously, less about musicians and composers than about administrators...
...Olmstead notes in passing that the school never gave tenure or imposed mandatory retirement upon its facul-ty—without acknowledging the significance of those administrative departures...
...This is a "royal college" in the British tradition, but created and sustained in a uniquely American way...
...Glass recalls how often his professors sat on secret juries (such as those selecting Ful-bright scholars to go abroad) and could thus advise him with authority on fellowships...
...3 (1965), Stefan Wolpe's Passacaglia (1936), and Charles Ives's Sonata No...
...Another cause of Juilliard's success has been the power its teachers have wielded for many years...
...For those of us who prefer high modern music to slick classical or "postmodern," Juilliard's free concerts rank among the best in New York...
...The composer Philip Glass has recalled how in the late 1950s he and the aspiring opera singer Shirley Verrett seperately hired another student, Albert Fine, to give them private lessons...
...Selecting over a hundred pieces to distribute to his students, he chose many modern classics that are rarely heard live—not only because many professional recitalists find them difficult, but because producers would advise against them: Alban Berg's Sonata (1908), Sofia Gubaidulina's Chaconne (1962), Karlheinz Stockhausen's Klavierstuck X (1955-1961), Pierre Boulez's Sonata No...
...A model for the kind of study Olmstead's Juilliard could have been is the 1987 volume by Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College, which focused on teachers and students to explain the innovation and excellence...
...But, wanting to write an institutional rather than an art or intellectual history, she addresses the question only peripherally...
...Juilliard's own dance and drama schools, added at later points in its history, have benefited from the music school's reputation but have never succeeded to the same degree...
...So rich is the Juilliard program in training so many superior instrumentalists that the cumulative effect has been awesome...
...The graduate school at Yale in the early 1960s produced a number of prominent painters and sculptors, but has taught many fewer in the years since...
...Why has Juilliard remained preeminent...
...Olmstead does include some previously published anecdotes from Miles Davis and the choreographer Paul Taylor, but she interviewed few former students and rarely quotes from their experience...
...Art colleges tend to be more volatile than liberal arts universities, as the departure or arrival of a few key people can drastically change the educational effect...
...As an avid New York con-certgoer, I see this quality less in student composers than in Juilliard instrumentalists...
...And consequently, by concentrating mostly on administrators and trustees, she misses much of the real action in an arts college: what occurs between teacher and student and what occurs among the students themselves...
...The most adept composition student in Glass's years, Peter Schickele (later noted for the comedy records of "PD.Q...
Vol. 5 • June 2000 • No. 37
