Gateway Study of Leadership: Turning Points 2017

2016 - 2017 GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP

TURNING

POINTS

Rice University School of Social Sciences

Gateway Study of Leadership TURNING POINTS {series VI | 2016 - 2017}

Gateway School of Social Sciences Rice University 6100 Main Street Houston, Texas 77005-1827 U.S.A.

TURNING POINTS

The Turning Points book series is a product of the School of Social Sciences’ Gateway Study of Leadership (GSL) at Rice University.

Each year GSL Fellows conduct interviews with faculty from a different school and feature select excerpts in key areas. The sections in Series VI (2016-2017) are dedicated to the Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and McGill University’s Schulich School and are grouped as follows: Turning Points Beyond the Notes Invisible to Visible Cultivating Talent Collaborative Nature Music in Our Lives TURNING POINTS SERIES Series I (2011-12): Rice University School of Social Sciences Series II (2012-13): Rice University School of Natural Sciences Series III (2013-14): Rice University School of Engineering Series IV (2014-15): Rice University School of Humanities Series V (2015-16): Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business & KoÇ University’s School of Administration Series VI (2016-17): Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music & McGill University’s Schulich School of Music

Copyright 2017 Rice University. All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the School of Social Sciences at Rice University. Requests for permission should be directed to ipek@rice.edu.

2016 – 17 TURNING POINTS PRODUCTION

TURNING POINTS DIRECTOR & GSL CO-DIRECTOR Thresa Skeslien-Jenkins SENIOR FELLOW EDITOR Simone Bergsrud SECTION EDITORS Kira Luscher Molly Turner Victoria Oliha Joanna Shen Joe Reilly Andrew White GRAPHIC DESIGNER Miranda Morris PRODUCER Alexander Wyatt ’11, Assistant Director of Gateway ADVISOR Ipek Martinez, Director of Gateway

2016 – 17 GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP

CO-DIRECTORS Caroline Lee, Emily Rao, Thresa Skeslien-Jenkins SENIOR FELLOWS Simone Bergsrud, Carlin Cherry, Tim Wang INTERNATIONAL LIAISONS Bradley Hamilton, Alexander Wyatt ‘11 FELLOWS David Cai, Meghana Gaur, Noah Alden Hardaway, Kira Luscher, Sara Meadow, Elizabeth Myong, Victoria Oliha, Joe Reilly, Joanna Shen, Gabriel Tugendstein, Molly Turner, David Yang, Hannah Wei, Andrew White, Natalie Wingfield, Lily Wulfemeyer TRANSCRIBERS Yasna Haghdoost, Camila Kennedy, Elise Lahoud, Alicia McCormick, Alexia Rauen, Isaac Schultz MCGILL UNIVERSITY STUDENT CONTRIBUTORS Noemie Chemali, Suzu Enns, John Drinkwater, Aiden Fontaine-O’Connell, Jeana Kim, Chris MacMillan, Mitchell Russo ADVISORS Ipek Martinez, Director of Gateway Fred Oswald, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology Lyn Ragsdale, Ph.D., Radoslav A. Tsanoff Chair, Public Affairs, Professor of Political Science

INTRODUCTION

The Gateway Study of Leadership (GSL) is a student-led fellowship in Rice University’s School of Social Sciences that facilitates interview-based research on leadership themes and influential lessons as articulated by faculty.

Turning Points is an annual collection of highlights from the interviews gathered together by the main themes explored each year. This annual student-led research project gives undergraduates an opportunity to develop their research and analytical abilities while also expanding their leadership potential.

The 2016-2017 Gateway Study of Leadership cohort focused its attention on studying the most mysterious of schools at Rice University: the Shepherd School of Music.

For non-music students, Shepherd is a place of wonder and faraway talent. With this book, we hope that we can illuminate the intricacies of practice, hard work, talent and the excitement of teamwork and performance with the greater Rice community. This series, started in 2011, is meant to give insight into the lives of professors to learn more about how they maintain their passions and why they choose to teach.

This year, we partnered with the McGill University Schulich School of Music in Montreal, Canada. Their focus on innovation through music technology and their promotion of music education provided a contrast to Shepherd’s classical specialty. Over a few months, we conducted nearly 50 interviews with music faculty and, in the six sections that follow, we highlight the best excerpts that give us a sense of professors’ motivations, passions, leadership experiences, student-teacher relationships, view of the 1

future of music and, finally, how they approach cultivating talent in their students by employing the most effective forms of practice.

We are incredibly proud to present this series to you and want to sincerely thank all of those who made this book possible including Schulich and Shepherd faculty and staff, Gateway staff, the GSL fellows, and administration at Rice University.

Thresa Skeslien-Jenkins Turning Points Director, GSL Co-Director

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ABOUT THE INSTITUTIONS

Shepherd School of Music Rice University, Houston, Texas

96 undergraduate students | 191 graduate students The Shepherd School of Music, founded in 1975, boasts an impressive international student body, has trained both Pulitzer Prize and Grammy winners, and repeatedly produces over 400 events yearly to contribute to the rich culture of Houston.

Schulich School of Music McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada 550 undergraduate students | 300 graduate students

The Schulich School of Music, founded in 1904, brings together the performing and creative arts with research in the humanities, science, and technology. The international student body is involved in c. 700 events per year, including scholarly conferences, early music, new music, jazz, and everything in between.

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CONTENTS Section 1. Turning Points Kira Luscher Page 7 Section 2. Beyond the Notes Molly Turner Page 35 Section 3. Invisible to Visible Victoria Oliha Page 57 Section 4. Cultivating Talent Joanna Shen Page 83 Section 5. Collaborative Nature Joe Reilly Page 107 Section 6. Music in Our Lives Andrew White Page 133

Featured Faculty Page 153 Gateway Study of Leadership 2016-17 Cohort Page 169 Acknowledgements Page 175

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Turning Points

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SECTION I: TURNING POINTS

Given the social climate surrounding general musicianship, one might suspect that the choice to pursue a career in music would be fraught with internal conflict. However, discussing this very personal decision with stellar music school faculty across two globally renowned music schools, Shepherd and Schulich, proved quite the opposite. While some of these professors knew from early childhood that they wanted to pursue a life of teaching, others transitioned into professorship much later in life when they were invited to teach after a long and illustrious performance career.

This section provides valuable insight on the trends and forces that influenced these talented men and women to follow a path that allowed them to become experts in their field. This musical appeal blossomed from roots such as their family’s cultural values, a particularly significant mentor, or the realization that they could build a career doing something they love.

In the interview process we made sure to leave quite a bit of room for interpretation with the exception of one question; we requested that faculty tell us the story of a crucial turning point in their life or career brought on by an event or by the right words at the right time. This question elicited responses that were provocative, moving, and even a bit humorous at times, as professors reminisced on moments that were powerful enough to alter the trajectory of their lives and careers. Our takeaway is that the twists and turns that inspired them to instill quality musicianship 9

in their students may vary greatly in nature, but a zealous dedication to the art resonates across all musical fields and backgrounds. In the words of pianist Jeanne Fischer, “Only people who have the deep love, the extraordinary discipline, and a conviction that they could not imagine themselves doing anything else should aspire to doing music.�

- Kira Luscher, Section Editor

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CONTENTS Excerpts featured in this section are by the following professors in the order they are listed Jon Kimura Parker Richard Bado Alain Cazes Isabelle Cossette Ivo-Jan van der Werff Arthur Gottschalk Christopher Harman Kyoko Hashimoto Desmond Hoebig Karim Al-Zand Jacqueline Leclair Arthur Gottschalk Stefano Algieri Richard Lavenda Leone Buyse Ichiro Fujinaga Barbara Clark Isabelle Cossette Charles Geyer Fabrice Marandola Jon Kimura Parker Dominique Labelle Arthur Gottschalk

Rice University Rice University McGill University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University McGill University Rice University McGill University Rice University McGill University Rice University

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Jon Kimura Parker

Piano

Shepherd School

The most significant turning point in my life was in 1995 when I was living in New York. I was out of school, performing a lot, and travelling the world a lot. During that time there was a war in Bosnia, and there was a peace accord in Dayton, Ohio, that worked out details of a peace agreement which was signed mid December of 1995. A couple of days before Christmas, I received a call from Steve Johnson, vice president of an American relief organization AmeriCares. He told me the Sarajevo Philharmonic, an orchestra that had disbanded for a couple of years because of the war, had announced they were going to play a New Year’s eve concert to celebrate the new peace treaty. AmeriCares was doing an airlift to Sarajevo over New Year’s Eve, and so they apparently contacted the orchestra and said, “We would like to bring in as a symbolic gesture, a soloist for your concert”, and he said to me, then, “and we think you’d be the perfect guy.” I was 35 years old, I was single, and I didn’t have any particular reason to say no, except it sounded vaguely terrifying, but he said, “We’re good at being safe.” So, I agreed, I mean, I thought about it for two days, and I agreed.

A couple of days after Christmas, we flew over. It was exciting for me, because I’m not a daredevil person at all, C-130 military transport planes and all this stuff. We arrived in Sarajevo. We were taken to the hotel, and I suddenly remember that I’d never even shown my passport, ‘cause I mean we just kind of went in to a private airport, and everything was chaotic. We had a rehearsal, then I played the Beethoven Emperor Piano Concerto with the Sarajevo Philharmonic on New Year’s Eve. After the concert, a very elderly lady, Bosnian woman, came backstage, looking for me. She didn’t speak any 13

English, so she found our translator. The official translator came over with her and said, “She wants to tell you something.” I said, “What?” and this lady said during the slow movement of the concerto (and this is a very, very beautiful nocturne-like slow movement, incredibly atmospheric and contemplative in a special sort of way. It was one of Beethoven’s most beautiful moments) she realized that a couple of minutes had gone by and she had actually realized that she had not been thinking about the war, like it had actually gone out of her head. And she just wanted me to know, and just thank me, and that was it. I was just sort of stunned, and it took me literally a couple of days to process that, but I thought that really is why I want to be a musician.

It’s not that I would want to be technically the best player there ever was. I mean I always want to improve myself, I always want to aspire to that high standard, but that isn’t at the end of the day why anybody should be a musician. You should be a musician because it affects people very directly.

People have emotional responses to music that they don’t actually always understand. And that was a turning point, because at that point I was going through a state of analysis and self-criticism and thinking, “Aam I really good enough to be doing this?” And it just didn’t seem relevant anymore.

It just didn’t matter. I thought, “That’s not the point.” If I’m so lucky that I have a chance to play a concert and people are actually going to have a response like that, then obviously that’s a special circumstance, but that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing, and that became a very big turning point, without question.

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Richard Bado

Opera Studies

Shepherd School

There was a point fifteen years ago after I was working and I hadn’t played for a while and they asked me to play some concerts. The first ones did not go well because I was getting very nervous, debilitatingly nervous. Instead of going to a shrink I just sat myself down and said, “No one is making you do this. Do you want to do this? If you want to do this get over your nerves and get out there and really do this, or don’t do it. Make a decision.” And I thought about this for a number of months and decided to do one more engagement to see how it went, and I sort of psyched myself into, “I really want to do this” and it’s gone well since. That was a turning point; deciding that this is what I want to do, no one is making me do this. It was a psychological approach to doing it. No one is forcing me, and I enjoy it, so just do it and get over yourself. This psychological change applies to everything I do. When I was practicing I would visualize. I would sit at the piano to practice but I would visualize a concert hall. I would sometimes stand and look at the audience. They weren’t there but I would just put myself there so when I got there in real life I’ve already been there and I enjoyed doing this.

Alain Cazes

Conducting

Schulich School

My main area of work is conducting. I started conducting in 1983, replacing someone in front of a community band. They asked me to replace the conductor because he was sick and they said, “Alain, we need a conductor,” and it started right there. I never had a single conducting lesson in my life. I just started conducting. I learned conducting by playing in orchestras with great conductors by watch15

ing and, with the experience of being in front of a group, this talent grew. I was fascinated by this field, and I started to do it much more seriously in the late 80s and early 90s with a professional group here in Montreal and then I was conducting a professional ensemble.

Isabelle Cossette

Music Education

Schulich School

I was trained to be a performer. My doctoral studies were in performance after I obtained a unanimous first prize at the conservatoire. I did some auditions for orchestras but at one point I decided that is not what I want to do. I don’t see what I’d contribute as a flutist. What do I have more than the other great flutists around? The atmosphere of music in the classical world was not very satisfying for me.

I could see that I could contribute more to something by doing the research I had in mind to do, and I still believe that is the case. During my doctoral studies, I was also trained in a respiratory physiology lab. I found there a supportive and collaborative atmosphere that I had not found in the classical music performance milieu.

Ivo-Jan van der Werff

Viola

Shepherd School

My quartet was approaching its twentieth year and we thought that was the time to put the Beethovens down. We were in a room rehearsing and we were playing the Cavatina from Opus 130, which Beethoven regarded as his greatest work. We’d been practicing for hours and it wasn’t going well. It was out of tune. It wasn’t together. The tempo was wrong. Nothing was working. Our second violinist said, “Look, why don’t we just play through the thing? I mean, 16

for goodness’ sake, all we’ve done is argue about it. Let’s just play it.” That play-through was my greatest musical experience ever. It was not even in public, but we sat down and as soon as we put bow on string, you could feel this tension in the air and there were no words to describe it.

It was enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. We hardly dared to breathe because we could feel something happening. We played through and at the end, we put our instruments down and we couldn’t talk. We were just shell-shocked. We didn’t say anything. We just got up and left. That was proof to me that all the hours I’d spent practicing and going through the pains to become a musician were worth it. To share that with three other people immediately gives you a bond that you cannot get with anybody else. It’s a unique experience. Whatever language you use, it’s quite a spiritual experience. It’s something that draws you together and stays with you forever.

Arthur Gottschalk

Composition & Theory

Shepherd School

When I went to college the Vietnam War was raging. I really didn’t want to join the military, which would have happened if I lost my student deferment. But I wasn’t going to school just for a student deferment; God knows there were enough of those guys. The threat of not being able to go to school certainly was made that much more severe by the fact that the alternative might be to go die in war. That was a great motivator for me to figure out not only how I could make a living but to pay for a rather expensive education.

I’m not averse to menial or manual labor, but I realized that I could make more money per hour playing my instrument and doing things like that than I could by digging ditches.

The pop music gigs were few and far between; I was a jazz and classical trombonist, and the pop music at the time 17

was primarily psychedelic stuff. However, the University of Michigan was in close proximity to Detroit, which had a thriving soul music scene, and the soul bands all had threeman horn lines – trumpet, trombone, and sax. I got into as many of those groups as I could, usually the only white guy in an all-black band, which was a terrific experience for me to learn what it’s like to be the odd man out. I think more people should go through an experience like that. It certainly made me more empathetic but I also learned a whole lot more about my art form than I might have had if I had not had that experience. For example, when we weren’t playing, we danced. Everybody laughed at the white guy dancing, but the important thing I learned is, when you’re on stage, you’re entertaining, whether you’re playing your instrument or not. If you’re not playing your instrument, do something. I had to get just as creative to find ways to support myself and pay for school as anything else I did, and I think that that was a crucial turning point because the sense of self-reliance that I developed from that was very helpful. Later on in life, professionally, it helped me a lot too, because I’ve never allowed a figure of authority to make me feel like I had to do something that I felt I didn’t want to do or shouldn’t do, because they couldn’t ever threaten me financially. I would rather flip hamburgers than do something unethical.

Christopher Harman

Composition

Schulich School

It might sound surprising but I never envisioned myself as a professor, and in my early twenties I even avoided going to university because of a rebellious spirit and an antiestablishment worldview. But over the years in my work and in my practice, I nonetheless had this analytical way of thinking about my own work and studying the work of others. In some way I had this unconscious idea that I 18

might have to use these tools at some point without ever thinking that I would become a professor. When I interviewed for a position at McGill, it seemed almost uncanny that being in this environment did not feel strange at all. I suppose I started to see myself as a professor a few months before I became one.

Kyoko Hashimoto

Piano

Schulich School

I never imagined when I was in my twenties that I would become a professor in Canada. When I was a student in Japan, I did a lot of gigs in operas, orchestras, accompanying and chamber music. I thought I would become a collaborative pianist. And actually I did; I started my career as a collaborative pianist. If you are young and talented, you have a lot of opportunities, but if you are over thirty, you will start to struggle, and it is a normal tendency for everyone.

You cannot continue to expect from other people the same kind of attention you got as a youth. Gradually, I started to struggle to get enough money from freelancing. I thought I had to get a teaching position at a University to survive.

But I don’t have any graduate degrees, as I didn’t speak any English when I left Japan and I was a performance oriented non-degree student at Bloomington and Julliard.

So it was not an easy task even though I played with lots of very established great musicians all over the world.

Until I reached my mid-thirties, I didn't really think about teaching but it seemed to be the only way that I could still enjoy my work as a musician and at the same time stabilize my income. I was living in Amsterdam at that time and sent out a bunch of letters to lots of good university job openings in newspapers. Then, I got my first invitation for an audition for a professorship in Germany, which was extremely difficult to get. Probably only five people among two hundred applicants could get this invitation. I was very 19

surprised. I went to audition but the problem was, they said I had to teach only in German. At that time I couldn't speak any German. I knew only a few words so of course I couldn't get the job. But afterwards I got some business cards from the people there and called them and said, “I'm sorry I couldn't speak any German but I hope I didn't waste your time." And the person that I talked to said, "Oh no. For me you were the best. You played absolutely the best and I understand you couldn't speak any German, but I see that you're a really good musician. You could be a really good teacher." I didn't expect that somebody would think that I could be a really good teacher because I had never done that before. This experience gave me a motivation and also a sort of confidence. It took, though, a few years since then to get my first regular teaching position at Utrecht Conservatory in Holland, and after that eight more years to get the position at McGill University.

Desmond Hoebig

Cello

Shepherd School

When I was 48, I was asked to be a professor at Rice. Since I had been the principal cellist of the Houston Symphony for 12 years and an adjunct associate professor here for ten years, I knew the school well. I was already good friends with a lot of the faculty and so it was quite an easy decision.

Becoming a professor partially fell into place. I think a high percentage of musicians do some teaching. Teaching is the passing on of knowledge to the next generation. When I started teaching in my twenties, I felt quite clueless. I didn’t know how to communicate my ideas. When this opportunity to become a teacher came, I said, “This would be a nice transition. I’ve done a lot of playing and now I want to do more teaching and it’s been fantastic.” I think it gets easier through experience.

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As a university professor you don’t stop performing. It’s not black and white, but it’s certainly less and my priorities now are my students and family. It’s nothing compared to what I used to do, but I still go off and play with an orchestra or play a recital or play chamber music.

Karim Al-Zand Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

The idea of actually composing music didn’t occur to me until relatively late in life, but I’d always been interested in music and performing. People oftentimes start studying instruments very early in life, while composers don’t often study composition very early. For whatever reason, there just isn’t that tradition. When I was a pianist, I used to try to emulate the pieces that I was playing. That’s when I got the bug of composing. This is as opposed to a lot of people who go into performance as a career where they’re interested in practicing a piece until they can play it perfectly and interpret it in a meaningful way. To me the idea of playing it perfectly wasn’t really important, it was more about, “How does it work?” and, “How can I try to create something like that?”

The most fun thing about composing is finally hearing what you’ve written on the page come to life - that’s really the motivation. Composition is a fairly solitary thing; you’re oftentimes working on your own, and the music doesn’t get realized fully until the piece is complete. When I’m working on a piece I’m always looking forward to that moment when I get to hear all these things that have only existed in my head. When the piece is complete you bring it to the performers and the performers bring it to the audience and that’s when all the really exciting stuff happens.

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I feel like teaching informs my composition because my students give me a lot to think about. I learn almost as much from them as they learn from me. When you teach composition, you see in your students a lot of the issues that you yourself encounter. Helping them work through those creative issues also helps me do the same.

Jacqueline Leclair Schulich School

Oboe

I studied oboe with Ronald Roseman when I was 21-24 years of age. I have learned from him every day over the years and continue to learn from my memory of him, his writings, and his recordings. I went to his apartment in New York City for a lesson when I was 24, and it occurred to me for the first time in my life that I was going to leave school soon which I had never thought about before. I think it had dawned on me that I would have to get a job and I was freaking out. So I arrived and we always went to the kitchen and he would wash his hands with a bar of soap and then hand me the bar of soap and I would wash my hands. We never talked about that, that’s just always what we did. Then we went to the living room, and he read me like a book. I was trying to be cool, but he could tell that I was freaking out. So we talked a little bit and he said, “Jackie, you don’t have to worry about making a living. I’ll tell you what you have to do to be successful. You have to play a note, one note, every day, that is so beautiful, that it vibrates with everything in the universe. And if you do that, you’ll be successful. That’s all you have to think about.”

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Arthur Gottschalk Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

Because of the nature of music conservatories, especially at the time that I was going to school, I imagined being a professor before I imagined being a composer. There were really no programs to teach anybody about entrepreneurship, or business, or careers, or life after school whatsoever, and about the only topic that professors at that time could even address with any amount of confidence was how to become a professor, because that’s all they knew and that’s all they were. It was pretty much drilled into my head at that time, rightly or wrongly, that if you were going to be a composer you were going to have to get a Ph.D. and you were going to have to be a professor. That’s not true now, and I try to discourage my students from thinking of that and, luckily, I have enough of a world view and experience that I can give them better counsel than that. After I became a professor I began thinking of myself more and more as an artist, and that’s something that I try to instill in my students from the get-go: they’re artists, they’re not craftsmen, they’re not scholars. They can be those things as well, and they probably should be if they’re going to be a successful artist in this field, but they really need to embrace themselves as an artist first.

Stefano Algieri Schulich School

Voice

I was born to sing. Music was a big part of our household even though no one was a professional musician. My father used to sing to me every night before I went to sleep and now I hear that voice every day. It was the most beautiful voice I had ever heard. He sang to all the brothers and sisters, but for me, it was like a laser that went directly to 23

my heart. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t singing. I started out singing for the family as a child, and when I was seven-years-old, I joined the Catholic Church choir. I’ve been singing professionally ever since. The encouragement to pursue a career in music came from my parents and there was also one person in the family who was jealous of me. They weren’t blood related. I didn’t know why, but I knew the person was jealous of me. The person didn’t want me to do well. Coming from Jersey, you either deal with the bullies on the block or you never leave the house. I learned to deal with the bully. As much as the encouragement I received helped, that person’s negativity inspired me to do well. I turned their bitterness into a positive.

I spent 30 years as a professional opera singer, singing all around the world. I was singing professionally in Germany when I got a call that my wife was ill. I came home right away. We did the best we could to save her, but 7 months later, she passed away. I stayed home with my daughter, of course. My wife was my muse, my inspiration. I lost my desire to go back on the road to empty hotel rooms and empty apartments. I had already sung my Tristan, which is the summit for any tenor who has that type of voice. When I stopped, McGill University found out and asked me to apply to the vacant position of voice professor. Now, I’m in my 14th year at McGill. I don’t miss the travelling or the career. I sing every day with my students.

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Richard Lavenda Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

My parents both loved classical music very deeply. They were not performers, but my father especially really loved it, and we had the radio on all the time. When I was in elementary school every student was handed a musical instrument in the fourth grade and received free lessons once a week on that instrument. When you combine that with my life at home with my parents, music was natural.

It was just something you did. When I was in about 6th grade I began to go into New York City every Saturday to the Manhattan School of Music preparatory department where I studied the cello. I was there all day every Saturday for seven years. When I was in about 9th or 10th grade, my cello teacher and I had a long discussion about careers in music. We agreed that I would not go on in music, that I wasn’t serious enough about the cello. I didn’t want to practice the cello for four or five hours a day. I could think of nothing worse than spending 4 or 5 hours sitting behind the cello. So, I went to college not to be a music major.

I actually went to Dartmouth College. Being as it was a wealthy Ivy League school, they had a lot of guests come up. I had some serendipitous experiences where I met some people who were very influential and I was able to take a few classes where I was able to write music. I began to think of music not as a cellist, but as a composer. Then what happened was the total serendipity which changed my life completely. In my sophomore year, Dartmouth hired a string quartet that specialized in playing contemporary music and they brought in all sorts of composers.

They would premiere a piece and the composer would be available to any student. I would sign up for a lesson with all these big name composers, I mean the biggest names in my field. One day I met this man who liked me and I really liked him, and I heard his piece and the music just blew me away. I had never heard anything like it. I loved 25

it. I didn’t think much more of it until he came back about 6 months later. In my senior year of college he came back to record the piece, and we met again and he said, “Hey Richard, what are you doing next year?” and I replied that I had no idea. He said, “Well look, I just started work at this new music school, why don’t you be a music student and come get a master’s degree in composition?” He then said, “Well it’s in Houston, Texas, called Rice University, they just created a music school.” I said, “Yeah, okay.” Literally, that’s about how much planning it took. I came to Rice in 1977, which was the second year of the Shepherd School and from that point on I’ve been a composer.

Leone Buyse

Flute

Shepherd School

My background, both in my family and in my hometown of Ithaca, New York, pushed me toward academia. My father was the assistant superintendent of schools and had earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in education at Cornell.

I had planned to be a teacher because of what I had grown up with: two universities essentially in my backyard. After returning to the United States following flute studies in Paris on a Fulbright, I was actually working on my master’s when I had the chance to audition for the Rochester Philharmonic. I hadn’t planned to pursue an orchestral career, but I won the position, which turned a switch for me. I was twenty-four and didn’t finish my degree at that time, but rather went right into orchestral playing. Who would have guessed that would be my career for the next twenty-two years? I could never have known that I would would later win positions in the San Francisco Symphony and then the Boston Symphony/Boston Pops—one of the world’s greatest orchestras. It’s amazing to realize that you can’t know where your career will lead you. Throughout my 26

years in three major American orchestras I always taught but came to a full time career in academia very late: I was 50 years old when I came to Rice following four years at the University of Michigan. What keeps me excited about being here is the excitement of working with students. When you see people who are just starting to prepare for their careers, who are fifty or more years behind where you are but who love music, that to me is incredibly inspiring and also a huge responsibility.

Ichiro Fujinaja Schulich School

Music Technology

In adolescence I wanted to be a rock star like everybody else, but there was never a question for me to be a professor. It was easy. I first envisioned myself as a professor when I was five. My dad’s a professor, so there was no other path for me. It wasn’t a forced choice, it was just natural because I watched my father work and he was a great role model. He had a great time working. He worked all the time, but that’s what he wanted to do. He didn’t tell me how to become a professor, he didn’t even tell me to become a professor. He just said, “Do what you want to do, do what you want.”

Barbara Clark

Voice

Shepherd School

My father is an organist and taught in academia his whole life. My mother was also a musician and holds two degrees, one in organ and one in voice. Absolutely, the idea of making music with other people was something I did every day at home with my family. The joy in that for me was about the relationships as well as the music. My sister and I, when we were bored, would sit down and sight read the Bach duets from the B Minor Mass. It was very much a so27

cial event for me to just do music with the people who were around me. My father and my mother both taught as well, and my mother was my first voice teacher. I think I had a lot of natural curiosity growing up, and I was encouraged to ask a lot of questions. I was encouraged to be inquisitive, and I think that asking questions is at the heart of education. The kind of students to this day I am attracted to are the students who are curious. I see them progress and they love music, and it’s more than just the end product of creating some perfect form of music. They’re creating something deeper along the way. My father is 86 now and still wants to be up on the latest research on Bach. He’s still inquisitive and I admire that. I think that’s what made me interested in education: questions and answers.

Isabelle Cosette

Music Education

Schulich School

When I was very young, my parents bought an old boat they were going to renovate and I found a flute on it. It was metal and a mouthpiece was attached. It’s a weird kind of flute but it made me dream a lot. I thought I could become a flutist. I don’t know if it had an influence, but I started to study music part-time. At that point I had many questions and I was the kind of student who asked so many questions that the teachers would have to take a break after my lessons. Then, I did my normal studies in music and I had my first prize at the Conservatoire. After that I came here to McGill to do a Master’s, and I started to ask myself, “How does it work?” because my teachers were not able to really answer my questions. I would ask, “How do we use the body when we’re performing?” And they all seemed to have different answers to my questions. When you’re a wind instrument player, obviously you need to use your respiratory system. My father’s an engineer and when I was discussing this with him he would always encourage me to 28

look further to try to understand how things work. There was a scientific background from my family and they were always looking for answers to their questions. My parents were well educated for people of their age and I continued asking questions. My teachers were saying what they felt was happening but what they thought was happening was not necessarily directly related to what was actually happening. Also, their explanations were often not aligned with how the body works so it was quite confusing. This probably motivated me to go into research in order to answer some of my questions. And it did for many!

Charles Geyer

Trumpet

Shepherd School

My parents really wanted me to go to college because nobody in my family went to college. They certainly didn’t expect me to go into music, which is what I did. My dad was in the circus. He didn’t even finish high school. It was during the Depression, and he found out that they were going to give shots for smallpox or chickenpox, so he quit school and joined the circus. Most of his family was in the circus. The reason I chose the trumpet was because my dad had just bought a trumpet, a used trumpet, for ten dollars from somebody he worked with. He didn’t have time to practice it very much but he really liked it. That was my first inspiration, to do what my daddy did.

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Fabrice Marandola

Percussion

Schulich School

My parents were primary school teachers. I was raised in a very small village community with two teachers, my father and my mother. The expectation that they had was just that I do my best. I think they were expecting me to be curious and tried to cultivate that. My father once said that you should never take yourself seriously in the work, but you should do your work very seriously. It’s the idea of applying yourself consciously to what you’re doing to do your best and eventually being the best. But I wasn’t expecting to be the best. My father was always pushing us to do the best we could. He was an amateur drummer so there was a drum set in in my house that was never used. I think that was the first trigger, because I remember really clearly, when I was 6 years old and he asked me what I wanted to do when I was older and I said, “I want to be a drum set player.” I wanted to be a drum set player to do what my father was doing for fun. My parents also had a friend who lived in Niger, Africa, and one year he brought me a small drum. The drums and the pictures my parents brought back got me attracted to African music very early on.

Jon Kimura Parker Shepherd School

Piano

Pianists and violinists all typically start playing at a very, very young age. We have a single-minded focus, which is different than most students, who just start to think of what direction they may want to go in high school, and may not refine it until in college. But I was sure when I was four I wanted to be a pianist. My mother is Japanese. She grew up in Tokyo with no background in Western culture except that it was traditional for one girl in the family to get piano lessons if parents could afford it, so she had piano lessons.

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My father is Canadian, and never studied music, but his brother did, and he became my piano teacher growing up.

I feel very connected to both of my parents and their expectations every time I perform. The expectations of my mother were very much about responsibility, preparation, practice, and, playing the right notes. My father’s expectations were more emotion driven. What music had a big emotional impact on him. He would say, “That was exciting,” or, “That was tragically sad,” or, “That was joyous.” That was equally important to me. It’s very important as a musician, to try to express human feeling through music; it’s also very important to have practiced and mostly be playing the right notes. When I give concerts, I feel like most of the people in the audience are listening for an emotional response. But, if I play in certain cities, I feel there are a lot of people like my mom out there, too. I feel like those values were instilled in me very, very early. And they certainly have stayed with me to this day.

Dominique Labelle

Voice

Schulich School

My parents had no expectations of us. My father comes from a very strict Catholic family of nine people. He had to say the rosary every night at seven o’clock on the radio and they would pray together. It was a conservative, tight-knit family. I think he suffered somewhat from the rigidity of the family so he just let us do what we wanted. For example, music was the first love in my life but I was never encouraged to take lessons. He felt that it had to come from me. My parents strongly believed that they didn’t want to impose on me the rigidity or the structure of having to take music lessons. I also did ballet, played the recorder, the piano, the flute, and the guitar, but it was always coming from me.

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Since I was a little baby I’ve always wanted to be in music.

That’s the only thing I cared about. So when I discovered singing I got very deep into it and started understanding the whole depth of this instrument and the immensity of the universe of singing. It became completely overwhelming in a good way. I never believed I was to become an opera singer. I loved music and I wanted to understand it, to be part of it. I started writing poems and I had no idea I had a voice. I sang a song to my friends because I was taking music lessons and they were surprised that my voice was pretty. I thought, “Oh, that might be kind of fun,” and this is how it started. My own music-making and poemmaking, brought the voice out of me.

Arthur Gottschalk

Composition & Theory

Shepherd School

I was expected to go to medical school, which I did, and to stay in medical school, which I didn’t. I was expected to go to the University of Michigan because my father was so gung-ho that he almost refused to admit of any other possibilities and, at that time, most high school kids didn’t really know what they wanted. I thought that because I was very good at science and math that I should go and study the biological sciences. I wasn’t terribly upset about being pre-med because it’s basically the same curriculum. It was never my intent to become a physician in the first place, but my parents didn’t have to know that, and I was lucky that Michigan had a three-year accelerated pre-med program.

I also had enough time to take a few music courses. I had always been very active in music. Over the first two years or so I began to realize that the reason I hadn’t considered a career in music is because I had absolutely no idea what that might entail. Most people think musicians are the people you see on TV, with the long hair and the funny clothes, or the tuxedos on stage, none of which appealed to me. I 32

got to know practitioners in various fields of music, and it became more and more attractive to me as something that I would like to do with my life, rather than just get a job and wait for the weekends so that I could play golf. So to the detriment of my relationship with my parents was when I decided, two and a half years into a three-year program, to switch into music, and they said they would support me entirely in my decision, except financially, which was also fine. I just put myself through school from that point on.

There were other expectations for me but I followed my own path instead.

I like what I do. I think I made the right decision to pursue music and not medicine when I was a kid. I was scared about it; I saw a counselor and the smartest thing she told me, I thought, was ‘’Well, don’t worry if you’re making the wrong decision, people live long enough these days to have two or three careers. So if it doesn’t work out you can do something else”. I thought, oh well, that’s good. No decision I made at that age was going to necessarily force me into some odious or repugnant field. I have no intention of retiring; I like working with students, I like the academic environment, I like being an artist. This is what I wanted. I work nights, days, and weekends, but that’s what I wanted.

I didn’t want to have just a job, I wanted to have a life and a career.

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Beyond the Notes

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SECTION II: BEYOND THE NOTES

A musical score is like a recipe—it’s a set of instructions for making something. However, a talented musician, just like a talented chef, will always go a little beyond these instructions. They will go beyond the exact measurements and rules, and add their own secret ingredient. As Victor Hugo said, “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.”

In our interviews at both the Schulich School of Music and the Shepherd School of Music, many of the faculty touched on this magic ingredient that exists beyond the notes on the page. Some suggested sparking musical curiosity outside the practice room by experiencing other facets of the arts. One professor, Jacqueline Leclair from McGill University, suggested that the simple habit of smiling while you practice can make a difference.

Perhaps the most common thread was exposure—to new sounds, emotions, people, and life experiences. Professors emphasized that music is about life and you can’t play music well without a generous depth of life experience.

Of course the faculty are concerned about precision and technique, but more interesting are their thoughts on getting beyond the mechanics of playing. Musical curiosity is not something that happens in a single practice session, but over time. There is no single strategy for developing this curiosity, rather, it is a mindset of yearning for 37

knowledge and open-mindedness.

Even though Shepherd and Schulich are different in size, breadth of studies, and demographics, professors at both schools greatly value a relentless musical curiosity from their students. Perhaps this hints at the great universality of music—beyond the notes, music is simply about sharing a story.

What makes a great musician better than a good musician?

It’s something beyond the ink on the page. This goes against the notion that great performers practice the most hours. It says great performers not only spend time in the practice room but also seek meaningful life experiences that they can bring back to their music.

- Molly Turner, Section Editor

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CONTENTS Excerpts featured in this section are by the following professors in the order they are listed Jon Kimura Parker James Dunham Janet Rarick Hank Knox Alexandra Kieffer Anthony Brandt Jacqueline Leclair Ivo-Jan van der Werff William Caplin Fabrice Marandola Anthony Brandt Thomas Jaber Guillaume Bourgogne Barbara Clark Robert Roux Norman Fischer Anthony Brandt Karim Al-Zand Janet Rarick Robert Roux Jean-SĂŠbastien VallĂŠe Norman Fischer Karim Al-Zand David Ferris Jerry Hou

Rice University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University McGill University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University Rice University Rice University Rice University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University Rice University Rice University

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Jon Kimura Parker

Piano

Shepherd School

I recommend to my students before you sit down and start playing a piece you should be able to talk your way through a piece. A lot of musicians can’t do that. You know that expression, ‘You missed the forest for the trees?’ You get so caught up in the details that you actually don’t see the big picture. It’s really easy, for pianists in particular to not see the big picture, because we just play so many notes all the time. It’s just so complicated and one can get very caught up in that and just kind of forget that there’s an overall arc in music, so I advise students not to lose sight of that.

James Dunham

Viola

Shepherd School

Being a musician is stressful. A line from a memorable graduation address was, “Be sure to scare yourself at least once a day.” For we musicians, we scare ourselves twenty times a day. We get a thrill, sometimes a good one. But we’re constantly a little bit on the edge, and that keeps us going.

Janet Rarick

Professional Development

Shepherd School

As a musician, you grapple with the idea of what your dreams are and what the realities are and how to navigate through that. There’s an element of trust in the fact that if you have a dream that you want to go for, you will follow that dream, but follow it with awareness. In other words, follow your dream by listening to the kinds of cues that you’re getting from around you. Is the world saying yes to you? Most importantly, is it saying no? Is your awareness open enough that you can see a yes coming at you? As you navigate through your life, you want to be mindful and 41

notice the little things that happen every day that perk your awareness up and say, “Oh! I really like that. I connect with that. That resonates with something deep inside me that connects with who I am or who I want to be.” The more you open yourself up to look for those little things, the more you’ll see those cues coming.

Hank Knox

Harpsichord

Schulich School

It’s not easy to carve out a space for yourself as a performer.

And there are not a huge amount of opportunities unless you play in a string quartet. It’s like if you’re a dentist, you go to dental school, you can be a dentist forever. Guaranteed. If you’re a vet, you can be a vet forever. If you’re a plumber, you’re set for life. I’ll call you because I can’t deal with plumbing. No problem. But nobody needs a harpsichordist. Nobody needs a clarinetist. Nobody needs us for anything. We do it because we love it. So we find ways to keep going. A lot of people who start off in music discover that they don’t have the fire, the flame, the passion for it so they end up looking for another outlet for their talents.

Alexandra Kieffer Shepherd School

Musicology

I had a few experiences in grad school that were challenging and pushed me in certain ways. This is not an inspiring story, but my advisor at Yale resigned. We had a lot of disagreements and I had been trying to convince him to get on board with my project, but we just had some fundamental disagreements as to what scholarship is and little things like that. It all turned out fine, but I think that experience was formative to the extent to which it made me detach myself from the one person who validates my work.

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There is no one person who can say, “You’ve done well, you are a good scholar, you are a good person,” but learning to have more conviction in myself and what my work should be, not just entrusting an advisor or an authority figure to validate it, has become more important to me as I’ve moved through my career.

Anthony Brandt

Composition & Theory

Shepherd School

Often creativity in the literature is fixing something that’s imperfect. This doesn’t work so well in the arts. Beethoven didn’t write symphonies because he thought there was anything wrong with Mozart’s symphonies. In fact, we turn that idea on its head and take what we love and make it into something new. It isn’t that you are fixing things that are wrong, it’s that you’re showing your love and admiration for things by making it your own and carrying them forward. There are a lot of composers I certainly know who are tremendously intimidated by Beethoven and Brahms.

I’m not going to say I’m not. Truth of the matter is they’re my role models. They’re my constant reminder to do my best.

Jacqueline Leclair Schulich School

Oboe

One piece of advice I give students is to incorporate smiling into their practice, because when you smile, even a totally fake smile, can let your brain spit out happy chemicals. So make it a mechanism when you get your instrument out, smile, when you change pieces, smile, when you do whatever, smile. You will learn and feel better.

Practice is playful. I play the oboe. I don’t work the oboe.

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A year ago, one day it was around 8:30pm, I came back to the studio from my other work, and I was exhausted. And conventional wisdom is to just go home. I didn’t. I got out my instrument and I practiced for forty-five minutes. And I walked out of my studio feeling pretty wonderful. Fortyfive minutes, I was transformed from a bitter, depressed, and exhausted person to walking out of there feeling pretty good with a smile on my face.

Ivo-Jan van der Werff Shepherd School

Viola

As musicians, we tend to be highly emotional creatures by nature, even if some of us are more emotional than others.

What we’re doing is expression in a higher level of feelings and ideas. We’re really living on the edge and I think that’s why you see so many blow-ups in any art form. It’s not just music. If you look at artists and actors and look at their lives, you often think, “What the heck?” We put ourselves out there. Our goal and our purpose is to tell a story to an audience, which creates some of the most inner-most thoughts of the composers we’re trying to emulate, spiritual and emotional feelings. We’re really out there, and yet, we’re getting criticized for it all the time. We have very delicate emotions, and yet, we have to be very strong. In a sense, we have to be vulnerable to be able to do what we do, but on the other hand, we have very thick skin. That’s the dichotomy of performers.

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William Caplin Schulich School

Music Theory

If you’re not curious about things, you don’t learn much.

It’s pretty much the base of all learning, “I’m curious about that, so I’m gonna learn about that.” I think people who are curious about things continue to develop and foster that creativity. If you don’t have curiosity you’re stuck. What’s to motivate you? Why would you want to learn about anything? I think it’s at the root of practically everything; we don’t teach it, we just assume it.

Fabrice Marandola Schulich School

Percussion

I think what motivates me to keep teaching is to help students make changes. I don’t want them to be like me, I want them to go way past what I can do. What I’m trying to develop in the students is for them to build a sense of coherence in what they do. Whatever direction they want to take in the interpretation of something can take a totally different path from the one I have. I have no problem with that. But it has to be coherent. What we’re working on is trying to help them to create this coherence and to be able to understand the language of the composer.

Anthony Brandt

Composition & Theory

Shepherd School

Creativity is very collaborative. A piece of music isn’t what’s written on the paper, it’s the performance. The score is only the script. In fact, it’s an imperfect script. It is similar to how a play doesn’t tell you how fast to say the line, can’t tell you all the intonation, and can’t tell you which word to stress. There’s a lot of aspects that are up to the performer.

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Similarly, this notation, as rigorous as it appears, has a lot of stuff it cannot tell you. It’s one of the reasons you need music theory for classical music. Theory helps to understand the 50% that’s not explicitly notated in the score that’s very much part of the musical content. I always tell my students, “Your piece is not finished until you’ve had the first great performance of it.” When you have the first document, orally, of what you wanted the piece to sound like, then you can rest.

Thomas Jaber Shepherd School

Conducting & Vocal Coaching

My choirs rehearse their music directly with me. And, I feel that being “there” with them when they rehearse is of paramount importance. To be honest, most people who participate in choral ensembles don’t regularly rehearse on their own; they rehearse as an ensemble. When I am doing my best work, the singers don’t simply learn the correct notes to sing. I want them to understand how all of those notes ended up on the printed page and why a composer wrote them. Furthermore, they understand technically, from a standpoint of singing and of music composition, how the music can be. My job as their teacher is to ensure that a rehearsal is jam-packed with information and sparks of creativity and inspiration that create lasting joy for the music that is being sung.

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Guillaume Bourgogne

Conducting

Schulich School

To conduct a piece of music is a challenge. To overcome it, I study it as well as possible. Sometimes I have a piece to conduct that I’m not a big fan of and I overcome this situation in doing it as well as possible. I’m as demanding with a piece that I don’t like as with one I like. So I make no difference in my involvement because a part of my job is to be kind of an advocate of the composer. Like advocates, I have to defend even someone who is guilty, in a way.

Barbara Clark

Voice

Shepherd School

Some of the greatest singers and pianists that I know come from completely non-musical backgrounds. One of my mentors taught English Literature in Australia for most of his life. That doesn’t mean he didn’t practice. Obviously he did. Singers like Ian Bostridge did his degree in Classics from Oxford. I don’t think that you have to have a musical early experience in life to arrive at the place where you’re a professional musician. I think curiosity can be cultivated in any area that stimulates someone’s creativity. Studying Classics at Oxford probably contains enormous intellectual stimulation for someone. I’m a big fan of letting whatever backgrounds come together to make an individual experience. Technical proficiency is a requirement, and that’s assumed, but I think that it can be achieved without that technical background. Sometimes the most curious people I know are the ones who don’t have that stimulating background.

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Robert Roux

Piano

Shepherd School

Mind, heart, and physicality are what matter. Without mind, you’re a fiasco. Without heart, you’re a machine.

Without technique, you’re an amateur. I think one of the sad things is the amateur is sort of frowned upon. There was a time when that wasn’t true. The word ‘amateur’ means ‘love, love of ’, right? Which should encourage more people that are amateur musicians.

Norman Fischer

Cello

Shepherd School

As performing musicians there are basically three archetypes to understanding what we do. The first archetype is called the musician. This is that part of us that is nonphysical, that has to do with imagination, with creativity.

What do you see when you look at a score? What can you anticipate? How do you problem solve? How do you think about what you are doing? How do you make a plan for what you want to do? That is the musician whose most important attributes are imagination and creativity.

The second archetype is the athlete. And this is a different kind of thinking. This archetype has to do with understanding how the body works and how it’s designed. There is a lot of knowledge that we get from yoga, the Alexander method, Feldenkreis etc. to find out these things. Then we ask, how does the bow and cello work? Then ultimately how do you create an intelligent interface between the two things so you’re actually operating efficiently? And basically, you take something that’s hard to do and make it simple to do. So when you study as an athlete, you want to create something that is really simple and efficient. Then the third part of that is the performer. The performer 48

is somebody who can create a connection between their vision of what they are doing and selling this vision to the people that are in the concert hall (or the people that are on the other side of the screen if this is a video). The most important attribute is enthusiasm, which is the essential way to make connections between people, the artist to the listener.

When I am thinking about evaluating people - and I have done more than ten thousand auditions in my career - I think about these three things because I think you could have a successful career with any two of those things in bloom. But, it’s rare to see somebody who has all three.

Rarely I might find a person who in auditions played really well but I didn’t want to accept this player into my studio because I sensed an energy that was not healthy. It’s not a science, it’s an impression. Because of the dynamics of the class and the way we work as a unit, it is so incredibly important to have a healthy, positive energy. I want to make sure that the students are part of an environment where they can become vulnerable. With this vulnerability they are capable of really giving something personally authentic, which can become the most beautiful thing in a performance. Let’s face it, it can be frightening to get on stage.

And we want to make sure that the whole performance experience becomes something beyond themselves.

Anthony Brandt Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

My major composition teacher Mel Powell, who was my teacher at the California Institute of Arts, said that the reason he loved being a composer was to be part of the same guild as Bach and Mozart. I think he puts it so beautifully.

I like to think we are the humble great grandchildren of the people whose music we love so much. Nothing fires me up more than turning on the radio and hearing a Tchaikovsky 49

symphony, a Beethoven symphony, a Beethoven string quartet, or even a piece by Bach. That’s what inspires me more than anything. Although I love contemporary music and I love hearing what’s going on, the wellspring of what makes me really love being a composer is the classical repertoire.

Karim Al-Zand Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

You have to regard the work that you’re doing as intrinsically valuable. If you don’t always get approbation from outside sources you need to try to keep in mind that what you’re doing is meaningful to you. Outside reinforcements are always nice and can compel you at certain moments.

If you rely on them constantly, however, you’re striving for the wrong things. Especially with music, which is a field that’s not lucrative. You need to be doing music because you love music, not because you know other people are sort of patting you on the back constantly. This is especially true as a contemporary composer, where new music is certainly not as performed. People are not as willing to take a chance on new music over something that they’ve heard many times before. You need to be ready for people to not appreciate what you’re doing on the first hearing.

Janet Rarick

Shepherd School

Professional Development

Some people are just naturally more curious than others, and sometimes musicians can get the idea that they just need to stay in the practice room and practice really hard and they’ll get where they want to go. But I think getting out of your own area definitely stimulates a lot of curios50

ity. Anything that can take you out of yourself and make you share what you love to do with other people is a huge motivator for moving forward with your work. It takes the self-criticism down a little level. You really have to think about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what is the message that you want to send out with your music.

You have to have a clear intention of what you’re going to communicate when you’re playing music because music is a language. It is a form of communication.

Robert Roux

Piano

Shepherd School

If you’re religious, you would say musical curiosity comes from the Almighty. But if you’re psychoanalytical you’d say it’s from the unconscious. I find, with musical performance, your mind and your conscious thoughts are your enemy in many ways. The more things that are running through your mind, both prior to a performance and during a performance are distracting. Rubinstein has a great story of a pianist acquaintance of his who played his debut recital in 1910 where he saw a great pianist, Busoni, sitting out in one of the aisle seats. He got very nervous and bombed the performance. That very man went backstage afterwards and it wasn’t Busoni. It was somebody who looked a lot like him. It’s important to get the mind very clear, very still, clear of any thoughts. All of that stuff is counterproductive.

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Jean-Sébastien Vallée

Conducting

Schulich School

I think musical curiosity first comes from the idea that we have the right to make choices and question things, which is something that is not always obvious when we start studying music. We often feel that we cannot challenge things and not question things. We have to learn and accept it, and it comes only from outside. We may be curious to discover new things, but there’s not a strong flow of curiosity happening there. But if we assume that we’ll learn from the outside, we can’t challenge and come up with our own ideas, then we’re not having that back and forth. I think that’s what makes some students really curious and really eager, because there’s this constant back and forth.

Norman Fischer Shepherd School

Cello

Music is one of the only disciplines that uses the entire brain. It’s the only one that uses the entire dimension of human experience. Intrinsically we have to know quantitative thinking, with theory, acoustics, and mathematical components. The humanities (history, literature, and art) are definitely huge parts of the musical tradition going back, as far as we know, to the Greeks. We have the spiritual dimensions, which are those things that really deeply touch us. We are small motor athletes. There is also, by necessity, social engagement and understanding the political aspects of how we deal with one another. All these things are of tremendous importance in terms of our training and there isn’t any other discipline that actually encompasses all of that.

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Karim Al-Zand

Composition & Theory

Shepherd School

Musical curiosity stems from being open to new sounds.

There are a lot of musical sounds that we’re quite familiar with, but there are a lot of sounds that are not as common on the concert stage. Composers are people who are constantly listening to sounds around them, not just the sounds that are part of a piece. They’re listening to the sounds of nature. They’re listening to the sounds of technology. They’re listening to the sounds of voices. Curious people have that tendency to be open to those new sounds - they’re always open to absorbing new things.

As far as being a composer, society usually has an association with Hollywood. I say ‘composer’, they say, “Oh, like John Williams.” That is a very particular kind of composing and very different than what I do. Many people are involved in the making of a movie, and usually the composer is the last of those people involved. Typically the movie gets made, and then the composer writes the music. It’s not collaborative to the same degree as what I’m doing. That’s also true of commercial music—writing for advertisements or computer games. Sometimes being a composer requires a little explanation. Part of that is because, even if people do go to the orchestra or opera, ninety percent of what they’re going to hear are going to be people that are not around anymore.

David Ferris

Musicology

Shepherd School

Exposure, in the right context, generates any kind of curiosity. If you are exposed to a lot of music and you’re encouraged to listen and play music, that will increase your 53

curiosity. Music is something people naturally love. I really think exposure is the key to musical curiosity. The more you listen to, the more you want to find.

Jerry Hou

Conducting

Shepherd School

Everything informs us as a musician, whether it’s about seeing art, reading literature, keeping up with world events or keeping up with history. Keeping up with having ideas about food, about dance, about theater. Everything is intertwined. Music is about life. Being curious about life is what makes you a better musician. The composers that everyone loves—Beethoven or Mozart—they lived very full lives. Their music is the expression of their lives, it’s expression of happiness or sadness, anger or grief. And the only way you understand those better is to go through those experiences yourself.

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Invisible to Visible

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SECTION III: INVISIBLE TO VISIBLE

At the Shepherd and Schulich Music Schools, there is no question that the students work hard, and there is no question that the students are talented. The question we were curious about and asked the professors was whether hard work or innate ability plays the biggest role in selecting students and propelling them to be exceptional performers.

At the start of our project, we were intrigued by an article in the New Yorker, “Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect” where Zach Hambrick, Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University, was quoted for having turned to science to prove that without the right genes, no amount of effort can guarantee expertise. In the music profession, there’s only “about a fifth” of variation between those that practice hard and those that don’t, according to a study by Hambrick.

The data is straightforward. The conclusion is clear. But for professors we interviewed, the answer to the nature versus nurture question was not concrete.

We observed that in order for students to impress the professors at Rice and McGill, a student needs a healthy mixture of both. As Professor Peter Loewen of Rice University said, “You cannot separate innate talent and hard work. Those two things have to be in balance.”

Without some form of innate talent, professors agree it will be an uphill battle. Even so, it is persistence and drive that truly captures their attention.

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Regardless of genes and natural talent, the musician must practice. Efficient practice brings self-awareness and the ability to critique oneself. We often heard it is not about the amount of time spent practicing, but the amount of focus and purpose put into a practice session. Rice University professor Janet Rarick shared the professors’ collective belief in deliberate practice when she said,” It’s not pounding at things over and over. It’s constantly trying to rekindle the love that you have for that art from.”

Surprisingly, we found something more important than the technique and the physique is the personality. The student needs to “fit.” “You test people for their different strengths and their innate skills. Then it’s just a question of seeing where they fit,” as Professor Lloyd Whitesell of McGill University plainly stated. In this section, we share highlights of excerpts from the professors that reflect what some believe makes a student “fit,” whether it is their passion, their persistence, or their prowess.

- Victoria Oliha, Section Editor

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CONTENTS Excerpts featured in this section are by the following professors in the order they are listed Alain Cazes Stefano Algieri Robert Roux Fabrice Marandola Arthur Gottschalk Charles Geyer Dominique Labelle Paul Kantor William Caplin Lloyd Whitesell Barbara Clark Janet Rarick Jeanne Kierman Fischer Alexandra Kieffer David Brackett Peter Loewen Jeanne Kierman Fischer Richard Bado Fabrice Marandola Benjamin Kamins Desmond Hoebig Mark Fewer Karim Al-Zand Alain Cazes Jacqueline Leclair Jerry Hou Janet Rarick

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McGill University McGill University Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University McGill University McGill University Rice University Rice University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University McGill University McGill University Rice University Rice University

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Alain Cazes

Schulich School

Conducting

Talent is like a seed. If you plant it, the tree is all there. A talent is a little bit something like that, but without water and sun, it doesn’t grow. It takes a good soil to grow. It takes water and sun. When all these ingredients are there, it provides a good environment for this talent to grow. Without that seed there is no possible growth. But at the same time, that seed without water and sun will never grow. So it takes both talent and hard work. The water is your personal practice. The sun is the instructions: a light that comes and gives an orientation to your work. I very strongly believe in natural growth. Forcing growth is never good. It could provide anxiety, an unbalanced life that could lead to some disorders, like anxiety, nervousness, and over-emphasizing of practice for a high level of performance. I believe in a high level of performance, but more as a consequence than a goal, just like when the beauty of a flower just comes as a consequence of a good amount of water, right amount of sun and right amount of environment. Musical work comes more of the balance of all these elements.

Stefano Algieri

Voice

Schulich School

When a student comes to me, underneath all the masks, I hear their true voice - the diamond in the rough. My main interest is boring through all the dirt and clearing the path to get the diamond out and refine it. Everybody comes in with different levels of talent and talent is many different things. Talent is dedication, instinct, musicality, use of language, perseverance. It’s also intuition, the ability to make right and wrong choices in life. If someone hands you a ball, you can throw the ball, kick the ball, or lateral the ball. You can also put the ball down on the field and just 63

walk off because sometimes it’s not right for that person.

That doesn’t change their talent.

Robert Roux

Shepherd School

Piano

What I look for in a student is more of an emotional response to music. What we call musical talent is really a conglomeration of lots of things. Some people are big physical talents, but not very musical. Other people are super consistent, but not terribly original or creative. So, when you come across a really great, great artist, like say, Arthur Rubinstein, it’s almost a miracle. They have the physical talent. They have the artistic talent. They have the memory.

They have the sense of rhythm. They have the speed of learning. My student can learn Rach Three in six weeks. It took me six months. If you have a reasonable enough talent and the passion for it, you can’t worry that some other person can sight-read much better than you can. Your own talent and creative ability is the only game in town.

Fabrice Marandola

Schulich School

Percussion

For music education you want to have people who are open minded and keen into trying different things, because that’s what they’ll be doing. The goal is always to have people who are passionate. I have to see a sparkle in the eye of the person when they’re speaking about what they do and what they want to do. For them, the reward will be to do music.

Making music is a reward enough so that it supports your motivation. It has to be, or else it’s tough. They also need to have basic skills and rhythm. If someone is super interesting but they don’t have the skills, unless you think they can get those skills by going into the job and learning the ropes 64

because they have potential, you need to have the minimum. Of course you’re looking for someone as advanced as you can, but if you compare them just on skills that they show at the moment of the audition, you can miss people with incredible talent. If you have someone who is showing that they have a good understanding of what they’re doing and they’re able to do it at the best capacities, then you can see they are able to maximize those skills to produce something which is musically convincing, even if it’s not super advanced. People who start percussion earlier spend years to develop this sense of feedback from the touch of the skin drumhead skin, and that’s something that people who start later on have more trouble developing in the quality of the touch. You also need to look for someone who’ll be able to fit in the studio. We need to make sure we have a good diversity here because the atmosphere of the studio is important. Some people are more natural at percussion than others, but at some point we all face the same problems that our bodies are physically limited so no matter how lucky you are, you have to practice.

Arthur Gottschalk

Composition & Theory

Shepherd School

Thomas Alva Edison, who’s admirable and shameful at the same time, had a famous saying, which is that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I think that’s probably true to many. You have to have that 1%. There are a lot of people that are certainly coasting with less than that but I think that’s true as a musician. I would far rather work with somebody who’s willing to show up for a rehearsal and work hard than somebody who’s maybe more talented but has a bad attitude and doesn’t practice. In the end, the person that tries harder is probably going to deliver a better product than the guy who’s full of himself. If they don’t have that innate spark then I try to discourage 65

them. There’s so many shows on television that encourage mediocrity in the arts, American Idol, The Voice and so on, and I have worked for those shows. Those are scripted shows but people who watch them don’t know that. They think it’s actually real or is happening in real life and it leads to a lot of people thinking, “Well I really want to be this thing’’ but they have no idea what that thing is, and they don’t have what it takes, and they can ruin their life if they pursue an unattainable goal. Even though it’s difficult sometimes, I’ll step forward and tell people they should really think about something else. Most people won’t do that, because they get mad when you tell them those kind of things, but in the end run, I’d rather do them that favor and take the heat than lie to them, which is the easy way out.

Charles Geyer Shepherd School

Trumpet

We’re forced to pick who’s ready right now, not potential.

We pick people that can hit the ground running, ready to go. My daughter said, “Practice makes perfect but nobody’s perfect, so why practice?” Practice doesn’t make perfect. We have to tell our students to fool the audience into thinking they are. Our goal is to be like an actor on stage and give the impression that we’re perfect. We aren’t perfect. We want our audience to relax in our performance so that they can enjoy the music, not get involved in our struggles.

Domnique Labelle

Voice

Schulich School

I look for students who are willing to work hard, but with a voice you kind of have it or you don’t have it; you have to have an idea of the potential of the instrument. You can’t go into the store and get a better version of a voice. For 66

me it’s about the amount of work because the work is what makes you a great artist. It’s all about discipline. If you don’t have that it’s not going to work with me. What I look for is the will to work and get better. As a singer, we live with our body. We talk with our voice, we chew, we walk, we get tired, we sleep. There’s a specific discipline that goes with the art of singing because it’s your body that has to become the instrument.

Paul Kantor

Shepherd School

Violin

Among the talents I look for is a hunger to work in a consistently dedicated way, as opposed to someone who thinks, “Oh! I’m going to do a competition in a month so I’ll work really hard.” They’re working not just for the immediate goal, but for the work itself, for the pleasure of exploration, for the pleasure of learning. The level of accomplishment, that’s the easy part, because that’s very measurable.

What’s the potential of this person while working with me?

And as important as any of those things, a certain individual spark is needed. Something not same old same old, but something that says this is them, that has a personal stamp on what they’re playing.

William Caplin

Music Theory

Schulich School

I look for a complete combination of both hard work and talent. It gets very discouraging if you see someone who’s a hard worker but does not have the spark of originality. I don’t know how to explain what that spark is. How do you explain originality? How do you account for that? There are people who exhibit it, and I think what a lot of people don’t realize is most successful researchers are doing origi67

nal work. You can only take your professor’s ideas so far.

Eventually you have to stand on your own two feet.

Lloyd Whitesell Schulich School

Musicology

In musicology students I look for people who have a lively interest in a diverse range of things. Diversification is really important when you can’t account on where your career is going to lead. You want to be someone who has initiative to be able to survive or be flexible with the skills that you get from a Ph.D., so that if an academic career doesn’t work out, there are some intangibles to get those jobs even if the market is really narrow. You test people for their different strengths and their innate skills. Then it’s just a question of seeing where they fit well because there’s a lot of different things you can do in musicology. Some people have come from a place where they haven’t been challenged in a certain way, and they still have a lot to give and realize that it takes a lot more work to get up to that level of expectations. On the other hand, you can tell when someone has come to you for help. Even though they’re not up to the level of innate ability, you can see they’re working a way lot harder than the other person. That is something to be recognized.

Barbara Clark Shepherd School

Voice

You can look at innate talent and hard work from two different angles. I think innate talent is pretty important.

Singing is just such a narrowing field that is so competitive. If there isn’t some unique distinguishing characteristic about that voice, no amount of technical perfection is going to change that. We are born with an instrument, we can’t 68

go buy a new cello, and what we have is what we have. If it’s manipulated in a way that doesn’t cooperate with nature, it’s dangerous. You will injure yourself. I have had students who have immense amounts of talent, who, for a certain period of time, get by and are rewarded for doing minimum amounts of work. I see these other people who really have to step it up to be competitive, and sometimes those are the people who really work hard and have less innate talent. I think there has to be a respect for the development of technical skills because there becomes a point where you can max out the innate talent. I think I know a lot of really gifted singers who haven’t figured it out. Moreover, by the time you turn forty, if you don’t have good technique, your voice will show signs of wear and tear quickly. Singing is a physically demanding job, and it takes really refined technique to not become injured.

Janet Rarick

Shepherd School

Professional Development

I think exceptional performers need to work hard and have innate ability, but I think the hard work and awareness is more important than the innate ability. The innate ability is helpful, but it has its perils. Being extremely proficient when you are young sets up a linear expectation that you do well, you get approval, and you move forward. You expect that expectation to continue in a line moving upward, but that’s not the way life is. Life is not linear. Sometimes, it’s very difficult for exceptional performers when they have setbacks. It’s very difficult for them to really understand that what is easy for them and what sets them apart from the people who are not quite at their level becomes less important because the other people who might not be as innately talented may have better or more effective styles of working and more awareness. They start to catch up, and sometimes, they start to bypass the really talented ones 69

and that’s very hard to take. Also, with great innate talent, there’s an expectation that if you don’t fulfill a certain objective, you’ve failed. I would say most of us end up in different places at my point in life than we ever thought we would be when we were college students. For example, I never thought I wanted to teach. Never. I never thought I would be teaching at a university. Innate talent is important up to a point, but it can be limiting. Awareness and the ability to navigate with people and systems and hard work that is smart work are really key.

Jeanne Kierman Fischer Shepherd School

Piano

I had one teacher with whom I studied for two summers in college who was Russian; and the Russians were, of course, famous for their severe education. For each lesson she had very particular goals for me: Three hours of technique, three hours of repertoire, and if something didn’t go well, she’d say it. She had no trouble saying, “That was really not better than last week”, and she would make me feel extremely incompetent. For me, it was so exhausting, mentally and physically, that when I got home from the six-hour lesson, I just fell apart. I cried after every single lesson. That level of criticism was just too much for me. As a teacher myself, I prefer to treat each student with clear intention but also with personal respect. In fact, I believe that if an aspiring musician does not totally love music he/ she shouldn’t be planning on a musical career, as it requires endless hard work. Horowitz used to say that he could tell if he hadn’t practiced for a day. His wife could tell if he hadn’t practiced for two days; and the audience could tell if he hadn’t practiced for three days. So, in my opinion, only people who have the deep love, the extraordinary discipline, and a conviction that they could not imagine themselves doing anything else should aspire to doing music.

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Alexandra Kieffer

Musicology

Shepherd School

Certain students are much more hesitant to put themselves out there and move from that first step of having your data to the next step of making an argument or claim. Something I’ve seen in students is imposter syndrome--they have a lot of anxiety about not being smart enough, knowing enough, or not having the right skills. Whenever I face a student who’s having that problem, I try to convince them to not be ruled by those feelings and to recognize that they don’t have any grounding in reality. If you feel inadequate it doesn’t mean that anyone else thinks you are. Students who were very capable found themselves hampered by anxiety about putting an idea forward for fear that it would be wrong or that someone would critique it. I think it’s really important to be able to recognize when you should take criticism seriously and when you shouldn’t. That’s a salient issue for me, learning what kinds of criticism are pointed to actual problems I need to deal with in my work, like a conceptual problem or more fundamental differences in the role of scholarship. There are people who think the work that I’m doing just isn’t worthwhile. I think passion is less important than being willing to show up every day.

It’s more about having an intrinsic motivation that will lead you to work on something even if it’s a little bit every day, rather than only being guided by passion. I haven’t actually worked with many students but I do think the students that are most accessible are the ones that are diligent and willing to put in time in order to figure something out. If they’re confused about something they’re willing to spend time on it, even if it’s hard or challenging.

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David Brackett

Musicology

Schulich School

I’m skeptical about the idea of talent. I think people are drawn to different activities for reasons we don’t really understand and when we’re drawn toward something, we often find we’re good at it. This is not to say that some people have certain abilities that other people don’t. Some small children can remember pitches or sing back a melody very accurately and others can’t. I guess you could call that talent, but if you don’t work at developing this ability super hard, it doesn’t matter. There’s a book called Outliers and all the people discussed in the book spent at least ten thousand hours practicing the activity they were drawn toward, and they then ended up being recognized for having exceptional ability. Where does the motivation to work that hard come from? I’m not sure, but I believe that, if someone wants to do something enough and works hard at it, even if other people might have more of a natural physical ability to do something than someone else, intense effort can neutralize the effect of a slower start. I tend to put more stock in the amount of effort people put into something than the idea of in-born talent.

Peter Loewen Shepherd School

Musicology

You cannot separate innate talent and hard work. I think you have to have innate talent. People who aren’t innately talented will rely on other strategies to find their way to success. I think you also cannot replace hard work. I think that understanding my own limitations I know I need to work harder to find other paths to success. I like to work hard and strategize. I like to think that it makes up for whatever talents I lack. Those two things have to be in a 72

balance and the ratio varies according to the individual because we’re all born of different qualities. However, at a certain point one realizes one’s limitations. What one person can achieve with innate talent another may achieve with hard work and a clever strategy. You have to have the talent and curiosity to recognize possibilities.

Hours you spend practicing will not produce as much as going through a maturation process knowing how to work out a problem. You can be a performing musician practiceing repetitively and have an outcome that’s not as good as someone who is more adept at recognizing how to solve problems more quickly. I think the closest model to that kind of training is sports training. There’s a certain repetitive aspect, you learn muscle skills and learn to coordinate brain and muscle skills. If you don’t recognize or if you don’t understand how those two things go together, you cannot excel as well.

For a performer, you have to have time by yourself alone with your instrument in your practice room. But I think that should not take up time spent together with other players. When you are by yourself, you can easily fall down a rabbit hole. You can become too laser-focused on one problem in your playing. When you have people together with you, you’re working with them and you’re watching them. You can try to do what they’re doing especially those who are better than you are. Ideally, you want to be in an ensemble where people are better than you are, because you need to strive, and you learn from them whatever tools and methods that you think you can apply to what you’re doing, even if they may be playing another instrument. I think the essential problem with practicing by yourself is that you do the same thing over and over again sometimes without really figuring out an application. I think you solve problems much faster when you are in an ensemble.

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Jeanne Kierman Fischer Shepherd School

Piano

There’s something about practicing the piano, and maybe this is true for any instrument, but it’s very easy to be automatic when playing the keyboard, especially if it’s a piece you are very familiar with and/or have from memory.

It is possible to be playing mindlessly while looking out the window and wondering, for example, when you are going to get your Economics homework done. There is the physical and the mental. The two can be completely astray from one another. I am not sure how other piano teachers think, but I would rather have a student commit to practicing four hours really intelligently and committedly rather than six mindless hours a day. Furthermore, I am not convinced actually that most people can really accomplish more than four hours of really purposeful practice. I think all of these things have modifications depending on the individual pianist, but it’s not the number of hours necessarily. The work ethic needs to connect to the mind as well as the body. I can usually tell pretty fast if a student has been practicing consistently with attention to many different aspects: to understanding the music’s artistic intention, to investigating intelligent fingering, to playing with organized, internalized rhythm, and to researching a particular composer’s style.

Richard Bado

Opera Studies

Shepherd School

I always say that practice does not make perfect. Practice perfects what you practice. If you practice the wrong thing over and over again, you perfect the imperfection.

Efficient practicing, not just mindless practicing, is what matters. It’s not about how many hours a day, it’s the focus and the attention to what you’re doing. For a singer, there are two kinds of practice. There is the actual singing 74

then there is all the other work of studying music, where they’re studying language, where they’re working out the rhythm study. That’s not actually when you’re singing. You can learn the pieces without singing. They have so much language work to do as singers because they have to sing in so many foreign languages. So there’s translating the pieces, figuring it out to make sure they pronounce the words correctly, learning the rhythms, all of that before they start singing. You divide the work up and some of it is actual singing, some isn’t. And then you approach rehearsals for an ensemble to utilizes your ears and listening to other people a lot. It’s smart, efficient practicing. Not just mindless practicing to repeat without a purpose. You learn to stay really focused for that period of time that you’re doing it and have a specific goal for what you’re doing and not just sort of bull in a china shop.

Fabrice Marandola

Percussion

Schulich School

I think a couple of things are important for effective practice, one of them is being methodic and rigorous in the practice, and the other is to manage and vary the practice so that it doesn’t become something that we solidify. Often I’m asking students to sing or to play away from the instrument because when you take them away from the sound, they focus more on the gesture. The goal is to produce sound that makes sense within a context, but to attend that we need physical gestures to do it. I think there’s an aspect of performance which is purely physical, the problem being that if you focus too much on the physical, then there’s no relationship to the goal. The ultimate goal is to produce a sound. Being able to imagine the music you want to produce and being able to understand the language of a composer, helps you perform better. Technical exercises are very important in the sense that they allow you to master 75

your instrument so that you are able to control at a higher level. Peer work is important. There’s a period of late teenage years where you want to play as fast as you can, practice with friends and push each other in a friendly way. If you’re with others, it’s encouraging and then you stay forty-five minutes instead of thirty. After one month it’s a lot more time that you spend practicing.

Benjamin Kamins Shepherd School

Bassoon

I have a giant sign in my studio that says, “More. Slow.

Practice.” Now, as my father would have said to me, that’s the incomplete comparative. The idea is “more slow practice” than whatever you’re doing. It’s grammatically intentionally incorrect. Students come to schools to practice, but they have to slow things down. So, I try to open up their awareness of what they really sound like. I try to help them realize that they have their own individual voice.

Everybody wants to know how to do it right so they get an A in the class. You want to give the teacher what they want.

But when you are talking about arts, there is no fundamentally objective end to it. It’s all subjective. Obviously there are parameters. But within those parameters, my students should play the way they like. If you go into a room with other people and you are convincing about what you believe in, you will convince somebody else as well. If you go in and try to play the way you think somebody else will like, you are not going to convince anybody.

Desmond Hoebig

Cello

Shepherd School

I’m not sure productive practicing would be one thing. I think listening to yourself, and being aware of what you’re 76

actually sounding like is a huge component. I think imagination—as we would say, being able to sing in your head what you’re idealistically hoping to sound like—is a huge component. The dedication to practice slowly and carefully, so that we’re not just slamming into things, is incredibly important. I’m not sure if there’s only one productive form of practice. Most practice is working alone—you’re prioritizing self awareness, really listening to yourself, and critiquing yourself. Then when you’re on stage, you have to switch from that self awareness and let go and just enjoy performing. You have to be able to do both. On one hand you’re very critical and very aware, with great detail as to what you want to adjust. On the other hand, you’re trusting and letting go, being able to perform, make music and communicate your ideas.

Mark Fewer

Schulich School

Violin

I believe the best practice is a practice of becoming aware of what you’re doing. When people don’t know what they’re doing, you need to break it down to small enough pieces that your brain can construct a brain map piece by piece.

Instead of throwing five studies at them, the better practice is to show students one or two notes gently. The brain will reconnect those ideas better by starting small. It’s also important to know your limitations. When you realize your abilities, that’s also the start to productive practice.

It’s a trajectory you cannot plan. You can only see the way things happened, not the way they will happen.

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Karim Al-Zand

Composition & Theory

Shepherd School

Practice sort of means something a little bit different with composition. Practice can mean trying to write as much music as possible. Oftentimes composers get writer’s block.

They’ll be so close to the music that they can’t really back up and evaluate the overall context and go forward. I feel it’s much easier to revise than it is to compose. It’s useful to get something done from the beginning to end, and then you can go back and tweak it and fix it, erase and adjust, and condense or expand or interpolate or whatever. Getting that first pass through is most difficult because you need to be able to get some momentum. It doesn’t need to be exactly right the first time, you just need to get a sense of the overall picture. That’s the reason why I am a composer as opposed to a performer: I have an eraser, I can change things and make sure they’re exactly as I want them.

Alain Cazes

Schulich School

Conducting

To reach a high level of improvement and a high level of artistry, I would say it all depends on the high level of image we have in our mind, what we want to produce, the precision of your goals, it’s like a target. With archery, for example, you can have a target, but if you’re blind, or if you don’t see the target, you can always practice good movements. You will improve your movements, but you will never be able to reach that target if you don’t see it. So the precision of the target is responsible for your improvement when you practice archery. It’s exactly the same thing practicing an instrument: the refinement of your target and your mind is the main power to reach a high level of performance. Arnold Jacobs, the former tuba in the 78

Chicago Symphony, said, “The tuba in your hands is the mirror of the tuba in your head.” This is his way to say that if you have a good target in your head, then the tuba on your hands will be the mirror of that.

Jacqueline Leclair Schulich School

Oboe

I’ve got a document on practice techniques about how to practice efficiently and safely, it’s a research interest of mine. Becoming injured from practicing too much or incorrectly is an epidemic among serious musicians. To play music just as it goes is not really practicing in my book.

Practicing is creating. For example, an Olympic athlete in basketball who wants to be a world-class basketball player won’t go out and do scrimmages and play games all the time and hope to get better. That’s what an uninformed musician will do, with good intentions. They just try to play and get better and play again and hope it’s better. It doesn’t work very well. What do really well-educated athletes do?

All kinds of stamina training, strength training, agility training, and studying videotapes from as many different angles as they can.

Jerry Hou

Shepherd School

Conducting

Finding productive forms of practice is like solving a problem. If you have Olympic athletes, they practice getting out of the blocks. Not jumping the gun. Being as close to the gun. Having the force to explode out of the blocks, and they practice that. If their specialty is running the 200m, they don’t just do that again and again and again. They do a lot of different things to help them do that. They lift 79

weights, stretch, swim—all sorts of cross-training. There is the same idea for musicians. You practice the skills that allow you to play a piece of music. These skills are all of these various things—playing your scales, playing long tones, playing etudes, exercises that develop your lips, fingers, of right arm. You have that and then you apply it to a piece of music.

Janet Rarick

Professional Development

Shepherd School

In music, we get a lot of negatives coming at us as young people. Things like, “Well, how are you going to make a living in music? Music is unreliable. It doesn’t pay much.”

These kinds of things are embedded in the consciousness of young musicians growing up and one has to try to set that aside and not let that interfere with your trust, faith, and ability to go forward with something that’s really important to you. Efficient practicing is routine. It’s not pounding at things over and over. It’s constantly trying to rekindle the love that you have for the art form. It’s also the idea that you believe in what you’re doing and believe in your unique voice. You’re not trying to copy something you heard on the Internet that makes you think, “I will never rise to that level.” We are who we are and we’re important because we are unique.

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Cultivating Talent

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SECTION IV: CULTIVATING TALENT

What seems to be a common experience within any music school is the tight bond students and teachers develop.

This section focuses on the important elements involved in teacher-student relationships. The professors share their views on the qualities of students that they value, teaching methods, and the role of criticism.

All admitted music students enter with recognized signs of talents or potential. However, how to bring out their full musicical capacities and make them excel is a challenge for professors. Through our interviews, it is amazing to see the effort professors make for the music produced by their students to “melt the hearts of listeners” as Professor Thomas Jaber described it.

Understanding the teaching environment that influences and forms the professors’ views is essential. The unique teacherstudent relationship in music education greatly contrasts with the techniques used in a stereotypical chemistry lecture hall. For most music professors, their most common way of teaching is through one-on-one sessions. Each professor has only around ten students. This creates a close relationship between teachers and students. In the interviews, professors stressed the uniqueness of each student and talked about the necessity of personalizing each class with respect to their students. The qualities that they value in students also differ amongst fields. For singing professors, besides hard work, they place great emphasis on innate talent, a recognizable voice that has the ability to move people. As Professor Dominique Labelle phrased it, “You can’t go into 85

the store and get a better version of a voice.” What’s more, for professors of voice and composition, we heard that they value potential more than professors of instruments.

The reason is that voice and composition students start practicing and learning relatively later than those playing instruments. Therefore, when evaluating an undergraduate student, professors look more for the potential in the student to excel. However, professors from all fields stress the importance of self-motivation and a sense of engagement in students. Professors seek the student who is unique, creative, courageous and dedicated.

In addition, because of the strong subjective interpretation and intimate teacher-student relationship, criticism plays an important role in music education. Many professors discussed their different experiences with criticism as a student and shared how they use criticism to motivate students. Almost all professors agree that constructive criticism provides an appropriate amount of stimulus to take the initiative to identify their problems and improve. For composition professors, the method involved in criticism is different. They encourage peer criticism. In composition, a field that involves little interaction with others, letting students seek advice and communicate with peers is a necessary part of education.

Lastly, it is wonderful to see how the professors are not only mentors in music education, but also mentors in life. As Dr. Jean-Sébastien Vallée remarked, “Personal growth is a clear parallel that sometimes drives the musical growth.” They are helping students to develop critical thinking, to reach out and build connections, and to be good citizens.

- Joanna Shen, Section Editor

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CONTENTS Excerpts featured in this section are by the following professors in the order they are listed Stefano Algieri James Dunham Richard Lavenda Richard Lavenda Karim Al-Zand Thomas Jaber Peter Schubert Julie Cumming Benjamin Kamins Arthur Gottschalk Jean-Sébastien Vallée Paul Kantor Paul Kantor Norman Fischer Guillaume Bourgogne Lloyd Whitesell Jon Kimura Parker Stefano Algieri Lisa Lorenzino Anthony Brandt Peter Loewen Alain Cazes Julie Simson David Ferris Arthur Gottschalk Jean-Sébastien Vallée Robert Roux Jacqueline Leclair Anthony Brandt

McGill University Rice University Rice University Rice University Rice University Rice University McGill University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University Rice University McGill University McGill University Rice University McGill University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University McGill University Rice University

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Stefano Algieri Schulich School

Voice

I treat each student as an individual. I try not to presume or assume. I try to be a good listener and listen to why that person is there. I believe it’s a spirit that’s speaking and the spirit merely inhabits the body. I find out what that person has to say and how I can help them. Part of the process is overcoming your limitations, which is like peeling an artichoke, layer by layer, until you get to the heart of the matter. Once you get to the heart, one is never the same. I have tissue boxes all over the studio, sometimes for students with colds, but in most cases, it’s because they find themselves truly touched at their core. The reason I’m here is to get them to that point. Once they get to that point, my work is done.

James Dunham Shepherd School

Viola

When training my students, somehow, I get them to do what I want, and they don’t know it. I don’t do that on purpose.

I don’t want people to say about my students, “Oh, that’s a Dunham student.” I want them to sound like who they are.

They’re all unique so I try to help them find out who they are. There are technical things that I show all of them. We have to find everybody’s best way, which is part of what’s fun about doing this. There are so many ways to look at one topic. Some people are visual, and some people are aural, and some people are tactile. I find what suits them and elicits the best from them. I will often guide a phrase the way I hear it, but I also challenge them. Because there is not a right way. Obviously it’s got to be as good technically as you possibly can make it. If it’s not, there are ideas you will be handicapped trying to express. There are many kinds of perfect yet we’re haunted by perfection.

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Richard Lavenda Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

The teacher-student relationship is slightly different for composition than it would be for a performer. There are these lineages and a lot of baggage that you have in the piano world or in the violin world. Studios become sort of representative of the teacher’s aesthetic. That’s certainly true here at Shepherd. We have three major piano teachers who play very differently and their students play very differently, or at least look at music differently than the other studios do. You can’t just go from one studio to the next.

While in composition, we want our students to challenge us. We have a policy in our department where almost without exception, students will study with a bunch of the composition faculty. In the piano world, it takes an act of Congress to move from one studio to the next. The masterapprentice relationship is stronger in the instrumental world than it is in the composition world. The composition world is more of a mentor thing.

Richard Lavenda Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

The fact is I can’t teach a person how to compose, which is a strange statement for someone who teaches composition!

What I mean is, if you don’t have sounds in your head, if you don’t have musical ideas, I can’t put them in your head.

There’s a distinction between having a musical idea and doing things to it. My definition of a composer is somebody who has aural imagery and then does stuff to it. I can teach someone how to do the stuff, but I can’t teach you what the sounds are. When you’re a composition teacher, you have to be very careful not to intimidate your student, not to make your student write the way you would do it.

What you say is, “What are you trying to do here? How do 90

you think this is going to sound? How can you make this more clear to the player and to the audience?” Rather than saying, “Well, here’s what I would do,” because students are going to have one of two reactions. Either they’re going to obey you, which is the last thing you want, or they’re going to rebel against you, which is a waste of everybody’s time.

Karim Al-Zand Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

In composition, people don’t necessarily have the early training that they do in the performative fields where someone might have been playing violin since the age of five or six. People will typically come to composition a little bit later. In young prospective composers, we’re looking for a certain amount of technique - being able to move notes around, control melodic lines, control harmonies and a little bit about orchestration. But even if that’s not developed fully, we’re also looking for someone who has the beginnings of a voice; someone who has something to say. Someone who’s trying new elements, experimenting, maybe trying to express things in a unique way. In other words, we’re looking not only for a certain amount of technique but also a certain amount of potential as well.

Thomas Jaber Shepherd School

Conducting & Vocal Coaching

Young singers who are thoroughly educated are the ones who are the most authentic or authoritative musicians.

However, the most important thing to recognize in singing is that spark that indicates a voice that is worth training: this is a voice that can sing and communicates. There is a very strong drive here at the Shepherd School for singers to 91

succeed in the opera world, to take auditions, to win competitions, to begin to sing professionally. There is a great life and potential out there for our most gifted young singers.

Drive and talent are important, but if one is going to be an operatic singer, one needs to be someone who can actually take a phrase of music and actually melt the heart of the listener. The average person who listens doesn’t give a darn about music school, but cares only about what they feel when they hear something. At the Shepherd School we try to help guide them in the strongest ways possible. We give them as many opportunities as possible, and then support them as they try to move toward further career goals, hopefully toward professional opera singing.

Stefano Algieri

Voice

Schulich School

I once said to a student, “How is it that you take theory one, and then when you take theory two you appear to have forgotten everything you learned in theory one?”

And she said, “Because we’re focused on the grade, and we don’t know there’s a lesson for life in there.” This insight changed all my teaching and turned everything upside down because I realized I wasn’t getting through to them. I had to change my whole teaching method. So the teaching method became not about writing this exercise, but go to the piano and play it, sing it, memorize it, improvise it, so that people would understand that music is part of life, and it’s not some mysterious act of composition with a piece of paper in a silent room. You have to approach theory problems from many angles at once because you don’t know what the student is going to be good at.

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Julie Cumming

Musicology

Schulich School

I want students who are very engaged and excited about what they want to do. That quality of, “I love this music.

I think this issue is so fascinating.” They don’t have to be great when we admit them, but they have to have the potential to get better at things. Sometimes you have the student who has a lot of ideas, but can’t write very well, so I work with them to get better in that way. Or there’s somebody who writes really well, but hasn’t figured out how to come up with their own ideas for research, so I help them with that. They don’t all start out that way. It’s really about the sense of engagement. That’s the most important thing.

Benjamin Kamins

Bassoon

Shepherd School

I want a student willing to do the work with deeply committed rigor. I’m also looking for someone who is going to get along with other people in a close-knit society, somebody who will be a contributor to the community.

I spend a lot of time trying to help my students find who they are and what their authentic voice on the instrument is. Their authentic voice is the sound and elements in music that they like. You better want it. I never tell a student to quit. They’ve already decided to be a musician. I’ve always assumed they’ve already decided that.

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Arthur Gottschalk Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

I tell students, when they interview at the Shepherd School, that in addition to being talented and smart I’m looking for someone that understands that if they’re here, the success of their peers in no way diminishes them. At some of our peer institutions, too many of the students feel, and I think they may even be getting some of this from their teachers, that the best way to succeed is to somehow push their way in front of their neighbor. And I feel that, although that may be successful in the short term, it certainly is not going to enable a full-blown career over a lifetime. One of the most important things you’re going to be doing here as a student is developing your network for life. You are going to do much better if you have a network of people who are incredibly successful than if you have a network of people who are losers. Even though it might be tough to sometimes see somebody else do better, you came in second place and they came in first - so what? At the same time, we do have an awful lot of noise in the system. It’s a large world, there’re a lot of people. To write music you don’t have to have a degree, you don’t have to obtain a license like other jobs. You just have to hang up a sheet and say, “I want to write music,” and if people agree, well then it’s true. That’s led to a situation where there are a lot of people with sharp elbows who try to advance themselves through self-promotion more than actual product. I tend to be the kind of artist that would rather have my music speak for me than the other way around.

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Jean-Sébastien Vallée Schulich School

Conducting

I think it’s important to understand what works and why it works. Someone who has a natural talent may do things not knowing that they do it. That’s a good thing, but that creates a problem first to share their knowledge, and also the day those things don’t work, because that doesn’t mean that it works at the specific point. Being able to assess what you do and what works and why it works is a great skill.

That opens the door to the future. It’s harder to improve if you don’t know why it works.

Paul Kantor

Shepherd School

Violin

How fast you learn something is not particularly important. You don’t get out on stage and say, “This took me seventeen months to learn” and the next person gets up and says, “This took me seventeen minutes to learn.” Nobody cares! And probably the person who learns slower might simultaneously learn deeper. Fast learning and fast absorption is very impressive. It’s fun for me to see someone who can learn a Paganini Caprice in less than a week but it doesn’t say very much about how it ultimately gets played.

This sounds sadistic, but it is fun to watch the struggle, because the struggle is the process. And sometimes with people who inhale music at a fantastic rate it’s almost like there is no process. I think very good things come out of the struggle. And of course, I’m saying that as one who is a rather slower learner.

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Paul Kantor

Shepherd School

Violin

I once had a student who I took for two reasons. First, she was the grandchild of a chamber music teacher who was very important to me. Second, I heard an audition for a summer festival that they wanted to go to and I thought to myself, this is like Heifetz. Then I started working with this person and realized the person had absolutely no sense of rhythm, like that gene was missing. We just worked on rhythm for six years. And then, one day, she had great rhythm. It was not like a gradual progression, it was like a light switch. I learned more from that interaction than the student did. The person has been hugely successful and teaches now at the most important schools in New York.

What I learned is, you don’t give up on a student because you never know. I don’t care how experienced you are, you never know!

Norman Fischer Shepherd School

Cello

One has to be able to articulate the difference between developmentally where you are and where you want to be. And so the methodology that I tend to use nurtures a positive image of what we’re trying to do and to help the students to find that, rather than my being highly critical of them. This goes back to the notion that I want them to feel my affirmation of what they do and I try to encourage them towards even more acute and focused vision of that idea. If a teacher gets highly critical and tells you, “Don’t do this, don’t do that,” it starts to make the student feel more assaulted and lowers self-esteem, making it harder for them to be courageous. I like them to feel secure enough that they can actually take chances to do more courageous things.

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Guillaume Bourgogne Schulich School

Conducting

Feedback is different from criticism. In my improvisation course I comment but never in terms of good or bad or ‘could be better.’ It’s not in terms of value. That’s why it’s a class that’s difficult to evaluate because it’s the experience they are doing that makes them grow. It’s a process.

In class, it’s more training than discipline. So in the very specific case of the improvisation, there’s not much room for criticism. For the conducting students, it’s different.

We have a course that is called Conducting Techniques for conductors where we encourage them to critique themselves or one another. Being a conductor is a very lonely activity. Once your studies are all done, you never have chances to have feedback on your own job because you never have colleagues that come to your rehearsals or concerts. So the only time where a conductor can have feedback is during his or her studies. That’s why in this course we encourage them to discuss frankly among colleagues about their work.

Lloyd Whitesell Schulich School

Musicology

Regarding criticism, I try to portray the feeling of support and that I’m on my students’ side. At one of my early teaching positions I graded way too easy. You have to have sympathy, and empathy, but you also have to have standards. I had to learn by trial and error to figure out the right balance of rigor in a context of constructive criticism.

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Jon Kimura Parker Shepherd School

Piano

Regarding student criticism, it’s unbelievably hard not to use a negative word or phrases as a teacher! I’ve tried it, and it’s incredibly difficult, because you see someone doing something they shouldn’t do and you just want to say, “Oh, don’t do that!” It immediately gives you perspective on the kind of teaching, which is not like a lecture where you’re just talking about a period of history or how to solve a math problem. You’re reacting to what somebody’s doing. I lean towards being a positive teacher. I tend towards positive reinforcement, but, in the last 5 years, I’ve gotten more willing to let a student leave a lesson not feeling so great, because I feel they need to understand that their playing is not good enough. However, I’d say most of my goal of teaching is that I want somebody to feel inspired. At the end of the day I think it’s better to want to learn something.

Stefano Algieri Schulich School

Voice

There are some people who are very thick skinned. With some people, if you look at them the wrong way, it’ll destroy them. That must be tempered. You have to know who they are and where they come from. I believe in constructive criticism. I went to a famous baritone and took a voice lesson with him. He spoke with me for 30 minutes and then, he wanted me to sing. He asked me to sing a D natural and at that point, I was uptight and confused, so I sang it poorly. He said, “That’s the ugliest voice I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m going to take apart your voice and put it back together.” I went back for about 5 or 6 lessons after that and it was all an ego trip. I felt terrible. He wanted to take apart my ego and my mentality. I got wise.

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Lisa Lorenzino Schulich School

Music Education

There must be a comfortable environment in the classroom before you critique. You have to make it so everyone feels like they can critique one another and at the same time, you have to be open to critique yourself. You have to build trust in order to critique people. Different cultures are very different with critiques. I was in Cuba for a long time, and I once heard, “Wow! That’s terrible. You need to quit the profession,” and the next person would say, “That was 100% percent.” In Canada, we like to say, “I really enjoyed that, but there are a few things to work on.”

Anthony Brandt Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

Criticism is a very careful thing at all stages of the creative process. As David Eagleman would say, “If criticism wasn’t important, then our dreams would be novels, and doodles would be hanging on the wall of the Metropolitan museum.” Knowing how to critique and knowing how to self evaluate is a very important part. The greatest risk of criticism is that it can hinder the student and instill a nothing is ever good enough mindset. You have to have that perfect sweet spot of enough confidence that you’ll put your work out in the world and enough humility to realize its flaws.

I’m a big advocate of the Sandwich Method when it comes to criticism; say something nice first, and establish that you’re allies instead of adversaries. Then, you make the critique following with a nice thing. In general, that’s a good way of doing criticism. It helps find that sweet spot, so that it’s never overbearing negativity. What happens when composers don’t do that is that the performers instinctively find everything they can possibly find wrong with the composition. That will skewer the composer alive.

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Peter Loewen Shepherd School

Musicology

Criticism in the field of musicology mostly comes in the form of writing, with how you develop an idea. When I’m helping a student prepare a thesis, there’s a one on one atmosphere in which we develop ideas. I’m helping them make connections with the stuff going on in their brain.

This is a critical layer where I’m helping them understand how certain avenues are dead ends, and how to make a connection to something that will lead to more profits down the road. We often think we understand something when we have inchoate thoughts. But once they are on the page, it’s actually a completely different thing. To work out in a linear fashion how you bring someone else to the understanding you have in your brain is different. When I write, I don’t understand what I know until I’m writing it down and that’s when I start making other connections that would’ve been impossible if I hadn’t forced myself to write them. It’s not until you place them in a linear fashion that you realize how those ideas actually connect and lead to new discoveries.

Alain Cazes

Schulich School

Conducting

When criticism is done in a positive way, like by providing high level targets for the students to aim for and improve it is a much more powerful tool to make adjustments than negative criticism. If you, instead, can refer to the imagination of the player, so the player will say, “Ok, that makes sense. Now can I do that?” Now it provokes some creativity to achieve that. After it has been done, you can say, “Ok how would you play it now differently?” Just to encourage some kind of imagination is better criticism. Artists can play the same study or the same excerpt ten times differently, and still be good.

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Julie Simson

Shepherd School

Voice

Sometimes there’s way too much criticism. We give input to student’s singing every minute of their lives and sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s not. Sometimes it’s just too much. You have to know as a teacher when to pull back a little bit. I’ve been guilty of giving way too much information. You have to pull back and let them explore and let them experience what it feels like to try it on their own. A person will sing and then I open up the floor to comments. You have a conversation with everybody in the beginning about what’s constructive and what’s not, and I think that opens the floor to a much more positive environment and also to really constructive and productive criticism.

David Ferris

Shepherd School

Musicology

When I first started teaching, I had the same mistaken idea that many professors have. I thought my job was to help the student create the perfect essay and that my responsibility was to go over the whole thing with a fine tooth comb, find everything that’s wrong with it and if there was a sentence that was not grammatically correct and I missed it, I was not doing my job. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that’s not very helpful criticism. I’ve realized that if you give a student that much criticism, even if you say positive things too, they’re not going to get anything out of it. It’s impossible. You’re giving them too much stimulus. Now I realize that you’re trying to get a sense of where that student is at and how to get them to the next level. When I look at a piece of writing from a student now, my first question is, “If there are one or two things about this that need to be fixed the most or are the weakest, what would those be?” That’s 101

what I focus on. I let a lot of stuff go because they’re not going to fix everything and you shouldn’t expect them to.

Arthur Gottschalk Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

I’ve taught at Rice now for forty years. At one point I thought that the job was too easy. It’s easy to educate people who are educable and who have made the commitment to be educated. I say that a good student will learn despite their teachers and bad student will not learn in spite of their teachers. And that, to a certain extent, is very true.

You can, if you’re the greatest violin teacher in the world, maintain that position of being the greatest violin teacher in the world by only admitting people in your studio that are the greatest students in the world. That’s how you look like a genius teacher. But are you really a great teacher?

Most people that come to Rice have had the advantage of a strong family support system, strong pre-college education, and a lot of other advantages other students don’t have. And as a result, they’ve kind of mastered how to be a student and how to learn. That’s not true of other students because when they went to school they weren’t taught how to learn, which is really why you go to high school in the first place. But a lot of kids never get that. Then they get to college and they have all kinds of learning problems.

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Jean-Sébastien Vallée Schulich School

Conducting

Most learning curves are much more connected to personal growth than musical growth. There’s something major that changes in how they perceive who they are and what they do and then growth just happens in a clear way. I’ve also seen that happen with singers who finish a bachelor, and go on in life, do different things, sometimes not in relationship to music, and yet improve a lot. I think that it’s really based in the fact that growing as a person and becoming stronger and more secure with who they are can build much more in what they learn. I think personal growth is a clear parallel that sometimes drives the musical growth.

Robert Roux

Shepherd School

Piano

You need to know what to say, but you also need to know how much to say. You need to know when to say it during a development and you need to know to whom you can say such things. When you’re a young teacher, you’re liable to bombard them with a million things that just only confuse them. I’m experienced enough as a teacher to know that neither myself nor anybody on the planet has the answers for everybody.

With high level students, you’re doing much more than teaching them. You’re their psychoanalyst. You’re their manager. You’re telling them how to go out and get concerts.

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Jacqueline Leclair Schulich School

Oboe

The role of professors is to educate people to be good citizens. Even if you signed up for oboe lessons with me, and I would teach you about the oboe, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m teaching logic, problem solving and history.

I’m teaching a lot of respect, curiosity, confidence, humility, etc. Critical thinking is the really important one, to be able to tell the difference between an opinion and a fact.

It’s not an easy thing to recognize your own assumptions.

Anthony Brandt Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

I think that teaching is the most important job in the world, especially early childhood teaching. I’m honored to be at a place like Rice with these gifted and intelligent kids.

It’s sort of backwards in our society that we are so indifferent and disrespectful of grade school teachers and don’t pay them properly. If you educate someone properly, you can set them up for life. In that sense, I think teachers are our great heroes. It’s a great profession to be a part of.

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Collaborative Nature

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SECTION V: COLLABORATIVE NATURE

At its core, music is a form of communication— between a composer and a conductor, a conductor and a performer, a performer and an audience—that inspires and transforms.

In order for a piece of music to realize its full potential, the composer, conductor, and musicians must all contribute their own interpretations of it.

Professors at the Shepherd and Schulich Schools of Music explained the importance of the musicians’ interpretations to the overall performance: Professor Arthur Gottschalk of Rice University says, students “Have an awesome responsibility…of teaching those of us in the audience something about the piece that they know.”

The increased flexibility of chamber music allows for even more collaboration. Chamber musicians take turns being leader more freely than in an orchestra, and, as Professor Jon Kimura Parker described it, learn to, “understand when to lead and when to follow.”

Orchestras require every player to identify his or her role as, “leader, partner, or supporter,” as Schulich’s Professor Alain Cazes puts it. After his orchestra plays a section, Cazes often stops and says, “Can you play now with more leadership?” This, he says, means, “engaging others to follow.”

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Musical leadership consists more of listening, encouraging, and collaborating rather than dictating or instructing. The resulting rotating leadership structures and ever-changing musical direction maximize music’s creative potential, but require constant collaboration to ensure that each member of the team has an opportunity to add their own interpretation.

- Joe Reilly, Section Editor

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CONTENTS Excerpts featured in this section are by the following professors in the order they are listed Arthur Gottschalk Guillaume Bourgogne Charles Geyer Karim Al-Zand Karim Al-Zand Robert Yekovich Kyoko Hashimoto Desmond Hoebig Charles Geyer Arthur Gottschalk Arthur Gottschalk Richard Bado Jon Kimura Parker Alain Cazes Peter Loewen James Dunham Dominique Labelle Jeanne Kierman Fischer Ichiro Fujinaga Jerry Hou Peter Loewen Jacqueline Leclair Peter Schubert John Mac Master Benjamin Kamins Paul Kantor Julie Cumming Peter Loewen

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Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University Rice University Rice University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University McGill University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University

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Arthur Gottschalk Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

Composition is a collaborative process from the get-go. The actual writing of music can be a kind of lonesome process.

But it doesn’t exist alone in a vacuum. I tell my students that we don’t write for instruments. We don’t write a piece for a piano. I write a piece for a piano player. Those notes I’m putting on a page are a series of complicated coded directions to another human being as to where to put their fingers, at what time, and in what sequence and in what manner. We’re at their mercy. I can write a piece of music but that music can’t live and breathe without the intermediary of a performer, of an interpreter, of the conductor. It’s collaborative at every stage of the game. It’s much easier when I can think of that person, not just their sound, but who they are and what they like to do and what I’ve heard them doing before that I particularly thought was interesting or good.

Guillaume Bourgogne Schulich School

Conducting

To be a conductor is to gather and assemble everyone’s energies, everyone’s different energies. This is because the basic function of a conductor is to make playing together easier. It’s from a certain amount of people that we need a conductor. It’s too challenging to make general agreement with so many people. This is basically why we exist.

These different energies coming from everyone have to be gathered and be guided. The conductor has to take into account everyone’s personality. It’s basically a question of management. Of course, I always have a strong conception about a work but I’ll react to what the musicians give as sound producers. It’s very similar to any manager except 113

the fact that it’s about music. The hierarchy is very visible.

The hierarchy is very marked in the way that soloists and conductors are very at the top of the pyramid. Also, inside the orchestra, there are also different levels of grades. On the other hand, as I’m teaching improvisation, it’s kind of the opposite. Because there’s no hierarchy at all in improvisation. It’s like an anarchy, in the way that the group has no leader. But leaders can come across sometimes, and it’s always collective musical decisions that are taken. It can be a bit abstract, to speak about improvisation for someone who doesn’t know so much about that.

Charles Geyer Shepherd School

Trumpet

The biggest challenge to musical relationships is ego.

Self-esteem is really an awareness of what you can do, but, ego suggests, “I’m the best.” It is very negative. To have it suggests that you’re nothing unless you’re the top person in the orchestra. That’s foolish. Chamber music is really what teamwork is about, working together.The best way people could be well prepared to play in an orchestra would be doing chamber music, string quartets, brass quintets, woodwind ensembles, learning to play together. Chamber music is the key ingredient to being good, even for soloists because the big product is not how Itzhak Perlman plays the violin or Emmanuel Ax plays the piano, but it’s their product together. The greatest players in the world, even if they’re soloists, are great teamwork people. All these young people playing in ensembles, they’re learning a lot of skills on how to communicate, not just make rules or yell at people. That will help them in their lives when they start having a relationship or a family, and how to deal with little problems that come along.

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Karim Al-Zand Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

If I’ve done my job well, the musical score is like a recipe to create the piece. If I’ve written the recipe well, then hopefully my intentions of how it is to be executed are conveyed accurately. There’s going to be a little bit of wiggle room, and maybe a lot of wiggle room. But more often than not, I’m pleasantly surprised how performers will interpret the music - they bring something to it that I don’t. They have a different perspective. Oftentimes there will be things in the score that are vague and they’ll bring an interpretive approach to it that I don’t necessarily anticipate, but I think that’s wonderful. That’s why you can have many people play your piece, the same piece, and play it very very differently.

Each performance you can enjoy and appreciate and it’s still the piece but it’s someone else’s take on it.

Karim Al-Zand Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

Music is a collaborative art. Even if you’re playing solo music, there’s collaboration that happens with the composer. Even if the composer is long dead, you’re still engaging with the music. You’re having this ‘push and pull’ with the music—what the music notates and how you can express your own personality through the music. It can also be a collaboration between the performer and the audience too.

Performers are anticipating the audience’s reactions and manipulating expectations and emotions of the audience. It might not be expressible in words, but there needs to be a certain kind of connection with the audience.

When you’re writing a piece for a particular performer you need to keep in mind not only your own thoughts about how the piece should go and what you want to commu115

nicate with the piece, but also the instrument’s ability and the performer’s particular ability. There’s always a kind of negotiation that happens. If I’m commissioned to write a piece for a particular performer, it will be that performer’s personality and their own particular style of playing that will inspire what I want to write. It’s tailored to them in a way. That’s a challenge I guess. But it’s a good challenge, it’s an inspirational challenge.

In any kind of group dynamic there’s going to be some sort of leader, and that’s true in ensemble as well. When you watch really good ensembles work there may be one dominant personality. However, there’s a lot of collaboration that happens, too, more so than any kind of top down, authoritative kind of approach. Being able to listen to each other, hear each other’s ideas, and being flexible are really important parts of music-making.

Robert Yekovich Shepherd School

Composition

When you’re a composer, you have to know how to sit and talk to the musicians and say things to them in ways that aren’t so abstract that they have no idea what it is you’re really trying to get them to do. And you have to be able to communicate, you have to be able to write it on the page in a way that makes sense to them. It’s an interaction, sometimes nonverbal, sometimes verbal, that requires working in pairs or larger units and there’s just no end.

There’s no way music is realized unless you have all of that human interaction, and in a sense, teamwork to get you there. Teamwork is a huge part of music. Teamwork is indispensable. You can occasionally run into people who are not as inclined to want to work as a member of a team and don’t function as well with other people, whether it’s in 116

a committee or a music ensemble, or within a department.

Part of the role of an administrator is, in fact, those kinds of problems. They are the ones that find their way to my office and a big part of my job is being the one who adjudicates that or tries to be an intermediary and explain to one side or the other that there is this breakdown in communication, and we need to solve this for the sake of the school or the sake of the department.

Kyoko Hashimoto Schulich School

Piano

I think chamber music coaching is absolutely necessary for any musician, even for soloists, to widen horizons, to develop flexibility and openness, and also to learn from other instrumentalists. I often tell my students to play like strings, or wind instruments’ sounds to understand and have more expression, more colors, and more various textures. For me, chamber music is not only for artistic reasons, but also for a musician to develop social skills, since some musicians have a tendency to be too self-conscious due to long hours of solitude practicing. I love how chamber music is a way that we can communicate with other people in an intimate, personal way, that you can’t get it usually in orchestra or some other forms of music making.

I enjoy it tremendously.

Desmond Hoebig Shepherd School

Cello

One example of teamwork that is special to classical musicians is called chamber music, where two people or more play the same work at the same time. In chamber music, 117

musicians have to listen to each other, they have to help each other, they have to blend together and they make one product as a team. Other teamwork is camaraderie in the class—to help each other because one person has certain things that are a little easier to them, and they can help someone else and be another set of ears to listen. To have a professional life in chamber music is a great life to have. A very challenging and very busy and stressful life, but a wonderful life.

Charles Geyer Shepherd School

Trumpet

A leadership role is not being bossy, it’s not being critical, it’s being really good at what you do, as well as being soft spoken, gentle, and encouraging. Concertmasters should be a model representative of what has to be done.

They should be really, extremely well prepared at every rehearsal. They should know the music inside and out and what chords are being played. They should get to know the people in their section and encourage them by telling them how great they are at what they do. Leadership is through good examples, and showing appreciation to the people around you. If you do the opposite and look for things to criticize, then it’s non-productive.

Arthur Gottschalk Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

People are much more likely to listen to you if you can walk the walk, not just talk it. When I was a young performer, I really enjoyed playing second chair because I could learn a lot from the first chair player. Most people in the first chair tend to be very gracious. For the most part 118

we tend to follow people that have demonstrated on a daily basis that they do what they claim to do. In a string quartet, the natural leader is generally whoever knows the most, they may not even be the best player, but it’s the person who knows the most about the repertoire, demonstrably so to the other players because they’re all very good.

Arthur Gottschalk Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

Sometimes the performers look to the composer for leadership, and I’m not sure that that’s always a good thing. Unfortunately we’re training our performers to be slaves to the written note. Teachers go into a lesson and tell them what to do, and then they go into an orchestra and they have a conductor or another authority figure telling them what they must do, and they become very nervous about making any decisions on their own. I’ve been in the position many times where a performer asks, “What do you mean by this, how should I do this?” and I say, “How do you think you should do it?” and they get a deer in the headlights look.

I’m interested in what a musician can bring to my music.

It’s a collaborative art form after all. I write notes, but I want to hear what the player can make out of them; with some musicians that’s just as natural as breathing, but with far too many of them they get very nervous at the prospect. I tell my performing students, “You know, you have an awesome responsibility when you sit down and play a piece for the public. You’re not just playing the notes; you are teaching those of us in the audience something about this piece that you know.” The great thing about music is that there’s room for interpretation, if not there would be no room for our current generation of students. We need their interpretations, but they should be true and they should be honest and they should be individual.

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Richard Bado Shepherd School

Opera Studies

When I’m leading, whether it be an orchestra rehearsal or a chorus rehearsal with Houston Opera, I have to have a plan for what the rehearsal is, what the goal is. When leading a group you have to keep an interesting link interesting enough so that one thing doesn’t become tedious. Moving onto something else very high energy level will maintain interest. You have to keep their energy level up, I have to have a very high energy level, and a focus in moving the rehearsal along constantly. Don’t let things lag or people get bored. It’s planning the rehearsal to move from one thing to another, having a rehearsal never end on a down note so you always end up with the feeling that you’ve accomplished something great at that point.

We’re on a clock, except the clock is money and it’s all for the union. If you go a second over, you’re paying overtime. So you’re always watching the clock. “Ok, I have four more minutes left, what can I accomplish in four to end this rehearsal on a high note and not going over?”

It’s time management. It’s huge in rehearsing groups. For example, some of the operas we do here we start with two hour rehearsals when we’re starting and then we gradually increase them over the weeks so that they start to get used to longer periods because performances sometimes are 3 hours long. It’s like running a marathon, you start slow and you build. So that’s what you do. You build the length of the rehearsals. You want to push them, then you want to push them maybe one step beyond what they can do because some of them can surprise you. But you’re not going to add something 5 steps more than they can do now. You always push to the next step, see how far they can go.

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Jon Kimura Parker Shepherd School

Piano

The best chamber music experiences I’ve had have been experiences where it wasn’t that we all felt equal, it was that we all felt that we could take turns being a leader. If it’s somehow a controversial approach then it’s okay to have to have a conversation about it. That’s part of what rehearsals are for. If you have five people who understand when to lead and when to follow, you can almost not rehearse. You can almost already play it, because you understand how to trade it back and forth. The whole idea with chamber music is asking about different opinions and presumably conflict resolution.

Alain Cazes

Schulich School

Conducting

Very often I would stop as a conductor after playing a section and I would say, “Can you play it now with more leadership?” Playing with more leadership involves engaging all others to follow. Energy, synergy, is very important to be taught, because there is a treasure there. It’s extremely powerful when someone understands his role as leader, or partner, or supporter. A very refined player can identify immediately, “What’s my role here?” and act it out. As a conductor you have to correct some situations, but also you have to be able to make music with musicians who are in front of you. So, we have to make these musicians give their best. The only way to do that is to be supportive to musicians, to provide high-level targets and to create unity of mind, but still support them.

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Peter Loewen Shepherd School

Musicology

I think leadership has to do with personality, there are certain personality traits that play into this. I think some people are natural born leaders and want and take leadership positions. There are also people who discover leadership in themselves in a moment when they realized there’s nobody who can do it like they can, or they have something to contribute.

Your personality as a leader shapes a community in a certain way with all complex interactions with the other person that you encounter in that group. I’ve seen circumstances where more than one person in that group feel that they’re the alpha animal. Then, there can be conflict. The egos are too big, they can’t be in the same room together.

The best circumstances are when people understand that they need to subvert, in some respect, their need to lead in order to achieve something better that takes advantage of all of these other people’s complex understanding of their capacity to lead. In some of the greatest ensembles, especially small ensembles, each performer is a soloist, a highly regarded musician, and they have to subvert, or suppress some aspect of their individualistic leadership quality in order to make things blend together.

James Dunham Shepherd School

Viola

I think teamwork is key in all of education, and in all of life. I did a workshop for Chamber Music America. With a young quartet as our example, we were working on how to rehearse, collaborate, and work together. We talked about how to balance being inviting and direct, about how to work as a team, and how to anticipate. I did it in a way that 122

was designed to make a lay audience recognize the effects of different communication styles. But at the end, this lady came over, and said, “I just wanted to thank you for that, but you weren’t talking about chamber music. You were talking about life.” These teamwork skills apply in every area. Here, in our school, the collaboration at the faculty level is quite amazing. And ideally, students see that, and say, “We can do that too.”

Dominique Labelle Schulich School

Voice

Teamwork is everything if you make music. You are expected to participate fully in the sound of an orchestra. If you’re a soloist, you have to work with other people. The best thing that music can teach us is how to work together, you don’t have a choice. I find it very important to make sure that things are harmonious and that we work together for the benefit of the whole. As a singer, I preferred to work with conductors that were not dictators and I chose to make music with people that were inspired and inspiring, and always considered you as a full unit in their orchestra as a singer or musician. I think it’s very important because I don’t like conflict and I’ve always wanted to do harmonious things in my life as a singer, as a musician. Harmony is very fragile and difficult to keep balanced, but it’s essential.

It’s essential for any organization: an orchestra, a family, or a university.

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Jeanne Kierman Fischer Shepherd School

Piano

Music demands teamwork. Not just for people who actually play in an ensemble, but even for people who are soloists. Solo musicians who have solo careers need teamwork skills to deal with their concert management organization, with their coaches (in the case of singers), and concert venue representatives, just to name a few examples. There have been some notable stories of people who have been so difficult because of their lack of regard for others that they have actually been shut out or fired. Here at the Shepherd School, I feel very fortunate to have a sense that every single person with whom I work here, members of the faculty and staff, are all team players. In addition, we have faculty with international concert careers as soloists who also regard musical relationships in a vital way, along with their own personal musical preparation. I’m thinking of two of our faculty, Jon Kimura Parker and Jimmy Lin, who are both playing with orchestras all over the world and who are both real team players. If you watch them play a concerto with an orchestra on stage, they are making connections with every single person on the stage as well as the conductor. It is as if they are playing chamber music with each colleague on stage with them, and I find it inspiring. In fact, in my own perfect imaginary world, I have always felt that playing or singing with others should be a requirement for political office. Perhaps if our leaders could make music together, a spirit of love, collegiality and humanity might become a compelling goal. What a crazy and wonderful dream!

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Ichiro Fujinaga Schulich School

Music Technology

I think music is great for learning teamwork because playing together is something you really don’t get in many other activities. There’s a big difference between musicians who haven’t worked in small ensembles and those who have. They’re different people because they’ve never had to do that. Pianists rarely play together. Guitars are almost always solo. You can see that big difference in their personalities and how they’re able to deal with other colleagues. It’s all about subtle timings. We have to be listening to each other at all times to coordinate our movements and be able to perform in public. Having respect for other people is important. You have to learn how to get along with other people and leave any sort of personal differences aside so you can perform music together.

Jerry Hou

Shepherd School

Conducting

Leadership is an important part of any group. I believe in any sort of musical performance, everybody is leading at some point or another. The challenge of that is knowing when to lead and when to follow and when to allow other people to lead. Leadership is very important as a conductor. You’re trying to get everybody to be the best they can be, or to be better than they thought they could be. You must push them to the limits of their capabilities and it comes through various different ways. I would say the great orchestras of the world are great because the backs of the sections lead. What I mean in that sense is that the players in the back are the ones that are really producing the most sound. They are the ones really pushing sound forward to the front of the orchestra. In this sense, they’re 125

leading from the back. Being at the back of the orchestra is very difficult, you’re so far from the conductor it’s hard to hear anything. It’s actually the most crucial part of being in an orchestra—playing in the back and really leading from there. That’s what makes an orchestra great.

Peter Loewen Shepherd School

Musicology

There’s no better laboratory for learning by teamwork than performing. Gesture is a very powerful medium. We can talk, it’s obviously one way of communicating, but the communication of sheer gesture is extremely powerful. The effect of our conversation, the way you articulate something verbally, has a different meaning than in written form, and so the performative aspects of communication face-to-face in an ensemble are incredibly productive. The language of music is all nuance. That’s people beginning, developing and ending the sounds. So there are at least two major things that are happening when you are performing in an ensemble. You are thinking, and then you are responding.

And you’re responding with some part of your body mechanically. And then you’re articulating with body gesture.

The smoother the contact is, the better your technical grasp of your instrument is, the more readily you can contribute with all these wonderful nuances.

Jacqueline Leclair Schulich School

Oboe

Leadership is interesting. One does need it. One thinks of armies, one thinks of countries, one thinks of deans of schools, hierarchy seems to work. But in terms of develop126

ing a community and evolving a school of music, it’s about facilitating others, and really listening, understanding, and encouraging other people to go for it and make something happen. The role of a leader, in my view, is to empower others to be leaders, to be a good listener and a facilitator. In terms of evolving the community to cultivate an environment where people are cooperative, I’ll give an example of my former dean and of what I think is good leadership that inspired me. I was at a faculty meeting and the dean said something about the scholarship for junior faculty of whom I was one. I wanted to apply for this grant and after the meeting I went up to him and I said, “Did you say the deadline for the grant was not this Friday but next Friday?” And he was taken aback, and he said, “No, it’s this Friday. It’s always this Friday.” I said, “Okay,” and he almost seemed upset. And I went back and twenty minutes later he emailed me, and he said, “I thought about it Jackie, and it’s actually not a bad idea to roll back the application deadline because some people are away and that’s actually a good idea, so we’ll roll the deadline back.” It struck me that he was soft enough to think about it. He didn’t respond by thinking that she was trying to get away with something there, or she wasn’t listening. He responded by thinking, “What would that be like? Or is that a good idea?” which I wasn’t even suggesting. He was an open-minded leader with flexibility.

Peter Schubert Schulich School

Music Theory

The hardest part in graduate academic scholarship is to keep people moving forward, because it’s easy for them to get bogged down and not produce. I would say leadership is actually a matter of listening. If you get students into a room and listen to what they’re doing, then you can see 127

if you can help them and how they can help each other. In my classes, I always emphasize that the person who’s playing and singing their little contrapuntal idea is doing it for their colleagues. I like to emphasize the social nature of any educational activity, so I don’t think the student should be focused on the teacher. I think it’s important to arrange the classroom so the students are focused on each other, and they evaluate each other’s work. Whether it’s music or not, practice ought to be collaborative. I’ve noticed that kids in music schools and good schools in general aren’t just in competition, they applaud each other. There’s that sense of supportiveness and recognition of quality that is important, whether it comes from the teacher or from other students.

John Mac Master Schulich School

Voice

One of the really interesting things about music students is that we have to train all of our musicians to be leaders and followers. Music is following, but it’s only jerks who are leading in a moment who don’t realize that they don’t have unfettered power. There are moments when we have to follow different people in an orchestra because of the melodic material they’re playing. This giving and taking of leadership roles is one of the things that you’ll learn in faculties of music, and it’s one of the reasons why faculties of medicine and law look for our undergrads; in a music faculty you learn how to learn, you learn lots of right-brain and left-brain thinking, and you learn leadership and teamwork. When I was very new in the business I started as a professional chorister. That’s somebody who’s paid to sing as part of the group. Even when you’re the star of the show you’re singing with other people and the chorus is singing with you, and you are always singing with the orchestra.

It is an ensemble art form. Occasionally you’ll meet a 128

colleague that you’re having trouble getting on the same wavelength. I’ve never worked with anybody that wanted to do me ill as far as I could tell, but I can remember working in Europe with directors where I’ve had professional contretemps, but nothing terrible. If you don’t like working and cooperating with people but you still want to be a singer, well then you should just be a concert artist with a pianist that you hire.

Benjamin Kamins Shepherd School

Bassoon

My friend who plays with the Boston Symphony describes to people that playing in a symphony is like a hundred people who are typing the same novel simultaneously and have all of the typewriters lined up. Now, what type of teamwork is involved in something like this? Do you look around and notice what other people are doing? Is it that you are listening to other people more than you are listening to yourself? And you are already listening to yourself on a level that is unimaginable to somebody who is not a musician. Does your awareness go to even the slightest bit of nonverbal communication? I used to have Bob, who is the oboe professor here, sit in front of me and I could read every hair on the back of his head. Literally. I had to be able to play in perfect ensemble with somebody who had his back to me, being able to hear the way he was shaping a phrase. What do you do if you get somebody who doesn’t work well in a team? There are people whose personal skills are very bad, but when they sit down and play, they work and they are easy to play with.

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Paul Kantor

Shepherd School

Violin

If someone is specializing in the preludes of fugues of Bach, the team is Bach and the performer. The composer of course, is dead, in this case, and only helpful in what they have left behind. The partnership with the audience is tough. It’s vague. It’s hypothetical. What can I do to be the conduit between the composer and the audience?

Orchestra is a great deal more top-down as a team. There is interaction with others, but it is very much directed from a central authority. I think chamber music is the better example of teamwork because there is a great deal of flexibility. It is a great deal about not only being creative, but being able to present ideas in a way that is attractive and engaging to other people.

Julie Cumming Schulich School

Musicology

The most important thing for young people who want to be leaders in their field is to respect and listen to others.

No matter what the field is, that will be helpful. Be reliable.

If someone asks you to do something, come through. If you’re reliable, people will give you responsibilities. If you can’t do things right and on time, you won’t be successful in life. You must be reliable as a musician, too. Be able to learn a part and get it right. It’s about being someone you can depend on in all your interpersonal relationships. With leadership, you have to want to do it and it’s something that comes later in life. Taking on leadership of larger groups is a major-league thing. It’s about asking yourself, “What can I do that’ll make a difference? Is there something I can do in this position that’ll make things better for people?”

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That’s pretty inspiring. You have to find the thing you want to make a difference in, and sometimes, that takes a while to emerge. But when it emerges, you’re going to want to be a leader if you think you can make something happen.

Peter Loewen Shepherd School

Musicology

People find themselves in terrible circumstances with other people because they don’t have the radar for people’s feelings. I think the most important quality in any communal setting is to be able to understand how you need to subvert your own behaviors in favor of the needs of the group. We’re all individuals. Some of us are more overt than others. Some people need to lead more than others, while some people prefer to follow than to lead. There are all kinds of dynamics. I’m natural at picking out vibes from the least little thing, for example a facial gesture. You can see immediately when someone is reacting to what you’re saying, whether you should go with that or back off from that. If you’re being overpowering, maybe you need to be more tentative and find another path. You make much better headway when you’re giving more; you are giving opportunities for people to warrant what you’re saying.

Behavior comes from an early learned experience, and it takes extra work not to behave in a certain way. You have to think extra hard to not follow the natural impulse to behave a certain way, to react a certain way.

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Music in Our Lives

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SECTION VI: MUSIC IN OUR LIVES

The Shepherd School of Music and the Schulich School of Music are both institutions replete with musicians at the top of their fields. Shepherd, well known as one of America’s top orchestral breeding grounds, has undeniably placed its institutional focus on training the world’s next top performers. Schulich, a school that has made huge investments in recording and music technology, places equal emphasis on research and the training of Canada’s next great teachers.

Throughout the interviews, professors would reference the difference between “universities” and “conservatories,” places that both teach music, but with different cultural histories. While the nuance of the difference is easily glossed over, it is one that informs a deeper understanding of the professor’s background and communicational intent.

Universities, of which Shepherd and Schulich are both a part, are places where students study music as a part of a broader liberal arts education, while conservatories place an almost single-minded focus on teaching nothing but music. The differences have become less and less visible in the current age, as conservatories have broadened their non-musical educational offerings, often partnering with prestigious colleges or universities, while certain music schools in universities have shifted to a more hyper focused musical training. Shepherd, though a part of Rice University, stems directly from the cultural heritage of the conservatory, with a distinct motivation to train musicians to perform.

Schulich, a more classical successor of the university, develops performers, yet also uniquely invests in other areas, 135

especially research and teaching music education.

These differences contribute to the critical questions that musicians at these institutions continue to deliberate: What does music offer humanity? Why do music schools exist? How can music be made more acceptable to broader audiences? The musicians interviewed questioned everything from the dominance of “corporate” pop music, to the possibility of remaining human without music, to the future of classical music in a world where even the “elites” are turning more and more to popular music.

Most surprisingly, teachers expressed a deep undercurrent of trepidation about the future of classical music. Some teachers articulated anxiety about donors encouraging a need for profitability among orchestras, while others expressed frustration at musicians’ unions making impossible the sweeping changes that would keep orchestras in the black. Frustration with the decline of classical music is infused in the atmosphere. As Shepherd’s own David Ferris put it, “I think the place of classical music has been lost, partly because society and the institutions of society haven’t really advocated for it.” This conforms to the plethora of literature studying the disastrous effect of the 2008 financial crisis on the orchestras across the United States and the lingering isolation from the rest of society that musicians have come to feel. Despite this, musicians at these schools remain as dedicated as ever to their work, calling it a “holy art.”

What follows is a series of excerpts culled from responses to questions ranging in focus from the teachers’ motivation in music, to their opinions on practice, academia, teamwork, and talent that focus on the state of the music world and the impact of music in our lives and our culture.

- Andrew White, Section Editor 136

CONTENTS Excerpts featured in this section are by the following professors in the order they are listed Stéphane Lemelin Fabrice Marandola Peter Loewen Karim Al-Zand Stefano Algieri Isabelle Cossette Robert Roux Dominique Labelle Jean-Sébastien Vallée Julie Simson Anthony Brandt Jean-Sébastien Vallée Damian Blättler Isabelle Cossette Alain Cazes Arthur Gottschalk David Ferris Paul Kantor

McGill University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University McGill University Rice University McGill University McGill University Rice University Rice University McGill University Rice University McGill University McGill University Rice University Rice University Rice University

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Stéphane Lemelin Schulich School

Piano

There are an increased number of opportunities today.

There’s much more mobility in the world today than there was 40 years ago. I think that’s all great. Musicians’ careers depend on networks. You make your career from the networks that you’ve established around yourself, and those networks include your teachers, but they also very much include your peers because your peers are going to be your colleagues. When you collaborate with different people, you benefit from each person bringing their own network to the enterprise and everybody then multiplies the possibilities of finding performance opportunities. The role of universities and conservatories in that is hopefully to create an environment where those networks can happen. We believe that entrepreneurship is a central part of this, and giving students the tools to think in those terms, to have tools that they can apply to this. I really believe that living in a different place, being out of your comfort zone in a culture that’s unfamiliar to you, is one of the greatest growing experiences that you can have.

Fabrice Marandola Schulich School

Percussion

Conservatories are important because they are where a very specific human knowledge is developed and nurtured.

It is a hub of people devoted to music, which is so important in our lives. Without conservatories, where would you have the time and place for people to meet each other and to really dig into that matter? Would we be able to have so much knowledge available if people were not able to be at these places? Academia and conservatories are where you can give students the opportunity to be exposed to new 139

things. Our sense of curiosity and imagination is cultivated by the fact that we try consciously to do new things and force ourselves to go out of routine. People are a bit afraid of that, but you need to try things and open your mind.

Curriculums where you have to learn different things are very important because they make sure that you cannot ignore that other things exist. The role of academia and conservatories is to make sure that these channels stay open and make them available to people. That’s not that easy to do, but I think as institutions, we are mandated to do it. We do have to. It’s not an option. If you don’t do that, you close too many doors and stop creativity at some point. Musical curiosity is generated by exposure. It’s exposing kids at an early age to music, any kind of music. Music develops your openness to try to grasp things that you didn’t think could exist before. I think curiosity and imagination go hand in hand. If you can use the imagination of kids and expand on that, you expand their universe immensely.

Peter Loewen Shepherd School

Musicology

The role of a conservatory in a society is to continue to satisfy our needs for art. The place of the arts, the place of conservatory in society is to continue to provide society with beauty and the opportunity to reconstruct the music of the past. Music, unlike the other arts, has to be reconstructed. You can’t just look at it. You might need a docent to help you understand a painting, to help you appreciate a finished product, whereas with music, it has to be reconstructed every time, and how it is reconstructed changes every time. What instrumentation is available or the people who are playing the instruments has to reconstruct it. If we don’t have music conservatories where we train musicians, 140

not only will we not be able to reconstruct the music of the past, but also we won’t be able to do anything new. Whereas, if we stop producing visual art, we’d still have visual art in the world. I think the problem for music is different from the other arts in that we have to continue to produce musicians otherwise we will have no sounds.

Karim Al-Zand Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

The academy is oftentimes where the traditions of a particular art form are stored, a repository of all of this cultural knowledge. And in terms of training, it’s where students come to be a part of that. Students seek to understand that tradition and learn about that tradition, and navigate its both technical and artistic facets.

Stefano Algieri Schulich School

Voice

The mission of the university is to present the opportunity to learn to the young person.We should provide the information for them to have access to. At the university, you should be testing theory every day and when you come to a place like this, your spirit should be exploding with stimulation. You shouldn’t be afraid to say what you think here. I’m here to help develop my students’ critical thinking skills. It’s an exchange of ideas by people who come from different perspectives and are passionate about their theories.

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Isabelle Cosette Schulich School

Music Education

The role of academia is to develop new knowledge, new ways of doing music. In addition, there’s the role of informing communities and getting involved with communities.

Music can bring solutions. Even in healthcare, it can help a lot with a problem like mental health or rehabilitation and it offers opportunities to provide a lot of social support. I don’t think we academics should work in silos. I think that’d be good if we could diminish those disciplinary silos within academia. I’m also talking about outside academia—communities and industries—we’re one world.

I’d like to see that opened more. Academics are there to stimulate thinking and be critical about how our society is working.

Robert Roux

Shepherd School

Piano

The general trend of humanity is upward, at least as far as knowledge and competence. Chopin wrote twenty-four etudes for piano. These have always been considered a benchmark of a really accomplished pianist. I would say when Chopin wrote those in the 1820s, there certainly were no more than ten people on the whole planet that could play all of them at a high level from all points of view, both the physical and the artistic. Now, there are dozens of people that can do this in Houston, Texas. The difference is, in Chopin’s time, every one of those ten people that could do it was probably a genius. Because they would have to intuitively figure out how to play the instrument in a way that went against the way the instrument was taught in the conservatories of the time. But these dozens of people that can play them now in Houston and hundreds of people that can play them worldwide, they’re not all geniuses. They’re 142

simply very well-taught, intelligent, and disciplined enough to have achieved a certain confidence at the instrument. I am working with some students at present who certainly can do things that I couldn’t do.

Dominique Labelle Schulich School

Voice

Being a musician is not seen as a fantastic thing in this society. But it’s so much more than that. It is a holy art. Can you imagine a world without music? It’s so important, and we take it for granted. For a singer it’s about communicating our heritage, the human experience and all the different emotions that we experience. Singing is a fantastic way to communicate our history. There’s a stigma on musicians that they’re not really useful and important, but they are.

They are essential to humans, and to the holy art of music. I think our job as teachers is to inspire, to lead, and to teach.

Jean-Sébastien Vallée Schulich School

Conducting

After having taught for a number of years, I felt slightly empty in the sense that I had a hard time knowing why I was doing what I was doing. We get so focused as a student to do well and study that when we get to after school, where we have to find a first job, we start doing that first job, and push that ideal job. But there’s a point where you wonder, why is it so important for me to succeed so much, why is it so important to have that group sound so good, and why do I spend so many hours to make sure that those chords are going to be tuned well? Then it kind of hit me that what I’m trying to do through music is to create 143

this kind of micro society, where everything works well.

Where when I conduct the ensemble, every part of what I’m doing is going to be working together and the flow of things needs to go into the understanding of what we try to achieve. It’s like the ideal of what I would like to see in this world I’m trying to put it into what I’m doing. That makes a big change in the way I wake up and walk into a rehearsal.

Instead of just focusing, I feel I can reach what I would like to see in the broader world and that makes sense to me. I think if we achieve it in the rehearsal process or in the concert, that’s something that can bleed and expand outside of what we do.

Julie Simson

Shepherd School

Voice

The person who keeps music in their life will be better at whatever their profession is. If you love music, you’ll be better at economics. If you love music, you’ll be better at electrical engineering. You know? It’s really interesting.

It’s one of the reasons why we push so hard to keep music education in the public schools in this country. Because if you take that away, it won’t be nearly as good.

Anthony Brandt Shepherd School

Composition & Theory

Creativity is part of the software of the human brain. We all have it. To treat it as a gift or a luxury is incorrect. It’s the thing that distinguishes other species if we get right down to it. We have a phenomenal repetition suppression, where we will tune out if things are overly predictable. In order to 144

stay engaged with each other, we have to keep introducing surprise. A lot of what holds us together as a society is our basic ability to be inventive with each other. We cannot stand being boring for very long. Once you think about it that way, it seems so obvious why there should be music schools. The thing about human beings is that we take everything we can do, and we find a creative way of applying it. Music is just our way of being creative with sound, just like literature’s our way of being creative with language, and visual arts is our way of being creative with sight.

Jean-Sébastien Vallée Schulich School

Conducting

It’s a life-long challenge to find out how we make classical music more accessible and how we will open doors to it. I am not sure if it has so much to do with what we perform, but mostly in which context and how we bring it to people.

It sometimes tends to be anchored in tradition, where we’re going to go to a concert hall, and dress and everything is black and white. When I was in Los Angeles, there was a project called Messiah on Skid Row, which is a place of Los Angeles with one of the largest homeless populations in the country. They played Handel’s Messiah in a homeless shelter with a professional orchestra and it was free. And they all came, and it was really weird. But they listened to it. Also, The Los Angeles Phils played dressed in jeans and t-shirts. They had a casual one hour concert. Without changing the music, you can change the context so it doesn’t just feel like the fancy date that you go on Saturday night, where you have to dress. I think that would make a difference. Throughout history we’ve always had those two trends, even at the time of Mozart, we also had really folk and really pop works that were disconnected at some point.

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A different platform is needed to be able to share music; we just have to make it a bit more accessible.

Damian Blättler Shepherd School

Music Theory

I don’t think there will ever be an end to research on a certain piece or certain art. I think when we’re doing musical research, most often it is not discovering new facts like uncovering the next layer of an archaeological dig and finding a new set of pots or something. What you’re doing is finding a new way that the piece can mean in your own particular context. So when people come up with a new interpretation of Shakespeare, it’s not that they’ve found something latent in that play itself, but rather that a particular author with his/her criticism has their own context, and he/she finds out how that play means in that particular context. And new contexts are constantly being created, so this sort of research is infinite. No one will have the last word on the interpretation of an artwork. Whether people keep playing what we still hear at school, that’s a separate question, but in terms of research it’s definitely open-ended.

Isabelle Cossette Schulich School

Music Education

I think we can learn a lot from jazz and from other traditions. If we go back to the younger students in schools here in Quebec, they have music but the way it is taught doesn’t seem efficient as a lot of kids don’t like music at school. I think that sometimes just putting the radio on and dancing is a more fruitful way for young kids to get together 146

and appreciate music. It’s a different approach than, “this is a quarter note” and other basic theory that I think can be very boring for kids.

Alain Cazes

Schulich School

Conducting

Music is manipulated by humans, but the sounds are in the nature. We have all elements inside of us, it is an element of perception that this musical vocabulary has a meaning.

Awakening this sensitivity will generate curiosity. When I work with kids and I conduct, and I just show them with my gestures how to play—I can change my gesture for a much more legato, a much more flowing kind of gesture. I say, “Can you play that way now?” The image of my gesture creates an image of tone. And this awakes this sensitivity.

After they play and they discover the tone unity that comes from what they have observed, then this evokes some kind of curiosity inside them so they want more. They want to go farther than that, because they say, “Wow it’s amazing how the sound is connected to the gesture.” But the sound that I provide in my arm comes from my soul, comes itself from how I hear the sound in my mind before I create that gesture. Music generates gestures, and gestures generate an image of sound for the musicians. It’s all connected together, and the more we experience that, the more we want it. When the words stop, music starts.

Arthur Gottschalk

Composition & Theory

Shepherd School

The conservatory has two functions, and unfortunately, because of the word conservatory, it leans a little bit too far in favor of conservation, that is, perpetuating the museum 147

structure. Today’s symphony orchestras are museums.

You go to an art gallery of Renaissance art and you look at Renaissance portraits and you go to a concert and you hear music by dead white European male composers from the 18th and the 19th century and it’s a museum. And that’s fine, museums are good. However, people still paint, and people still write music, but there are far more venues for contemporary visual art than there are for contemporary musical art. Part of the reason is because there has been a corporate takeover of much of modern music since the turn of the last century. Recordings became a corporate medium rather than a viable artistic medium. Popular music is incredibly conservative; the people that listen to it think that they’re really cutting-edge, but their music is not.

It has the same three chords, and you don’t dare change the formula too much because then people won’t like it, and so you change it just slightly, and then everybody says, “Yeah, that’s my generation of music” but it really is a change in hairstyle and clothing and attitude and posture, and that’s because it’s corporately controlled. It’s possible to grow up in this country and never hear anything except corporate music. I see it all the time when I travel, and talk to community groups, with kids that have only heard classical music on a car commercial or in the background of a movie.

David Ferris

Shepherd School

Musicology

Throughout history, “classical music” has always been cultivated by a small minority of the population. It was never intended for “everybody.” It was always elitist. I know that has a strongly negative connotation, but I think it’s an ambivalent term. In some contexts, it should have a negative connotation, but in culture and art and music, there’s noth148

ing wrong with elitism. There’s a place in society for elitist culture and popular culture. It should be the case, and always has been the case, that popular culture will be appreciated by a much wider swath of society. That’s the natural order of things. However, the current problem is that the elite have no understanding or appreciation for classical music. They are much more likely to listen to popular music and understand nothing about classical music. I think that’s a really serious problem because if classical music disappeared from our society, it’s hard to quantify the effect it would have, but it would be a huge loss. Music is something that everybody listens to. Everyone is interested in music, but only the popular side of music. I think the place of classical music has been lost, partly because society and the institutions of society haven’t really advocated for it.

Paul Kantor

Shepherd School

Violin

In a society where there are so many crushing life and death questions, from the earth heating up at a terrifying rate, to the state of refugees, to will we be able to feed our population, it’s really hard to justify the existence of music.

Except, can we be human without it?

Asking me what the role of music education is, is like asking me the role of music in the human experience. I think music is one of the things that make us human. That expressing through sound and pitch and rhythm, things that are hard to express in any other way. I once tried to buy from the creator a cartoon that was in the New Yorker. It was so poignant I wanted to own it but it never happened.

The cartoon was a barren landscape-a moonscape and a discarded tire and a few open tin cans and the caption was, “Life Without Mozart.” What is it without what we do? It’s 149

pretty barren. Or it’s survival. We sure hope we’ve evolved beyond mere survival, although you could look at what’s going on and ask, “Have we really?”

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FEATURED FACULTY

Karim Al-Zand is an Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He received a Bachelor of Music from McGill University in 1993, and a Doctorate in Music from Harvard University in 2000. His compositions draw inspiration from varied sources such as graphic art, myths and fables, folk music of the world, film, spoken word, jazz, and his own Middle Eastern heritage. He has won several national awards, including the Sackler Composition Prize, the ArtSong Prize, the Louisville Orchestra Competition Prize and the “Arts and Letters Award in Music” from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a founding and artistic board member of Musiqa, Houston’s premier contemporary music group.

Stefano Algieri is an Associate Professor of Voice and the Voice Area Chair at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He was considered one of the leading tenors of his generation, having sung with many of the great opera houses around the world and symphony orchestras including: New York, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and others. His repertoire includes music from the Baroque to the Contemporary eras. He has debuted works at both Carnegie and Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. He has been a guest lecturer at the University of Missouri, Royal College of Music in Glasgow, the Sibelius Academy, and many more. He was coached by many of the leading vocal instructors of his time including Fritz Kramer, Joseph Braunstein, Anton Coppola, Nicolas Flagello, Nicholas Grannito, and Thomas Grubb.

Richard Bado is a Professor of Opera Studies and Director of the Opera Studies Program at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He received his Bachelor’s degree from West Virginia University and his Master’s of Music from the Eastman School of Music. Mr. Bado has also studied advanced choral conducting with Robert Shaw. He is the Chorus Master for the Houston Grand Opera, where he received the Silver Rose Award in 2013.

Mr. Bado made his professional conducting debut in 1989 leading Houston Grand Opera’s acclaimed production of Show Boat at the 153

newly restored Cairo Opera House in Egypt. Since then, he has conducted at Teatro alla Scala, Opéra National de Paris, Houston Grand Opera, New York City Opera, the Aspen Music Festival, the Tulsa Opera, the Russian National Orchestra, the Florida Philharmonic, the Montreal Symphony, Wolf Trap Opera, Houston Ballet, and has conducted the Robert Wilson production of Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts at the Edinburgh Festival.

Mr. Bado regularly judges for the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions and served as Houston Grand Opera’s Head of Music Staff for 14 seasons.

Damian Blättler is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 2006, and his Doctorate from Yale University in 2013. At Rice, he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in musical analysis. His primary research area is tonal music after the common practice period and other interests include issues of authenticity and value in popular music, harmonic and scale theory, and the music of Louis Andriessen. He has presented his work at national conferences and has received fellowships from Yale University and Harvard University. In addition to his theoretical pursuits, Dr. Blättler is an experienced educator. He designed and ran teacher-training workshops for the Yale Teaching Center and worked for the Music in Schools Initiative at the Yale School of Music as well.

Guillaume Bourgogne in an Assistant Professor of Conducting and Music Director of the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He completed his saxophone studies in his native city of Lyon, France at the Paris Conservatoire, where he won first prize in orchestral conducting, musical analysis, harmony and orchestration. He joined the Schulich School of Music faculty in 2013. In addition, he teaches at the Paris Conservatoire, Sao Paulo State University and at the Campos de Jordão Festival.

David Brackett is a musicologist at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He teaches undergraduate level courses on popular music, jazz, ethnomusicology and contemporary art music, as well as gives graduate seminars on the conjunctions 154

between contemporary music, historiography, the sociology of culture and music analysis. His research focuses on the relationship between categories of music and people, and how perception and analysis of musical genres are tied to issues of cultural value and prestige. He has published two books; one on the history and social meaning of 20th century popular music, Interpreting Popular Music (Cambridge Universiy Press, 1995) and a collection of annotated source readings, The Pop Rock and Soul Reader: Histories and Documents (Oxford University Press, 2013). He is working on a third book, Categorizing Sound: A Generic History of Popular Music, to be published by the University of California Press. Prior to his work in musicology, he studied as a composer under such teachers as Karel Husa, Steven Stucky, Yehudi Wyner, Robert Ceely, and David Cope.

Anthony Brandt is an Associate Professor of Composition and Theory, and Chair of Composition and Theory at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He received his degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and Harvard University. As a composer, he has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet-the-Composer, the Houston Arts Alliance, and the New England Foundation for the Arts. He is the co-founder of the Houston-based contemporary music ensemble, Musiqa.

He has authored a paper on music and early language and is a principal investigator in a stroke recovery research program at the Houston Methodist Center for Performing Arts Medicine. He is also the author of the online music appreciation course Sound Reasoning, which was awarded an Access to Artistic Excellence Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Barbara Butler is a Professor of Trumpet at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music as well as a soloist with Music of the Baroque, Chicago Chamber Musicians, and Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra. She received her Bachelor of Music from Northwestern University. She has performed with Eastman Brass, Eastman Virtuosi, the Vancouver and Grant Park Symphony Orchestras, St. Louis, Chicago, and Houston Symphony Orchestras and the New York Philharmonic. Additionally, Ms. Butler has held tenure at both the Eastman School of Music and Northwestern University.

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Leone Buyse is the Mullen Professor of Flute at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, after having spent twenty-two years in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She received her Bachelor of Music from the Eastman School of Music, and her Master’s degree from Emporia State University. She has performed with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players throughout Europe and Japan with the Tokyo, Juilliard and Muir String Quartets, the Boston Musica Viva, Da Camera of Houston, and in recital with Jessye Norman and Yo-Yo Ma. In addition to Rice, Ms. Buyse has taught at the University of Michigan, the New England Conservatory, Boston University, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, and as a visiting associate professor at the Eastman School of Music.

William Caplin is the James McGill Professor of Music Theory at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He received an undergraduate degree in music composition from the University of Southern California and he completed graduate studies in music theory and history at the University of Chicago. He also pursued further studies in musicology at the Berlin Technical University.

He specializes in the theory of music form and also studies the history of music theory. He has published award winning books, textbooks, articles, and research papers.

Alain Cazes is an Associate Professor of Conducting and Brass Performance at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music.

Professor Cazes studied at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal and studied tuba in the United States under Joseph Novotny, Donald Harry, and Ronald Bishop. In addition, he is the principal tuba of the Orchestre Métropolitain. He has worked with musical groups all over the world and has performed under some of the world’s most renowned conductors.

Barbara Clark is an Associate Professor of Voice at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. She received her Bachelor in Music, Master’s degree, and Doctorate at the University of Cincinnati College - Conservatory of Music. Furthermore, she continued to teach at her alma mater for an additional nine years.

A soprano singer, Ms. Clark has not only served as a clinician with the Cincinnati Voice Consortium, but also has performed 156

with various symphonies and orchestras, both domestically and internationally. She has had students perform nationally as well as internationally, and has trained students who have led illustrious careers in seven different Broadway productions.

Isabelle Cossette is a Professor of Music Education and Research at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. Cossette holds flute performance degrees and Ph.D. studies on respiratory mechanics. She is the founder and director of the Music Performance and Body Lab, which is the first North American respiratory laboratory using optoelectronic plethysmography. She was also the interim Associate Director at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology in 2014. Isabelle Cossette has published in renowned scientific journals such as Respiratory Physiology and Neurobiology, Acta Acustica united with Acustica, Perceptual and Motor Skills and Journal of New Music Research. She has been a member of the Schulich School faculty since September 2003.

Julie E. Cumming in an Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology, and Interim Dean at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Music and Medieval Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University in 1980. Additionally, she earned her master’s of arts in 1982 and her Ph.D. in Music and Medieval Studies at the University of California at Berkeley in 1987. Her specialty is in Late Medieval and Renaissance polyphony. She joined the Schulich School of Music faculty in 1992.

James Dunham is a Professor of Viola at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music as well as an active recitalist, guest artist, teacher and advocate for new music premiering two works

by Libby Larsen. He received both his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Mr. Dunham was a founding violist of the Naumburg Award winning Sequoia String Quartet and a member of the Grammy Award winning Cleveland Quartet.

He continues to have an international performing and recording career. Mr. Dunham formerly taught at California Institute of the Arts, the Eastman School of Music and the New England Conservatory.

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David Ferris is an Associate Professor of Musicology at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He received his Bachelor of Music from the New England Conservatory in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1993. He teaches seminars on the classical style, Mozart, romantic song, Mendelssohn and Schumann, text and music, and folklorism in 19th-century music, as well as a First-year Writing Intensive Seminar on musical biography.

Mark Fewer is an Associate Professor of Strings with a specialty in Early Baroque to the avant-garde at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He received his education from the University of Toronto and the Liszt Academy in Budapest with pianist Ferenc Rados. He is a jazz violinist as well as an artistic director.

He joined the Schulich School of Music faculty in 2007 and was appointed as William Dawson Scholar in September 2015.

Jeanne Kierman Fischer is the Artist Teacher of Piano at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Fischer received her Bachelor of Music from Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1971, her International License from the Dalcroze School in 1973, and her Master’s in Music from the New England Conservatory in 1977. She specializes in contemporary American piano music and teaches a small class of piano majors, chamber music, piano literature, and Dalcroze Eurhythmics at the Shepherd School.

Norman Fischer is the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Cello and the Director of Chamber Music at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Fischer received his Bachelor of Music from Oberlin College in 1971. He specializes in music for solo cello. He previously taught at Dartmouth College, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the Tanglewood Music Center. Fischer is the cellist for the Fischer Duo, a group that focuses on both classical and contemporary pieces, and was a member of the Concord String Quartet for 16 years. He also has an extensive history of performance and recording.

Ichiro Fujinaga is an Associate Professor of Music Technology and Associate Dean of Music Research at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He received a Bachelor of Science 158

degree and a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Alberta as well as a Master of Music Theory degree and Ph.D. in Music Technology from McGill University. Professor Fujinaga’s research includes work with the Distributed Digital Music Archives and Library, the Research Centre for Harpsichord Performance, Gamera, and the Networked Environment for Music Analysis (NEMA). His research interests include optical music recognition, digital signal processing, music information retrieval, pattern recognition and more. He currently teaches a Music Technology Seminar at the Schulich School of Music.

Charlie Geyer is a Professor of Trumpet and Chair of Brass at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He received both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Northwestern in 1966 and 1969, respectively. He has performed as part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Lyric Opera, and the Eastman Brass, and has led as Principal of the Houston Symphony Orchestra and the Grant Park Symphony Summer Orchestra. He previously taught as Professor of Trumpet at Eastman School of Music and Northwestern University. Geyer frequently performs with orchestras and at music festivals all around the world.

Arthur Gottschalk is a Professor at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where he served as Chair of the Department of Music Theory and Composition until 2009. Gottschalk received his Bachelor of Music in Music Composition, a Master of Arts in Music Composition and English Literature, and his Doctorate in Music Composition from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Furthermore, he was founder and served as Director of Rice University’s electronic and computer music laboratories until 2002. Gottschalk has won various recognitions for his compositions, including an invitation as Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, the Meritorious Service Award via The Association of Rice Alumni, the First Prize in the XXV Concorso Internazionale di Composizione Originale for an original composition, and the Bogliasco Fellowship in addition to many others.

Chris Harman is an Associate Professor of Composition at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He studied classical guitar, cello and electronic music with Barton Wigg, Alan Stell159

ings and Wes Wraggett respectively. He has won countless awards and joined the Schulich School of Music faculty in 2005.

Kyoko Hashimoto is a Professor of Piano and Chair of the Piano Area at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. Professor Hashimoto attended the Toho-Gakuen School of Music, the International Menuhin Music Academy, Indiana University, and the Julliard School. She has performed solos all over the world in renowned halls such as Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, among others. She has performed concertos with ensembles including the Prague Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra and the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra.

Desmond Hoebig is a Professor of Cello at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He received his Bachelor of Music and Master of Music from the Juilliard School of Music in 1982 and 1983, respectively. He has had a distinguished career as a soloist, orchestral and chamber musician. As well as performing solo with many prominent orchestras in North America, including Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, Hoebig has held the position of Principal Cellist in the Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Houston symphonic orchestras. Furthermore, he has performed as the cellist for the Orford String Quartet, the Hoebig-Moroz trio, and a duo with Andrew Tunis. He has had multiple international orchestral engagements, and has been the recipient of numerous awards for his achievements on the cello.

Jerry Hou is the Associate Conductor at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Hou received his Master’s degree from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and received his Doctorate of Musical Arts at the Eastman School of Music. He is a passionate advocate for contemporary music performance, which he studied in Europe with Pierre Boulez and members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain at the Lucerne Festival Academy.

Born in Taiwan, Hou has conducted orchestras across the world, including the Rochester Philharmonic, St. Louis Symphony, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. Hou also recorded several works of 160

Zohn-Muldoon and has collaborated with Bernard Rands, MarkAnthony Turnage, Unsuk Chin, Brett Dean, Harrison Birtwistle, Benedict Mason, and Peter Eötvös, among other composers.

Thomas Jaber is the Director of Choral Activities, Professor of Vocal Coaching, and Director of Rice Chorale at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Jaber received a Bachelor of Music Education from Arkansas State University in 1974, his Master of Music from Indiana University in 1976, and a Performer’s Certificate in Accompanying from the Curtis Institute of Music in 1977. Before moving to Houston in 1988 and coaching four operas with the Houston Grand Opera, he was the Music Director of the Opera Theatre of Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While in Pennsylvania he also conducted the Philadelphia premieres of Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea and Virgil Thomson's Mother of Us All, as well as served on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music.

Benjamin Kamins is the Lynette S. Autrey Professor of Bassoon at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Kamins studied under Norman Herzberg at the University of Southern California.

Additionally, he is on the faculty of the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California. Kamins has an active career as an orchestral musician, chamber player, and solo performer.

He was the Associate Principal Bassoon with the Minnesota Orchestra, the Principal Bassoon of the Houston Symphony, a founding member of the Epicurean Wind Quintet, and the Houston Symphony Chamber Players. Furthermore, he has multiple solo recordings including the Mozart Bassoon Concerto with the Houston Symphony in 1994.

Paul Kantor is the Sally Shepherd Perkins Professor of Violin at the Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and Artist in Residence at the Glenn Gould School in Toronto. Kantor received his Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees studying violin with Dorothy DeLay at the Juilliard School in 1977 and 1978, respectively. He has taught at several universities and has served as the Eleanor H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Violin at the Cleveland Institute. Previously, he served as a faculty member at the Aspen Music Festival and School for nearly 40 years. Along 161

with teaching, he has performed as a soloist with various symphony orchestras, including the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, and the Great Lakes Festival Orchestra. He also founded and currently directs the Gabriel Del Orbe Violin Program in the Dominican Republic. In 2014, he won the American String Teachers Association’s Artist Teacher Award.

Alexandra Kieffer is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. She received her Ph.D. in music history from Yale University in 2014 and spent the 2014-2015 academic year as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University. Her current book project explores constructions of sensation, listening, and affect in early twentieth-century Debussyism in the context of emerging scientific discourses on the body. Additionally, her essays on Debussy reception and early twentieth-century French intellectual culture are forthcoming in 19th-Century Music and Music Theory Spectrum. Her research has been supported by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the American Musicological Society’s M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet fund.

Jon Kimura Parker is a Professor of Piano at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He received a Bachelor of Music and Masters of Music in 1981, and a Doctor of Musical Arts in 1989, all from the Juilliard School of Music. Originally from Canada, he is an officer of The Order of Canada, his country’s highest civilian honor. He has lectured at several universities, performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Wolfgang Sawallisch at Carnegie Hall and has toured Europe with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Andre Previn. He currently serves as the Artistic Advisor of the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, and continues to perform as a soloist, release recordings, and perform in chamber ensembles including the Montrose Trio and Miró Quartet. In 1984, he won the Gold Medal at the Leeds International Piano Competition. Kimura Parker has studied at the Vancouver Academy of Music, the University of British Columbia, the Victoria Conservatory, and the Banff Centre.

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Hank Knox is an Associate Professor of Early Music and Harpsichord at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He studied with John Grew at the Schulich School of Music and with Kenneth Gilbert in Paris. He has performed around the world with the Arion Ensemble, an early music ensemble he founded, and the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Le Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montreal, and L’Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal. He has recorded and released two albums of Fresobaldi’s works for harpsichord using an original Italian harpsichord as well as multiple other recordings on earl-music.com on instruments of various origins and periods. Professor Knox is also heavily involved in the early music area at the Schulich School of Music where he has directed multiple productions of various baroque operas and conducts the McGill Baroque Orchestra.

Dominique Labelle is a Professor of Voice at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. Professor Labelle attended McGill University and Boston University. She has performed with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the Lexington Symphony, and the Boston Classical Orchestra, among others. Additionally, she has taught master classes at schools such as Harvard University, Smith College, and University of Massachusetts.

Richard Lavenda is a Professor of Composition and Theory and Director of Graduate Studies at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Lavenda received his Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth University, a Master’s of Music from Rice University, and a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Michigan. In addition to composition, he teaches undergraduate theory, graduate analysis, aesthetics, classroom pedagogy, and a practicum in Contemporary Music. Dr. Lavenda’s music has been performed around the world, and he has been a guest composer for festivals and concerts across North America, Europe, and Asia. His catalog of more than sixty works ranges from music for solo flute to a full opera.

Jacqueline Leclair is an Associate Professor of Oboe and Chair of the Woodwind Area at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. Dr. Leclair studied at the University of Rochester’s East163

man School of Music and SUNY Stony Brook where she received her Bachelor of Music, Performer’s Certificate, Master’s Degree and Doctor of Musical Arts. Dr. Leclair specializes in oboe performance, particularly in the study and performance of new music, many works of which she has premiered. She also presents contemporary music and technique classes in various schools across the United States. She performs on her own, as well as with several chamber music ensembles, both locally and internationally. In addition to her position at McGill, Dr. Leclair has been part of the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music as well as Bowling Green State University from 2007 to 2012.

Stéphane Lemelin is a Professor of Piano and the Chair of Music Performance at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music.

Lemelin studied with Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Conservatory and obtained his Ph.D. with Boris Berman and Claude Frank at Yale University. He has a particular affinity for French music, as evidenced from more than twenty recordings. Moreover, he is the director of the French music series “Découvertes 1890-1939” on the Atma Classique label. He is also a member of Trio Hochelaga and Artistic Director of the Prince Edward County Music Festival. A prizewinner of the Robert Casadesus International Competition, Lemelin has received many awards and grants, notably from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada. Additionally, Stéphane Lemelin taught at the University of Alberta for more than ten years and has been on the faculty and served as the Director of the University of Ottawa’s School of Music.

Peter Loewen is an Associate Professor of Musicology, specializing in Medieval and Renaissance music, at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He received his Bachelor’s of Music from the University of Manitoba, and his Doctorate in Musicology and Master’s of Music from the University of Southern California.

His research focuses on the music of the Middle Ages, with a concentration in the history of chant, Latin and vernacular song, religious drama, the Franciscans, music rhetoric, and the role of music in intellectual history. Additionally, Professor Loewen is the author of Music in Early Franciscan Thought (Brill, 2013) and has authored several articles in his career.

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Lisa Lorenzino is Chair of the Music Education department at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 2006. Dr. Lorenzino teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses, supervises student teachers in their field placements and also serves as a faculty advisor for MEDUSA, the Music Education Undergraduate Student Association at the Schulich School of Music. Her research focuses on cross-cultural approaches to teaching music in formal and informal settings. She also has published work in journals such as Research Studies in Music Education, Canadian Music Educator, Canadian Winds, and the National Flute Association Journal. Dr. Lorenzino has written chapters for two books, one of which covers the history of music education in Cuba.

John Mac Master is an Assistant Professor of Voice at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He received degrees from both McGill and Concordia University. Mac Master has performed around the globe as a celebrated operatic tenor with such companies as the Metropolitan Opera, the Welsh National Opera, and the Canadian Opera Company to name a few. He recently performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Laval Symphony, Detroit Michigan Opera, and Opera de Montreal. He frequently adjudicates competitions and gives master classes at universities and young artists programs. Additionally, he has previously taught voice at Western Ontario University.

Fabrice Marandola is an Associate Professor of Percussion and Co-Director of the McGill Percussion Ensemble at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music where his specialty is ethnomusicology. Marandola received his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology in 2003 at the Sorbonne, Paris. Before, he received the ‘Diplôme de Formation Supérieure,’ or "First Prize," in the class of Jacques Delécluse at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse (CNSMD) of Paris in 1997.

Janet Rarick is an Associate Professor of Music Career Development at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. She received her Bachelor of Music at the University of Southern California.

Professor Rarick has professional oboe performance and teaching experience in the realms of symphony, opera, ballet, and chamber 165

music. Currently, she coaches chamber music, teaches professional development classes, and directs outreach activities.

Robert Roux is a Professor of Piano and the Chair of Keyboard at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. He received his Bachelor’s of Music, cum laude, from Loyola University as well as a Master’s of Music and Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Texas. A renowned pianist, Dr. Roux has won many piano competitions in the United States and has toured as a recitalist in 16 countries around the world. Dr. Roux has been celebrated as one of the most sought after piano teachers in the United States, and his students have regularly won awards at the national and international levels.

Peter Schubert is a Professor of Music Theory in the Department of Music Research at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He received his undergraduate degree from Columbia College and his Master of Arts and Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University in New York City. He founded and directed Montreal’s Opera Uptown, Vivavoce and New Calliope Singers.

He has an interest in modern music and hopes to bring the love of music to schools in his community through the vocal groups he has founded.

Julie Simson is a Professor of Voice at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. She received her Bachelor’s of Music from Western Michigan University and Master’s of Music from University of Illinois-Urbana. She has sung with opera companies throughout the United States including the Houston Opera, Dallas Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Opera Memphis, and Opera Colorado, performing such roles as Hansel in Hansel and Gretel, the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos, and Suzuki in Madama Butterfly. She has also performed as a soloist in major oratorio works with the Denver, Colorado Springs, Cedar Rapids, Omaha and Milwaukee Symphonies, and in Boulder at the MahlerFest and Bach Festival. She was the recipient of the Berton Coffin Faculty Fellowship Endowment and has been a Master-Teacher in the National Association of Teachers of Singing Intern Program.

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Jean-Sébastien Vallée is the Director of Choral Studies and Chair of the Conducting Area at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. He has degrees from Université Laval, Université de Sherbrooke, University of California-Santa Cruz, and received his doctorate from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Maestro Vallée is interested in choral, operatic, and orchestral music, as well as being an advocate for contemporary music, making it a mission to premier new works. He researches French Renaissance music as well as conducting pedagogy. He has presented his music throughout the world.

Ivo-Jan van der Werff is a Professor of Viola at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and Associate Hons of the Royal College of Music in London. He has attained accolades as a chamber player, recitalist, guest artist and teacher throughout Europe and North America. As a member of the Medici String Quartet for 28 years, Professor van der Werff has performed in over 2,000 concerts in major festivals and venues world-wide, broadcasting regularly on radio and television. Professor van der Werff has performed as recitalist in New York, New Zealand and Hong Kong as well as numerous venues throughout the United Kingdom.

Lloyd Whitesell is a Professor of Musicology at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. Whitesell received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stony Brook University. He is the author of The Music of Joni Mitchell and has published articles on Benjamin Britten, Maurice Ravel, Charles Ives, minimalism, modern tonalities, and the anxiety of influence. An essay collection he coedited, Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, won the 2002 Philip Brett Award for excellence in gay and lesbian musicology. His current research project theorizes glamour in the Hollywood musical.

Robert Yekovich is the Dean of Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, as well as the Elma Schneider Professor of Music. He received his Bachelor of Music and Master of Music from the University of Denver and a Doctorate from Columbia University. Before coming to Rice, he was the Dean of North Carolina School of the Arts where he established one of the most prestigious opera graduate programs in the United States. Since 167

2003, he has elevated the reputation of the Shepherd School by increasing faculty quality, redesigning academic programs, and attracting highly qualified students to the university.

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GATEWAY STUDY OF LEADERSHIP 2016-2017 COHORT

CO-DIRECTORS

Caroline Lee Co-Director and lead for Research Paper Team Sophomore, Cognitive Sciences and Policy Studies Where do you see music at Rice? My college neighbor is a percussionist so I hear it nightly!

What is your musical experience? Piano & Guzheng.

Emily Rao Co-Director and lead for Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium (RURS) Team Junior, English and Biochemistry Where do you see music at Rice? Poetry in a language I don't know.

Who is your favorite composer? Scriabin.

Thresa Skeslien-Jenkins Co-Director and lead for Turning Points Team Sophomore, Sociology and Political Science What is your musical experience? I played the recorder for the entirety of 4th grade and the viola from 5th to 10th grade.

What did you learn? Music making is not an individual activity; it requires a large team with unique leadership styles.

TURNING POINTS TEAM

Simone Bergsrud Senior Fellow Sophomore, Sociology and Sport Management What is your favorite piece of classical music? Canon in D major; because that is the song I want to walk down the aisle to.

What is your musical experience? I am one of the twenty million who quit piano lessons before high school. I have limited knowledge of the recorder, glockenspiel, and guitar. On top of that my singing voice is one for the shower.

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Kira Luscher Junior Fellow Freshman, Mathematical Economic Analysis What is your favorite piece of music? On the Nature of Daylight by Max Richter.

What is your musical experience? I studied Japanese taiko drumming for 5 years and attended a high school for the performing arts, where I was acquainted with many talented young musicians.

Victoria Oliha Junior Fellow Freshman, Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences What did you learn? I learned that professors put a lot of emphasis on passion. They don't want mechanical students with amazing talents who are unable to connect with others and don't care about what they're doing. It's all about personality and determination.

Who is your favorite composer? Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Joe Reilly Junior Fellow Sophomore, Economics and Managerial Studies Where do you see music at Rice? In the unrivaled band, Steven Cox's Beard.

What did you learn? How richly collaborative a musical production can be.

What is your favorite musical instrument? Bagpipes.

Joanna Shen Junior Fellow Junior, Mathematical Economic Analysis Where do you see music at Rice? I see music in the pianos available at each college.

Who is your favorite composer? John Cage.

Molly Turner Junior Fellow Sophomore, Music Composition What did you learn? Music is about life. You have to have meaningful life experiences to play music meaningfully.

Who’s your favorite composer? Stravinsky, Boulez, and Messiaen.

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Andrew White Junior Fellow Freshman, Piano Performance What did you learn? Music, art, and all that makes life passionate are being increasingly disregarded by society at large.

What is your favorite piece of classical music? Poulenc’s Piano Concerto.

RICE UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM TEAM Carlin Cherry Senior Fellow Sophomore, Mathematical Economic Analysis and Philosophy What is your musical experience? Singing musical songs with my lifetime duet partner Simone Bergsrud.

What did you learn? The practice and dedication that both musicians and the music school professors exhibit is absolutely incredible.

David Cai Junior Fellow Sophomore, Computer Science Who is your favorite composer? Frank Ticheli.

What did you learn? I got to see a side of music I never thought about, from people I never thought I'd meet. Getting a glimpse of how professors got to where they are, and how they're teaching their students (in contrast to the professors I’ve experienced) has shown me the diversity of activity at Rice, and the incredible backstory of the faculty.

Meghana Gaur Junior Fellow Sophomore, Mathematical Economic Analysis Where do you see music at Rice? I mainly see music at Rice in on-campus concert performances (KTRU, Coffeehouse, random students playing the piano, occasionally attending Shepherd School performances).

What is your musical experience? I played the piano for 12 years (from when I was 6 years old until 18). I took lessons with the same instructor the entirety of my experience!

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Noah Hardaway Junior Fellow Junior, Music History Do you have any musical experience? Music is my calling.

Who is your favorite composer? Robert Schumann.

Elizabeth Myong Junior Fellow Sophomore, English and Political Science What did you learn? Practices in music are applicable to all areas of study. Most of the professors that we admire have gotten to their positions with hard work, passion, and a simple appreciation for music and they hope to inspire their students in the same way.

RESEARCH PAPER TEAM

Tim Wang Senior Fellow Senior, History and Biochemistry and Cell Biology What is your favorite piece of classical music? Etude No. 3 in E Major Op.10-3.

What did you learn? Leadership is in every discipline, including music. It is interesting to differentiate between the leadership for musical groups of different sizes.

Sara Meadow Junior Fellow Sophomore, Political Science and Policy Studies Where do you see music at Rice? At Rice, music typically remains in the Shepherd School and many students are unaware of how musically talented their peers are. However, on rare occasions like a college karaoke night or talent show, we get to experience the incredible talent and skill on display at Shepherd daily.

What is your favorite piece of music? “Wait For It� from Hamilton.

Gabriel Tugendstein Junior Fellow Freshman, Philosophy and Earth Science Who is your favorite composer? Kevin Shields.

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What is your favorite piece of classical music? A Change is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke.

Hannah Wei Junior Fellow Freshman, Psychology and Kinesiology What did you learn? I learned that many professors came from different backgrounds, but ultimately shared the same passion: teaching music.

What is your musical experience? I have played both the violin and piano since I was three. I’ve been in orchestra for 8 years, have done chamber music for 5 years, and have sang in choir for 3 years.

Natalie Wingfield Junior Fellow Senior, English Who is your favorite composer? Johannes Brahms.

What is your favorite piece of classical music? Beethoven’s 7th Symphony.

Lily Wulfemeyer Junior Fellow Freshman, English What is your musical experience? I sang in an opera, played clarinet for two years, and violin for ten.

What is your favorite piece of classical music? Either The Romeo and Juliet Overture by Tchaikovsky or Danzón No. 2 by Arturo Márquez.

David Yang Junior Fellow Freshman, Biochemistry and Cell Biology What did you learn? In most cases, everyone should be equipped to lead, and should take initiative in any way possible.

Where do you see music at Rice? There are so many opportunities for students to get involved in music, and I can only see it playing a bigger part in student life in the coming years.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project could not have been possible without the help of some very important and special people.

First and foremost, we would like to thank Robert Yekovich, Dean of Rice University Shepherd School of Music and Julie Cumming, Interim Dean of McGill University Schulich School of Music, as well as the music faculty at both schools who embraced our project and granted us interviews.

A special thank you to Fred Oswald, Professor of Psychology, Brooke Macnamara, Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University, and Zach Hambrick, the Laboratory Director of Science of Expertise Research Center at Michigan State University, for inspiring us with ideas for this year’s research; Karim Al-Zand, Associate Professor of Composition and Theory, for introducing us to his colleagues at McGill University that paved the way to our collaboration on this project.

We extend much appreciation for Jennifer Overton, Executive Assistant at the Shepherd School and Simon Aldrich, Assistant Professor at the Schulich School, for coordination and scheduling of interviews.

Thank you to Christina Keefe, Director of Rice Theater Program for hosting a retreat for the GSL Fellows, and Anne Dayton, McNair Center of Entrepreneurship Research Manager, for her editorial advice.

Our heartfelt gratitude goes out to all friends of the Social Sciences Gateway, for supporting the development and growth of programs like the Gateway Study of Leadership.

We also appreciate the careful time and effort invested by former GSL co-directors and fellows for advancing GSL each year and providing our cohort the opportunity to contribute to the growth of the program as well as our fellows’ personal growth as students.

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Featuring interview excerpts from music school faculty at Rice University and McGill University