A Hartt-Felt Reflection

Celebrating 100 years of The Hartt School

Julius Hartt (standing) with his student Moshe Paranov, circa 1918. In 1920 Hartt, Parvanov, Pauline Hartt, and Samuel Berkman founded the Julius Hartt School of Music.

Between his time as a Hartt student and administrator, and his years serving as the classical music critic and editor for the Hartford Courant, Steve Metcalf ’70 has experienced The Hartt School through multiple lenses over a span of six decades. In celebration of Hartt’s 100th anniversary, Steve helps us relive the School’s storied history and shares the road that led him to become part of The Hartt School community.

Adapted from the foreword written for the book One Hundred Years of Hartt: A Centennial Celebration of The Hartt School by Demaris Hansen, Wesleyan University Press, 2020 (available at leading online book sellers).

In the fall of 1964, as I was beginning my senior year of high school in Schenectady, New York, my longtime piano teacher asked me what colleges I was going to apply to. I said I didn’t know. I knew I wanted to pursue music somehow or other, but beyond that, I didn’t have much of a game plan. She said there was a school in Connecticut that she had heard good things about. The school was the Hartt College of Music, in Hartford. I had never heard of it. But at my teacher’s urging, I applied. A few months later, on a cold Saturday in January, I drove over to Hartford to visit and to audition.

Hartt was part of the recently founded University of Hartford, whose spacious campus had just opened a year and a half earlier. Truth to tell, in those days, it wasn’t much of a campus—just a handful of buildings and a lot of lawn. But the buildings were handsome and new, and the place had an open, promising kind of feel.

I had taken a couple of auditions already, and I was ready, or thought I was, for how these things worked: “All right, tell us what you have prepared.” Followed by: “Thank you. We’ll let you know.”

By contrast, the people at Hartt who greeted and interviewed me were friendly, engaging. The man who listened to my piano audition somehow wound up talking to me about baseball and politics along with Beethoven and Poulenc.

Driving home, and over the following weeks, I thought about the school’s unusually welcoming vibe.

Later that spring, when it came time to decide where I would go to college, I chose Hartt.

Robert Black with double bass students

Dance performance

Hartt Community Division private lesson

As I discovered in the fall, Hartt was a place with an endless cast of vivid personalities. Among them:

* The cosmopolitan, Ferrari-driving composer Arnold Franchetti (1906–1993), whose father, Alberto, also a composer, had been a friend of Puccini. Professor Franchetti told us stories about having dodged the Fascist regime in Italy, and of having somehow gotten himself to Munich, where he talked his way into the composition class of Richard Strauss.

* The stylish, pixie-like pianist and vocal coach Irene Kahn (1904–1996), who would joke about her vast collection of shoes one moment, and then, without missing a beat—literally—sit down at the piano and cold sight-read a thorny, 20th-century opera score as if she had known it for years.

* Joseph Iadone (1914–2004), one of the great lute players of the 20th century and a brilliant teacher of ear training and sight-singing, who nevertheless, with his shambling gait and impish mustache, looked as if he might have been a character created by Peter Sellers.

* Edward Miller (1930–2013), a wry and cerebral composer by day and hard-swinging jazz trombone player by night. Professor Miller’s local standing rocketed upward, at least among some of us, when we learned that he was a good friend of legendary Mad Magazine cartoonist Don Martin.

* In a different category, I can recall occasionally glimpsing the courtly Alfred “A. C.” Fuller (1885–1973), who was known around the world for having created the Fuller Brush Company. Starting in the 1930s, Fuller had become the school’s principal donor and benefactor, and Hartt old timers always went out of their way to acknowledge that the school never could have succeeded without him.

* But the dominant personality of this personality-rich school was its co-founder and, for more than half a century, its unquestioned leader, Moshe Paranov (1895–1994).

Even to a clueless 17-year-old college freshman, it was apparent that this was an exceptional human being.

Short, animated, with a gray shock of Einstein hair, Paranov immediately demonstrated to us that he knew how to work a room. His welcoming address to the incoming students was basically a rapid-fire assortment of his signature quips and cautions: “So your aunt Matilda thinks you’re a musical genius. That’s wonderful, but I’ve got news for you—the rest of the world couldn’t care less.” “You call yourself a musician because you know Beethoven’s Fifth? Well, what about Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo?’ Or the Piano Concerto of Busoni? Or the songs of Wolf? And when you learn those, come and see me. I’ll give you a few hundred more.” “Music is a great gift, but it’s a tough way to make a living. That’s because the average person today doesn’t know Beethoven from a ham sandwich.”

And, with an extra finger waggle for emphasis: “There’s no such thing as too much practicing. Keep going—it can always be better.”

Almost half a century earlier, in the fall of 1920, Paranov, then a 25-year-old aspiring pianist, had teamed up with his mentor and future father-in-law, one

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby—2016

René and Jackie McLean performing for students—1988

Hansel and Gretel—the first complete opera to be shown in its entirety on television—1943

Hartt Steelband

Edward Diemente in the electronic music studio—1970s

Julius Hartt, to open a school. Mr. Hartt was an organist and musicologist, but he seems to have mainly supported himself, precariously we can be sure, as a newspaper music critic. The two men, along with Mr. Hartt’s pianist daughter, Pauline—soon to be Moshe’s wife—and one or two colleagues, hung their collective shingle outside Julius’s home on a leafy street in Hartford, offering music instruction to customers of all ages. They paid themselves pittances—when they could afford to pay themselves at all.

By and by, the school managed to grow to the point where it was able to move, first to a larger house, and then, in 1938, to a castle-like turreted brick edifice that had previously been home to the Hartford Seminary.

Though he had had no experience as an administrator and did not himself possess an academic degree, Paranov expanded the school’s curriculum to include music education, theory and composition, conducting, and all the other disciplines required for an accredited, degree-granting conservatory.

He also, despite a budget that he invariably called “laughable,” brought to Hartford an impressive procession of visiting musical eminences, including pianists Harold Bauer and Dame Myra Hess, violinist Isaac Stern, soprano Eileen Farrell, composers William Schuman and Aaron Copland, and scores of others. How did he do this, exactly? Sheer tenacity apparently played a major role. Moshe liked to tell the story about his having once called the celebrated cellist Leonard Rose, asking if he would come up from New York to give a couple of master classes. Hearing the puny honorarium, Rose begged off. But Moshe persisted, sweetening the offer with the promise of a home-cooked Jewish dinner featuring his specialty, sautéed whitefish. Sensing that Rose might be wavering, Moshe went on to describe in detail the cornmeal-based batter that he used, right down to the seasonings.

Rose said he would be up before the end of the week.

A hundred years is a long time, especially in musical terms. It’s the amount of time between the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth and the premiere of “Rhapsody in Blue.”

We know there were moments when Moshe and his troupe wondered if their school would make it through the next semester, much less survive for a century. The school’s finances were particularly shaky during the Depression and World War II. According to lore, in some of those lean times, the aforementioned Mr. Fuller would be tapped to cover the school’s end-of-year deficit with a personal check. The lore says that he did so.

The decision to become part of the new University of Hartford, in 1957, was pivotal, of course—the end of one era and beginning of another. If the change meant a certain loss of independence, it also meant stability and fresh opportunities for growth.

Moshe officially retired in 1971, but the school marched on. It added a jazz major, overseen by the alto sax virtuoso Jackie McLean. Its opera program acquired a national reputation. In addition to its increasingly distinguished resident faculty, it continued to host a string of “name” guests: Marian Anderson, Mstislav Rostropovich, Yehudi Menuhin, Dizzy Gillespie, Karl Bohm, John Cage, and Wynton Marsalis.

In the early 1980s, it signed a young, unheralded string quartet to an informal residency. The group called itself the Emerson Quartet, in honor of Ralph Waldo.

The appointment was mildly controversial within the school because, well, no one had heard of them.

Student recording a jazz trio in the newly renovated recording studio

Music lessons for children—1950

Ed Bolkovac conducting vocal students

The Emersons had a reply to the doubters: they worked hard, performed tirelessly, and, not too many years after their arrival here, found themselves being acknowledged as one of the two or three premier string quartets in the world. Their Hartt residency, for the record, lasted 21 years.

The school officially added degree programs in dance and theatre in the early 1990s. It was a bold, even risky move, but against all odds, these new disciplines quickly flourished and became as essential to the identity of the school as music.

If we can agree that the rise of The Hartt School from its shoestring origins was something of a miracle, then we can also agree that in the fall of 2008, there occurred a sequel, a follow-up miracle. That would be the opening of the Mort and Irma Handel Performing Arts Center.

Built in a lively melting-pot city neighborhood, a mile or so from the main campus, the Center was created as a proper and permanent home for the now-burgeoning dance and theatre activities. Fashioned from the crumbling brick shell of a defunct Cadillac dealership, the $30-million complex was a triumph of town-gown diplomacy, marathon fundraising, and ingenious architectural repurposing.

(Does the word miracle seem like overstatement? I invite you to drop over some afternoon—to this place where customers once brought in their Fleetwoods and Coupe deVilles for a transmission flush—and watch the current generation of Hartt kids hurl themselves into Petrushka or Sunday in the Park with George. Then get Tback to me.)

And now, almost suddenly it seems, The Hartt School, as it was eventually renamed, finds itself celebrating its centennial.

Moshe Paranov didn’t get to see this milestone, of course; didn’t quite get to see his little clapboard house evolve into an internationally known conservatory with 600 students from all over the U.S. and 20-odd foreign countries. He gave it a good run, though—he died in 1994, a few weeks shy of his 99th birthday.

These days, when I’m at the school for a meeting or event, I make a point of taking note of the sights and sounds coming from the rows of practice rooms and teaching studios and rehearsal spaces.

In recent months, walking these corridors—sometimes at the Fuller building where the music activities are still housed, and sometimes at the Handel Center, I have randomly overheard:

A pianist struggling, heroically, to smooth out a passage in Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise; a young woman in the music theatre program belting out “Promises, Promises” (I couldn’t help wondering if she knew that the artist who made that song famous—the great Dionne Warwick—is a Hartt alum); the orchestra rehearsing the deceptively modern Fifth Symphony of Sibelius; a dance class warming up to an old Gladys Knight and the Pips song; the wind ensemble playing the heck out of Samuel Barber’s “Commando March”; the jazz ensemble wailing on an updated arrangement of Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke”; the school’s crackerjack new-music group, Foot in the Door, reading through some impressively out-there student compositions; a violinist taking on the daredevil final section of Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy; a couple of young dudes doing an almost perfect cover of “Dear Theodosia”; a choir blowing the roof off the place with Bernstein’s “Make Our Garden Grow.”

At moments like these, I sometimes think of Moshe Paranov.

I can’t be entirely sure what he would have made of his school having reached the century mark. Some mixture of pride and amazement, I suppose.

What I think I can say for certain is that he would have stuck his head into some of these rehearsal rooms—or more likely each and every one of them—and said, “Good, that’s good. Now keep going. It can always be better.”

HARTT LEGACY

Steve Metcalf ’70

Steve Metcalf ’70,Journalist, administrator, pianist, and composer

For more than 20 years, he was the full-time staff classical music critic/editor of the Hartford Courant, chronicling the musical life of Connecticut and the wider world. His experiences and roles as part of The Hartt School community have covered many decades, both before and after his newspaper days: undergraduate student, graduate student, assistant dean, director of instrumental studies, founder and curator of the Richard P. Garmany Chamber Music Series, and a member of The Hartt School Board of Trustees (he is today a lifetime honorary trustee). The Hartt School honored him as its Alumnus of the Year in 1989.

Michael Larco

Michael Larco,Violist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic

Hartt Community Division, 1993–95 SUZUKI

Michael Larco joined the internationally renowned Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra in July 2012. Prior to that, he spent seven years as assistant principal violist of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. Larco previously served as principal violist of the Juilliard Orchestra and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. In recent seasons, he has performed in the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. His virtual instruction through the “Learn from a Master” series, 25 video lessons for the beginning viola student, is available on YouTube.

Lisa Borres ’11

Lisa Borres ’11, Selected to join the world-renowned Paul Taylor Dance Company

COMPOSITION

Lisa Borres debuted with the Paul Taylor Dance Company at Jacob’s Pillow in July 2019. “It’s such an amazing feeling in this place,” Borres said at the time. “When you get here, there is just such a calming vibe and energy. It’s just been the best week of my life so far.” She has also performed with the Amy Marshall Dance Company, Elisa Monte Dance, DAMAGEdance, Lydia Johnson Dance, and LEVYdance. Since 2012, Borres has been part of the selection process for Ballet Tech, a tuition-free school that draws its students from the New York City public school system.

Phillip Boykin ’95

Phillip Boykin ’95,Broadway and beyond

VOCAL

Phillip Boykin’s website puts it simply, “The boy can entertain.” Whether it’s Broadway, opera, film, or stage, he, as Hartt School co-founder Moshe Paranov put it, is “a talented and gifted man with extraordinary charisma and major stage presence that electrifies and captivates audiences.” The bass-baritone made Broadway history in 2017 as the first African American Boatman/Lee Randolph in Sunday in the Park with George and played TonTon Julian in the 2018 Tony Award-winning revival of Once On This Island. In 2012, Boykin was nominated for the Tony Award, among others, for Outstanding Featured Actor in a musical for his role as Crown in the Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess.

Kenneth Boucher ’90

Kenneth Boucher ’90, Multi-talented music educator and artistic performer

MUSIC EDUCATION

With a proven aptitude in breaking musical stereotypes while embracing diverse music styles, Ken Boucher has been dedicated to instilling music appreciation and literacy in students for three decades. He has taught in urban public schools and designed Kodály-inspired curricula for public, Montessori, and French immersion schools. For 17 years, Boucher has served as chair of music education at the Center for the Visual and Performing Arts at Suitland High School, a rigorous four-year program for artistically talented high school students from Maryland’s Prince George’s County.

Ta’Nika Gibson

Ta’Nika Gibson, Actor, singer, and voice-over artist

Hartt Community Division, 2017 VOICE

Ta’Nika Gibson speaks loudly not only with her clear and ringing voice, but also with her passion for making a difference in people’s lives—whether it’s through teaching music to impoverished children around the world or showing kindness to everyone she meets. In 2014, Gibson’s performance in the musical Aida at the Strand Theater in Boston scored rave reviews. “Beautiful Ta’Nika Gibson tackles the role of Aida and makes it her own not only with her acting, singing, and dancing prowess but with her regal bearing,” stated the Theater Mirror. In more recent years, she made her film debut in the The Goldfinch, starring Nicole Kidman and Ansel Elgort; her television debut in the second season of Marvel’s Iron Fist on Netflix; and was a featured soloist at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall.

Wu Han ’83

Wu Han ’83, An esteemed figure in the classical music world

INSTRUMENTAL

It was at the young age of nine when Wu Han began her musical studies in Taiwan, studying piano, viola, and percussion. Within three years, she was playing concerts and winning competitions. At The Hartt School’s invitation, she came to America in 1981 to continue her studies with a double major in viola and piano. Han has since risen to international prominence through wide-ranging activities as a concert performer, recording artist, educator, arts administrator, and cultural entrepreneur. She received Musical America’s Musician of the Year award in 2012, and is currently the co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Chamber Music Today in Korea, and Music@Menlo in California.

IN THE NEWS

Matthew Brooks ’03

Matthew Brooks ’03, Bringing Music and Medicine Together

Matthew Brooks ’03, a graduate of Hartt’s music education program, has joined with colleagues around the country to start an all-volunteer organization, the National Association of Medical Orchestras (NAMO).

Serving as founding music director and conductor of the Nebraska Medical Orchestra, Brooks is assistant professor and director of orchestral activities in music and medicine at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), where he serves on the faculties of its School of Music, UNO Medical Humanities, and the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Medicine.

“Our goal with the NAMO is to bring medical orchestra musicians and medical orchestra leaders together and help create fellowship and resources to improve the ability of medical orchestras to make music,” Brooks explains. “Medical orchestras can bring so much joy and connection to their members and communities, and we think it is important to support this humanistic movement in medicine, especially when things are so difficult for medical and medically adjacent professionals.”

Wayne Escoffery ’97

Wayne Escoffery ’97, Grammy Award-winning tenor saxophonist

JAZZ

Escoffery is one of the jazz world’s most talented rising stars. In 2006, he secured a frontline position in Tom Harrell’s working quintet. For more than 10 years, Escoffery toured the globe with the trumpeter, recorded seven CDs with The Tom Harrell Quintet, and co-produced four of those releases. Called a “powerful, passionate player” by The New York Times, Escoffery is a founding member of the Black Art Jazz Collective, which is dedicated to celebrating the origins of jazz and African American icons through originally composed music.

Gabrielle Collins

Gabrielle Collins, Dancing at the age of five

Hartt Community Division, 2009–14 DANCE

In 2020, Gabrielle Collins joined the Cincinnati Ballet, which since 1963 has been the cornerstone professional ballet company of that region. She spent the previous season as a company member with the Dayton Ballet, where she performed the title role in Carmen. Collins previously spent time with the Atlanta Ballet II, Tulsa Ballet II, and the ballet program at Jacob’s Pillow. In 2014, she won the gold medal at the Connecticut Classic in both the senior female and pas de deux categories. That same year, Collins was a New York City finalist at the Youth America Grand Prix international ballet competition.

Douglas Lyons ’09

Douglas Lyons ’09, Award-winning composer-playwright and actor

THEATRE

It was during his training in Hartt’s musical theatre program when Douglas Lyons took a year hiatus to tour with the Tony Awardwinning RENT. Following his graduation, he went on to perform on Broadway and tour with shows such as The Book of Mormon and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. In his work as a composer-lyricist, he strives to use diverse stories to inspire children through art and remind them of their fullest potential and worth. He also has an important reminder for the theatre industry. “Going forward, equity needs to be our theme,” Lyons told Playbill recently. “There’s an entire generation of theatre artists waiting in the wings, with fresh stories to tell. Post this pandemic, there’s no acceptable excuse for our stages not to represent our real world.”

Brandee Younger ’06

Brandee Younger ’06, A leading voice of the harp today

MUSIC MANAGEMENT

A versatile artist who pushes the creative envelope, Younger defies genres and labels. A harpist, composer, and educator, her musical formulas are too intricate for a single genre. In addition to four solo album releases, she has shared stages with jazz leaders and R&B titans. Her ability to feature the harp in genres of music where the instrument is often absent demonstrates her cross-reaching ability as a musician. “I stripped myself of labels,” Younger explains, “and got over the idea of throwing myself into a mental box. People will categorize you to make themselves feel better, but that’s on them. Those labels aren’t mine.”

Lauren Bernofky ’90

Lauren Bernofky ’90, Hailed by legendary composer and pianist Lukas Foss as “a master composer”

COMPOSITION

Bernofsky has written more than 100 works, including solo, chamber, and choral music, as well as larger-scale works for orchestra, film, musical, opera, and ballet. Her music has been performed across the United States and internationally in major venues from Carnegie Hall to Grieg Hall in Bergen, Norway. Bernofsky’s works have won the National Flute Association’s Newly Published Music Competition, the Longfellow Chorus Award of Distinction, and an Excellence in Composition Award from the Brass Chamber Music Forum.

IN THE NEWS

Peter Boyer M’93, D’95

Peter Boyer M’93, D’95, Hartt Alumnus Makes Himself Part of History

A Grammy-nominated composer, orchestrator, and conductor, Peter Boyer is one of the most frequently performed American orchestral composers of his generation. His works have received over 500 public performances by nearly 200 orchestras, and thousands of broadcasts by classical radio stations around the world.

Boyer was commissioned by the United States Marine Band to compose a special fanfare that was performed at the Inauguration of President Joe Biden this past January. Boyer’s new work, “Fanfare for Tomorrow,” was performed as part of the one-hour prelude music of the Inauguration.

The composition, just over two-and-a-half-minutes in length, was inspired by the hope that we are “thinking ahead to, hopefully, brighter tomorrows for all of us.” It is based on a shorter piece that Boyer wrote for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which last summer introduced a fanfare project featuring solo musicians in quarantine.

Boyer received the official request for the inaugural music on New Year’s Day—with a deadline of just a dozen days later. His days were consumed by working on the piece, with the only breaks for sleeping and eating.

While the current pandemic prevented him from being in Washington, D.C., in person for the Inauguration, Boyer recorded the events of the day on several cable news channels. You can be sure he will be taking extra special care not to hit “delete.”

Chelsea Knox

Chelsea Knox, Principal flutist of the MET Orchestra

Hartt Community Division, 2003–06 INSTRUMENTAL

A sought-after performer, Chelsea Knox is the principal flutist of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. The New York Times has praised her for her “warmth, precision, and clarity,” while the New York Classical Review applauds her “expressive life and full tone.” Knox looks forward to that “magical moment” when the MET will be back playing again to a packed house. “That special energy from a live performance is something I am craving right now,” she says. Knox previously held positions as assistant principal flute of the Baltimore Symphony and principal flute of the New Haven and Princeton Symphonies.