September - 21st Century Music

Book Reviews
America's "Royal" College of Music
RICHARD KOSTELANETZ
Andrea Olmstead. Juilliard: A History. Urbana: University of
Illinois, 1999. 368 pp, $37.50
For everyone who needs to know, Juilliard has been for the
past century the most successful arts college in any art in
America. One convenient measure of its success is the number
of distinguished alumni in various areas, including in music
alone: Richard Rodgers, Van Cliburn, Billy Strayhorn, Philip
Glass, James Levine, Miles Davis, Tito Puente, Yo-Yo Ma,
Itzhak Perlman, Paul Zukofsky, Peter Schickele, and Midori,
which is to say classical composers along with jazz and
Broadway greats, avant-garde instrumentalists along with
concert-hall superstars and comic geniuses. This is a "Royal
College" in the British tradition, however created and
sustained in the American way without the imprimatur of any
monarch.
Not only is Juilliard's cumulative success uniquely impressive,
but it has also been remarkably continuous. Art colleges tend
to be more volatile than liberal arts universities, as the
departure or arrival of a few key people can drastically change
educational effect. For instance, the graduate art school at
Yale in the early 1960s produced many prominent painters and
sculptors but fewer before or since. One of the great American
arts incubators, Black Mountain, simply disappeared in 1957,
after only 25 years. At later points in its history, Juilliard
added a dance school and then a drama school which benefited
from the music school's reputation but have never been so preeminent.
Incidentally, Juilliard is pronounced Jewlie-yard and
spelled with I's on both sides of the double L. I wish I had a
penny for every time it appears in print as "Julliard" (which
would, of course, be pronounced jul-e-ard).
Why has Juilliard been so continuously fortunate That should
be the question answered by Andrea Olmstead's new book.
Wanting to write an institutional history, rather than an art
history, she addresses the question only peripherally.
Focussing mostly upon administrators and trustees, she misses
much of the real action in an arts college--what occurs
between teacher and students and among students. Compare
Juilliard on this count with Mary Emma Harris's The Arts at
Black Mountain College (1987), which by focusing upon
teachers and students more successfully accounts for how
innovation and excellence happened. Indicatively, Olmstead
interviewed remarkably few sometime students and rarely
quotes from their experience. Instead, she includes previously
published anecdotes by Miles Davis and the choreographer
Paul Taylor that suggested, at least to me, another Juilliard
book that might have been livelier.
As at Ivy League universities, many Juilliard students were
brighter than the teachers. So stronger ones sometimes taught
one another. In a memoir initially published in my book
Writings on Glass (1997), the composer Philip Glass recalls
how in the late 1950s he and the aspiring opera singer Shirley
Verrett separately hired another student, Albert Fine, only
slightly older, to give them private lessons. As the most adept
composition student in Glass's years, Peter Schickele, later
noted for "discovering" P.D.Q. Bach, was invited to teach his
colleagues in a course that Glass remembers among his best. A
decade later, Juilliard reinforced its faculty with some of the
brainiest and most influential composers/teachers in America
-- Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, and, less frequently, Elliott
Carter.
One factor accounting for the school's success was its location
in Manhattan; but as the city housed other music schools,
some of them more conveniently located near midtown
performance venues, why has Juilliard remained so
preeminent Was it simply that Juilliard's reputation as the
best music school made it attractive to successive generations
of the most ambitious teenage musicians from around the
world Olmstead says in passing that the school never gave
faculty tenure or imposed mandatory retirement upon them
without acknowledging the possible significance of those
administrative departures.
Some teachers had power in lieu of influence. Glass recalls
how his professors often sat on secret juries meeting in New
York, such as those selecting Fulbright scholars to go abroad,
and could thus advise him with authority on applying,
accepting, and postponing fellowships. More importantly
perhaps, the aspiring composers could get equally ambitious
instrumentalists to play their freshest scores, so that, as Glass
remembers, many years would pass before he would hear his
own compositions as often.
This tradition of eager excellence continues. As an avid New
York concertgoer, I see this quality less in student composers
than in Juilliard instrumentalists. For those of us who prefer
high modern music to slick classical or "postmodern."
Juilliard concerts rank among the best in New York City; and
for reasons that I think have something to do with union rules
and the stipulations of beneficence, these performances are
deliciously free -- that's FREE. (And also under-advertised
and thus rarely reviewed.) Programming devoid of
commercial needs can also be delightfully free of transient
"political" considerations that corrupt so much cultural activity
in America today.