[Dixielandjazz] Yale University Gift Enables Free Tuition For Music Students

[Steve barbone]

NOT OKOM BUT INTERESTING ABOUT THE HARDSHIPS AND COSTS ENCOUNTERED IN BEING
A SERIOUS MUSICIAN. ALSO JONATHAN, IF YOU ARE LISTENING, 4 YEARS WITH FREE
TUITION AT YALE COULDN'T BE ALL BAD. :-) VBG.

Note that Ms. Teply, the Yale Grad violinist in the article spent $100,000
on tuition, has $60,000 in student loans and currently makes $24,000 a year
with the San Antonio Symphony. Hope she has a day job the rest of the time.

Cheers,
Steve


Is a Free Tuition in Music Worthwhile? An Argument For

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI - November 28, 2005 - NY TIMES

The news that anonymous donors had promised the Yale School of Music $100
million came too late for Stephanie Teply, a violinist who graduated from
the school with a master of music degree in 2003. The gift, announced this
month, will enable the school to offer free tuition to all students starting
next year. 

Ms. Teply, like almost half of the school's current roster of 211 students,
had to take out sizable loans to finance her musical education. This year,
tuition at the school costs $23,750. Ms. Teply, 27, who earned her
bachelor's degree from Vanderbilt University, has accumulated more than
$60,000 in student loans, most of it for Yale.

This fall she started working as a violinist in the San Antonio Symphony.
"It's a great first job, and I feel lucky to have it," she said recently by
telephone. Yet for a 25-week contract she earns less than $24,000. "It will
be a struggle, I know," she added. Still, she said she was delighted that
her alma mater had received this extraordinary gift, one of the largest ever
given to a music school.

"I think it's fantastic," Ms. Teply said. "And my degree will be worth more,
because the school will be all the more competitive."

I think it's fantastic, too, not just as a critic who wants classical music
to prosper, but as a proud Yalie. After graduating from the college as a
music major, I completed a master's degree at the music school before
heading to Boston University for my doctorate. I know firsthand what a
struggle it is for students and their families to finance dreams of a life
in music. 

At major universities, candidates for Ph.D.'s in all fields routinely
receive full fellowships. These are considered prestige programs. Why should
an aspiring professor of musicology be subsidized while an aspiring
violinist must take out loans?

Though I live with a doctor, I get tired of hearing people go on about the
arduous road medical students tread to their chosen profession: years of
training, boot-camp internships, mounds of debt. Yes, yes. But at the end of
that road, a definite reward awaits. Compare this with the slog faced by
young musicians, who pursue advanced degrees with no guarantee that their
schooling will lead to a paying position.

Yet no sooner had the gift to the school of music been announced than The
Yale Daily News published a series of articles in which students questioned
whether so much money for music was warranted at a time of great need around
the world, including the parts of northern Pakistan and Kashmir recently
devastated by a major earthquake. The donors "could have given $20 million
to the school of music," one student was quoted as saying, "and still helped
a lot of students with their tuition while giving $80 million to other
causes." 

It's hard to respond to these compassionate concerns without resorting to
trite answers about the humanizing impact of art. Still, how many of us
associate transforming moments of our lives with transforming artistic
experiences? Nothing in my youth was more overwhelming than hearing Leontyne
Price as Aida at the Metropolitan Opera when I was 15, or hearing Stravinsky
conduct his "Symphony of Psalms" with the New York Philharmonic just before
I headed off to college.

Those raising ethical questions about the gift to the Yale School of Music
should first put the dollar amount in perspective. Private and corporate
donors in America have to compensate for the government's negligible support
of the fine arts. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts gave out
grants totaling just over $100 million. In France, in recent years, the
state subsidy for the Paris Opera alone has averaged roughly the same
amount.

That the Yale School of Music must contend at all with the charge of elitism
is doubly discouraging, since it has long been committed to fostering music
as part of an education in the humanities.

"We train the whole student here," Thomas C. Duffy, the acting dean of the
school, said recently by telephone. Over the years he has worked closely
with "Yale's other Tom Duffy," as he called him, Dr. Thomas P. Duffy of the
medical school, who directs the program for humanities in medicine. Together
they have collaborated on a special series, "Music and the Brain," offering
medical and musical lectures that explored cognition, perception and the
arts and included live performances.

In addition, Yale provides abundant musical resources for the larger New
Haven community. In my day there were student concerts almost nightly,
frequent recitals by renowned faculty members like the harpsichordist Ralph
Kirkpatrick and the violist Walter Trampler and regular chamber and
orchestral programs - all of them free. Listeners could attend opera
productions for less than the cost of a movie. I saw my first "Così Fan
Tutte" at Yale, with a splendid cast singing the work in a witty English
translation, conducted vibrantly by the composer Yehudi Wyner.

During the 1970's, a contentious time for contemporary music, collegial
relations mostly prevailed between performers and composers at Yale. It
became a tradition, for example, for pianists to include a new work by a
student composer on a degree recital.

Since hearing of the gift, I've been thinking about students who overlapped
my six years at Yale and went on to significant careers: among them the
clarinetist Richard Stolzman, the cellist Ralph Kirshbaum, the violinist
Daniel Stepner, the composer Alvin Singleton and Joseph W. Polisi, then a
bassoonist, today the president of the Juilliard School.

But I've also been thinking of colleagues who found, you might say, more
holistic ways to affect the field, like my friend William Westney, who is
both a professor and artist in residence at Texas Tech University. A winner
of the Geneva International Competition, Bill is a formidable pianist. I
still remember exhilarating performances of Ravel's "Gaspard de la Nuit,"
Barber's Piano Sonata and other daunting works he gave at Yale. Having
earned his way through Queens College accompanying pop singers at parties
and receptions, he thrived amid Yale's all-embracing philosophy.

"It was important to me that music not just be this niche spectator sport,
to show that you can play the piano louder or faster," he said in a recent
phone conversation, "but that it was something of deeply humanistic
importance."

Over the years he has developed a sacred-cow-skewering approach to teaching
- the un-master class, he calls it - which he expounds on in a 2003 book,
"The Perfect Wrong Note: Learning to Trust Your Musical Self." Drawing on
movement, dance and singing techniques, Bill encourages classical
instrumentalists, who tend to be physically uptight, to rediscover their own
instinctive connections to music-making.

He may not be touring the world. But talk about reaching out: he is
scheduled to give the keynote address at a convention of luxury kitchen and
bathroom designers in Miami. "They wanted someone to speak about creativity
and problem solving," he said. "I said I'd be delighted to do it if they had
a grand piano onstage so that I could make my points with music as well."

It was Bill Westney who put me in contact with Ms. Teply, the girlfriend of
his son Ben, a cellist with the Austin Symphony, an orchestra that pays him
roughly $9,000 per year. Ms. Teply was pained to hear that the gift to Yale
has come in for criticism. "Has anyone said that Hollywood should also stop
making movies because of needs in the world?" she asked. How many moronic
action flicks have cost more than $100 million?

Ms. Teply has no answer to this ethical quandary. All she knows is that she
feels privileged to be a musician, despite the hardships. In May she will
complete her a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Texas at
Austin, and there will be no more tuition bills to pay. But if she is going
to be competitive in future auditions, she must "seriously upgrade her
instrument," she said. A proper violin would cost at least $50,000, she
added.

Yet Ms. Teply is not complaining. "I love what I do," she said. "To sit
there and play the violin for my work is worth not making much money. And
the audiences are always so enthusiastic after our concerts. What I'm doing
really affects people."