“Observe the fermatas in your life,” Yale School of Music Dean Robert Blocker told the class of 2012 in his commencement address earlier this summer. “Take them regularly in your journey and be strengthened and comforted by the pauses, the reflection, and the silence.”
It seems like odd advice to offer to young musicians at the threshold of their careers, musicians who are hungry for as much work, business, and noise as they can manage. It’s measured advice like Blocker’s, however, that makes the Yale School of Music a master’s and artist diploma program that conditions its students for a lifetime of career moments rather than any one single experience.
“You want everything you can get. You want the exposure. But you can’t let your ego take over and say, ‘Yes, yes,’” says tenor and School of Music alum Ryan MacPherson. “Then you’re not giving the best of your abilities.”
In a typical student’s post-graduate time at Yale, there can also be very few moments of pause. A singer’s time each semester is dominated by scenes programs, annual recitals, fully staged operas, and as much additional work as they care to take on. And that’s when they’re not in classes, either as part of the core curriculum for a music degree or as part of the Ivy League institute’s college proper.
“At the center of things our mission is still to train and prepare gifted young students for careers in the Western classical canon,” says Blocker. “That’s what we do.”
“Most everybody who’s gone through that system at Yale holds onto that ‘baptism by fire’ sort of thing,” adds MacPherson. “You learn a lot of music, you learn it well, and you have it memorized before you ever step in front of a conductor or director.”
“I think that the program would be described as ‘intense,’” says Voice and Opera Department Chair Doris Yarick-Cross. But despite the challenges that come with a high-octane environment, going from zero to 60 with learning and memorizing and performing new music, Yarick-Cross notes that the rewards at the end of the journey are great.
The vocal program at Yale is extensive by design, and the comprehensiveness of its scope is thanks in part due to its size, which generally caps off at 16 students per year (an ideal breakdown, per Yarick-Cross, is four sopranos, three mezzos, three tenors, three baritones, and three basses). That means a greater concentration of attention on each individual artist. This especially holds true when guest artists—like conductor William Christie or composer-conductor Krzysztof Penderecki—are in town to work with the students.
“I’m not sure I knew then how important that was,” says baritone Edward Parks, who earned his master’s degree in 2008 (and who spent part of this past summer singing with the Metropolitan Opera in their Summer Recital Series).
For some, like mezzo Abigail Nims, the nonstop working and learning environment also means a redefinition of who you are as an artist and what your bailiwick is as a singer. While Nims worked with the likes of Colin Graham on more traditional repertoire like Così fan tutte, Yale’s commitment to living composers led her down a different rabbit hole.
While working with the Yale Percussion Group on Ligeti’s Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel (With Pipes, Drum, and Fiddles), a project that dominated the mezzo’s second year of artist diploma studies, Nims became acquainted with composer and Yale faculty member Martin Bresnick. In 2010, she sang his song cycle Every Thing Must Go on the composer’s eponymously titled collected works for Albany Records. Since then, she has balanced more standard fare with pieces like Peter Ash’s The Golden Ticket and George Crumb’s Night of the Four Moons, a valuable distinction in today’s competitive market. “It opened my eyes to a lot of different kinds of contemporary music,” Nims says of her time at Yale.
And, of course, the performance experience is on its own merits a valuable one. “The students who come aren’t students in the sense that you might ascribe to someone who’s beginning to learn the skills of a profession,” explains David Shifrin, a clarinet professor and artistic director of both the school’s Oneppo Chamber Music Series and “Yale in New York”—the latter a fast-growing concert series that offers unique and incisive performances at Carnegie Hall throughout the academic year.
Shifrin likens Yale School of Music to the university’s prestigious drama school in terms of the applicants they’re looking for and the conditioning they offer students. “The students aren’t just learning to perform, they’re learning repertory,” he says. “A necessary part of every performer’s education is performing, and the students who come here recognize that that’s what they need the most.”
“What they do is they give you real experiences,” says Parks who made his Carnegie Hall debut with Yale in New York, singing rare art songs by Charles Ives. “I’d already sung [at Carnegie Hall], and Yale had given me that. So when I sang Winterreise there in 2011, I didn’t have the burden of, ‘This is my Carnegie Hall debut.’ Especially singing such a piece like that.”
“That was one of the great programs we put on, offering Ives songs that are very rarely heard—and this is after recording all of the Ives songs for Naxos,” says Blocker. Taking advantage of the fact that, among the other accolades to Yale’s overarching educational system, the campus is host to a number of research facilities, Blocker and the faculty and staff of the School of Music seek to instill in their students an intellectual curiosity, outside-of-the-box thinking, and a resourcefulness that grounds them in their community.
“We want, first of all, to make all of our students aware of the world they inhabit—it’s a rich, rich world. The literature is extensive,” says Blocker. “The ability to be in the setting, to look at the poetry or the manuscripts and then to go to the Bridge Art Center and go, ‘This is why the Blake works so well—I’m looking at this painting and I understand it all.’ I think when that happens, there’s a human response that balances well with the intellectual approach.”
“[With] the things that we do at Yale and bring to New York,” adds Shifrin, “we try to preserve some of the identity of the university.” Like any viable artistic administrator, Shifrin understands the need to be distinctive, especially in a three-house setup like Carnegie Hall where there is a constant ebb and flow of Mozart Requiems, Handel Messiahs, and Schubert Winterreises. Comparatively, the number of times you’re likely in New York to see Penderecki (who taught at Yale in the 1970s) conduct his own music are few and far between.
And despite the amount of repertoire that’s hand picked for vocal students by Yarick-Cross and her husband, Richard Cross (a lecturer in voice to whom many students have ascribed a superhuman knowledge of art song and lieder), students are also encouraged to seek out their own fortunes in the school’s libraries. “I spent many days in the basement of that library just looking through the shelves of operas that I’d never heard of,” says Parks. “I definitely think if the time is there, that’s definitely something that’s really available. If you have the time to go find something that’s not really popular to sing, it’s definitely a place where you can do that.”
The resources extend past libraries, laden as they are with an Indiana-Jones level of historical manuscripts and archives, into four professional arts schools, two galleries, a museum, and an instrument collection. It’s those resources that serve as the backbone of Yale’s face to the professional music world, but built on that foundation are layers of distinguished alumni, current students, professors emeritus, and active faculty members. There is deference in such relationships, to be sure, but Blocker emphasizes that students are also treated as professionals. Programs like Yale in New York and the Yale Opera Program show, rather than tell of, that integration and conversational atmosphere.
In and of itself, that’s also a valuable lesson that singers take home after graduation. “When I finished Yale, I did the apprenticeship program at Santa Fe the next two summers, and it was interesting to me how easy that transition was to go into the program,” says Nims. “I realized that the Yale Opera Program had been run so much like an apprenticeship program. I felt like I’d already done that at Yale from the body movement classes to diction and coaching, even down to the fact that we didn’t receive our schedules for the next day until 5:00 p.m. the night before.”
“They don’t have to skip a class to do an audition. We build that into the schedule,” says Yarick-Cross of the flexibility that can be afforded singers should they need a day off to make the convenient trip from New Haven to either Boston or New York, or to rehearse with one of the local performing arts groups that often seek soloists from Yale.
Time management becomes one of the school’s object lessons, and while Yarick-Cross works around the experience each singer gains in the opera program (if one singer had a lead the previous performance, they may be in a supporting role for the next—“It’s not just choosing the best students for the leading roles,” says Yarick-Cross), there are still very few moments of down time. MacPherson credits this with being forced to recognize his own mental schedule and memorization capabilities, which is an essential skill for professional singers.
“Everybody had to do one recital a year, and the smart ones would quite often be able to position it before Christmas break, because then you only had a scenes program. In the second semester, you had two shows, so that plus a recital ends up being a lot of music. You learned how to organize yourself,” he explains, adding that the flexibility to also leave campus for the day to travel for work (or the possibility of work) “opened things up.”
So where does the fermata come into play? Perhaps Blocker knew intrinsically that the last two or three years had been a conditioning period for those same students to learn of those necessary spaces in between, rather than necessarily honor them. Above all else, Blocker wants his graduates to be thoughtful artists who are aware of their surroundings as much as they are aware of themselves, to be cultural leaders rather than cultural followers.
“It’s so easy to get into this trap thinking that if you’re 25 then you’re past your prime,” says Nims, who disagrees with that sentiment. “I’m 32 now and I’m feeling like I’m every day still realizing who I am as an artist more. At Yale I never felt any pressure to be performing too soon.“
And, in possibly one of the greatest pushes to have its graduates follow their artistic dreams and avoid early burnout, the Yale School of Music put its money where its mouth is in 2006: tuition for grad students is gratis.
