Inaugural Address of President Daniel Steiner
New England Conservatory
Jordan Hall, April 20, 2001
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Board of Trustees, Members of the Board of Overseers, Messrs. Williams and Lesser, Distinguished Guests, and Members of the NEC community:
I have much to be grateful for today.
I am grateful to David Scudder and the Trustees for entrusting me with this responsibility.
I am grateful to both Boards of the Conservatory for the many ways in which they support this institution.
I am grateful to the members of the Faculty for several reasons: for the generous way that they have received me, a stranger to their profession; for their extraordinary dedication to their teaching in studios and in classrooms; and for the many ways that they contribute to the well being of this institution.
I am grateful to the students for the intelligence and talent that they bring to their studies and performances at the Conservatory and for the creativity and energy evident on a daily basis in this Hall and in our other performance venues.
I am grateful to the administration and staff for the skill and commitment that they bring to their work at the Conservatory throughout the year.
I am grateful to my wife for sharing my passion for music and for joining wholeheartedly in our life at the Conservatory – and it is a life, not a job.
I am grateful to my children for understanding why I am spending less time than expected with them, their spouses and their children.
And I am grateful to my family and friends and to all our guests for being here today and being part of this celebration.
During the many years that I worked at Harvard University, I used a desk at which two 19th century presidents of Harvard, Messrs. Felton and Walker, sat during their tenures. Their photographs, which I kept in a drawer in the desk, revealed them as stern, no-nonsense types. I felt that the desk in some way connected us and that they were watching to make certain that I met my responsibilities properly. Whenever I was feeling slothful or thought that my moral compass might be deviating from true north, I would open the drawer, look at the photos, and be quickly back on course.
When I started to work at the Conservatory, I wondered how I would do in the absence of Presidents Felton and Walker. However, I need not have worried. When I exit my office by the door that leads directly to the hall, I confront immediately the bust of our founder, Eben Tourjee, a contemporary of Messrs. Felton and Walker. He seems to be saying to me, "Young man – what have you done today for the world of music?"
I would not be surprised if Tourjee, who founded the Conservatory in 1867, had asked himself that question every night before he went to bed. He had an extraordinary passion for music and a strong belief in its uplifting quality and its importance to our social fabric and well being. Earlier in the 19th century a memorial to the Boston School Committee had asserted "Through vocal music you set in motion a mighty power which silently, but surely, in the end, will humanize, refine and elevate a whole community." At the Conservatory’s first graduation ceremony Tourjee urged each of the thirteen graduates to serve music as "a reformer, an educator, a symbol of all that is beautiful, noble, and good."
Tourjee had the zeal and energy of a missionary, which he truly was. Creating and building the Conservatory was not his only occupation. He traveled the country and helped start organizations to urge the teaching of music in public schools so that all citizens could enjoy its benefits. In a well-known speech he asked "Shall our poorer citizens, equally capable of cultivation, and whose limited means of enjoyment render it a more positive necessity, be debarred its pure and innocent delights?"
Tourjee advocated music in many ways and in many forums. He helped organize and conduct two post-Civil War National Peace Jubilees. Prior to the 1869 Jubilee he sent assistants from city to city, from town to town across parts of America to form choral societies. As a result more than 10,000 people came to Boston to sing in the chorus. It must have been an extraordinary civic event, and an effective means for evoking a passion for organized singing in many communities.
Eben Tourjee faced overwhelming problems at the Conservatory, and many, including the financial difficulties, survived his lifetime. There were, for example, extreme imbalances in the instruments played by the students. In the early 1880’s, soon after Major Henry Higginson announced his commitment to establish the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Tourjee advertised for auditions for a Conservatory orchestra. Twenty-one students appeared; nineteen of them played the flute. Another problem was the very large number of students with minimum connection to the Conservatory. In 1884 only 40 of almost 2000 students graduated.
While Eben Tourjee was wrestling with many difficult issues, a younger man at the Conservatory was also engaging seriously with music and the teaching of music. His name was George Whitefield Chadwick. Most institutions have a defining leader who establishes the nature and character of the institution for the generations that follow, and for the New England Conservatory that leader was Chadwick. A high school drop-out, Chadwick had been a faculty member for many years and was generally recognized as a leading young American composer when he became head of the Conservatory in 1897.
Chadwick established an orchestra that eventually rivaled professional orchestras of the day. He began an opera program. Just as Eben Jordan Sr., the retail magnate, worked with Eben Tourjee, so Eben Jordan 2nd became a partner in music of Chadwick. That partnership led to many good things, most particularly the Hall in which we now sit, a hall that has no equal at any conservatory in the country, a hall that was painstakingly restored during the recent presidency of Larry Lesser. Chadwick also built small dormitories, particularly for women, in which a double room with board cost $7 to $8 a week.
Chadwick improved the faculty, strengthened the theory program, developed a coherent plan for the education of musicians, and established a regular curriculum leading to a diploma. In 1913, having recognized the need for scholarships to attract the most talented students – a position that Antonin Dvorak supported – Chadwick started to raise money for scholarships, and in 1917 he began an endowment fund. He raised the musical standards at the Conservatory. In 1910-1911 fifteen NEC graduates found seats in America’s leading orchestras. In short, both conceptually and physically George Chadwick laid the foundation for the Conservatory we have today.
These formative years of the Conservatory are well described in the excellent history, Measure by Measure, written by our faculty members, Bruce McPherson and James Klein. The Conservatory for many years now has been a mature institution. We have a range of degree programs for undergraduates and graduate students; we have steady enrollments; we educate people of all ages in the College, the Prep School, and in Continuing Education; we have a large and talented full- and part-time faculty in the College and in the Prep School; we have an endowment and financial stability; and we have effective and appropriate governance structures.
We are also one of a handful of independent conservatories that have survived in the United States. Conservatories have existed in our country for about 134 years, about the length of time the New England Conservatory has been in existence. Some were started within colleges or universities, but many began as independent institutions. All but a few either went out of business or were merged into universities, mostly for financial reasons. In his Inaugural Address in 1967 Gunther Schuller raised the question of whether we would be able to remain independent. From time to time suitors have approached us.
My firm belief is that we should remain independent, although we should always be willing to explore temporary or more permanent alliances with other cultural and educational institutions to make better use of our and their strengths. Society benefits from having mature centers of excellence whose sole reason for existence is the advocacy of music, and we at the Conservatory benefit from the ability to make decisions independently and without having to balance the needs of our music agenda against the requirements of other educational and institutional objectives.
Music is a language that unites us here and with others throughout the world. Anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and others have known for a long time about the universality of music. We know of no human culture that does not have music. Recently, archaeologists discovered that Neanderthals who lived more than 50,000 years ago made flutes from animal bones. Music has been with mankind for a long time, and there is evidence that we are hard-wired for music. Babies begin to respond to music while in the womb, and they enter the world with a capability for music. Howard Gardner writes about a music intelligence, just as we have a verbal, scientific, or other intelligences. He cites as evidence the reaction of Yehudi Menuhin at age 3 to hearing a violin performance and the ability of autistic children, who may have very limited capability for speech, to play well a musical instrument.
New techniques of brain imaging allow us to learn more about how people process music and what effect the study and performance of music may have on the development of the brain. Various kinds of therapies employ music, music is played for Alzheimer patients and in intensive care units for premature babies, and studies show that music may help moderate blood pressure changes. New technologies and new pathways in biology will allow us to learn more about these phenomena, but we who have experienced music have little doubt that something is happening to us, that changes are taking place within us as a result of the music. Evidence supporting mental and physical benefits from studying, performing, or listening to music should not surprise us.
The justification for the existence of the Conservatory does not depend, of course, on the possible practical applications of or concrete benefits from music. We compose, study, perform, and listen to music because it is inherently worthwhile and is part of our humanity. Where music stands in the hierarchy of human values was stated very well by John Adams in a letter to Abigail Adams:
"I must study politics and war so that my sons may have liberty – liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture; in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, and architecture… ."
Music, like the other arts, brings us experiences, insights, understandings, and a range of emotions that may not be obtainable in other ways. It can inspire ideas, stimulate our thinking, and bring immense pleasures and aesthetic satisfaction. It surely adds a dimension to our lives that we value enormously, and without which we would feel diminished in important ways.
Music, unlike painting, poetry, or architecture, requires an intermediary – the musician – to make it accessible to most people. We can experience a painting, a building, or a poem without an interpreter, but with music we are always reliant on one or more interpreters. The score of a Mozart piano concerto or a Haydn sonata has little, if any meaning to most people. Many would assert that music does not exist until it is performed.
The musician is, therefore, the gatekeeper, the tour guide, and the teacher. As Aaron Copland wrote in 1952 in Music and Imagination, "… the musical interpreter … is … the intermediary that brings the composer’s work to life – a kind of midwife to the composition." Mr. Copland went on to say that "…it is from the finest interpreters that the composer can learn most about the character of his work; aspects of it that he did not realize were there, tempi that are slower or faster than he had himself imagined were the correct ones, phrasings that better express the natural curve of a melody."
This role of the musician places great importance on the work of institutions like the New England Conservatory. Our primary mission is the training and education of musicians of all ages. That is our core mission but are there other things that we should be doing in light of the expanding knowledge about music, the cultural environment, and the needs of the Boston community and of our nation? How do those needs affect our educational goals? What kind of institution are we trying to build? What do we see as our responsibilities and how will we carry them out?
Of primary importance is our internal strength. No matter what we are doing we need to have the right environment, the best people, and well-conceived and designed programs.
We will continue to strive for a collegial, supportive, respectful environment – for faculty, for students, and for staff – one which fosters individual development and creativity, one where people will learn from each other and will experience benefits from the broad range of music that the Conservatory embraces, and one where people will gain a high level of satisfaction from their work and be willing to take risks. Risk taking is often a necessary precursor to creativity or other outstanding achievements, and as Howard Gardner has pointed out, the most creative people learn a great deal from their occasional failures.
People are, of course, the key to our success. The heart of any conservatory is its faculty, and as an institution we must support our faculty, foster their professional development, and strengthen their ranks through careful recruitment of the best performers and teachers. We want to improve our ability to recruit and enroll the most talented students and to provide an environment that will enable them to grow as individuals and develop their skills to the fullest extent. We want to help them gain their independence as performers and learn to communicate fully – not only musically but also verbally. Talking about music has become more and more important as a means of connecting audiences with the music that they are hearing.
The life of a student at the Conservatory is very demanding. A student must cope successfully with studio instruction, practice of up to six or even seven hours a day, classroom subjects with their required outside listening, reading, and writing of papers, and ensemble requirements such as chorus and orchestra. Conscientious students, especially those studying piano, devote prodigious amounts of time to their studies. We who have responsibility for the curriculum must be willing to reassess periodically our educational objectives and the means we are using to achieve them. Change is all about us. We have new learning and new ways of learning; there are shifting audiences; and there is technological change that affects the creation, reproduction, and distribution of music. Recognizing that our students will have a variety of careers after graduation, we must make them aware of their choices, help them understand the world in which they will be working, and to the extent that it is possible for us to do so, provide them with the range of skills that they will need.
The Conservatory has, of course, a responsibility to the nation and to the community in which we live. In significant part we meet this responsibility through our core educational activities with undergraduate and graduate students, prep school students, and adults. But we have done and we should continue to do other things. We open our doors to the public for hundreds of free concerts every year. We have worked with the Boston public schools and helped train teachers. We have established the Research Center for Learning through Music and helped create the Conservatory Laboratory Charter School, which are efforts to explore the effect that integration of music into an elementary school curriculum has on learning of reading, mathematics, and other subjects. We helped give birth to and remain the educational partner of From the Top, a nationally syndicated radio program that features pre-college classical musicians. As our resources permit and the interests of our faculty and the educational needs of our students dictate, we should continue efforts that connect the Conservatory with its neighboring communities, that foster audience development and understanding of music, and that explore new ways to incorporate music into our educational systems.
But we should remember that we can be most effective in these efforts only if we carry out our core mission at the highest level of excellence.
The Conservatory also needs to be a voice on important public policy issues that are within our competence. Let me cite a few examples. There is only so much conservatories can do to foster musical literacy. We can educate or reach directly only a limited number of people, and we can train our students how to teach and how to be ambassadors for music. But the primary responsibility for creating a musically literate public rests with the public education system. We are beginning to see some positive change in music programs in Boston and elsewhere, and ours should be a strong voice of encouragement accompanied by a helping hand. Another important issue is the access of lower income students to higher education. It should come as no surprise that a recent study showed that these students are significantly less likely than equally talented higher income students to progress past high school. We see some of these students in our applicant pool, and we know that we will not be able to meet their need out of our resources. The Conservatory should be among those voices pressing for more public aid for less privileged students. Similarly, as a member of the higher education community, we cannot ignore the growing attacks on programs that lead to diverse student bodies. Diversity has been an outstanding characteristic of the Conservatory for many years, and we should stand alongside those who are trying to protect carefully conceived and executed programs that promote racial and ethnic heterogeneity.
Who has responsibility for the present and future of the New England Conservatory? It is all of us – governing boards, alumni, faculty, staff, students, and friends. As we look toward the future, we know that we have a strong base on which to build. We have a school shaped in good ways by the missionary zeal and entrepreneurial spirit of Eben Tourjee, by the concept of a total curriculum of George Chadwick, by the breadth of musical interest of Gunther Schuller and his integration of different traditions, and by the sense of artistic excellence of Larry Lesser as well as by the efforts of other leaders of the Conservatory and those of many hundreds of Board members, faculty, students, staff, alumni, and donors.
We know that we now have well-documented material needs – that we must improve our physical facilities and increase considerably our endowment. Neither the facilities nor the endowment support adequately the talented people who teach and study here nor will they allow us to achieve our ambitions for the future – to be a conservatory widely known for excellence, for creativity and innovation, and for important contributions to the life of Boston and the nation. Just as George Chadwick and Eben Jordan 2nd gave us this Hall and the beginning of our endowment, we must now commit ourselves to meeting the material needs of this and succeeding generations. We need to finish the job that began with the renovation of Jordan Hall. It will be a multi-year effort, led by members of the two Boards, but I urge all members of the New England Conservatory community and others who care about music and the future of the Conservatory to join this effort.
I have now served as president of the Conservatory for almost two years. These have been good years for me as I have worked with interesting and challenging Board members and colleagues on the Faculty and staff, met talented and admirable students and alumni, listened to a decade’s worth of music with some superb performances and many challenging pieces, and had a good deal of fun and many laughs – essential parts of life for me. My experience to date and my view of the future leads me to close my remarks with precisely the same thought with which Gunther Schuller closed his inaugural address: this is one of the happiest moments of my life.