San Francisco Classical Voice

JUILLIARD! (Part I)

Institutional histories, like celebrity biographies, are typically boring excercises, more puff and gloss than real story--but not Juilliard: A History by Andrea Olmstead, (University of Illinois Press, 1999, 368 p.). Olmstead keenly chronicles the school that stands squarely front and center in America's musical life. The story is fascinating, involving as it does the legendary musicians from the past who taught legendary musicians of yesterday and today.

Given the tensions, rivalries, competition and temperament threaded throughout the histories of every academic institution, you can imagine the liveliness of the Juilliard story. Even the name, Juilliard School, is unjust. The school should properly be named after Frank Damrosch, who conceived and then in 1905 founded the Institiute of Musical Art (IMA). It was not until 1927 that the more formidably endowed Juilliard Musical Foundation merged its Juilliard Graduate School (JGS) with the Institute for Musical Art.

Ironically, the Juilliard Graduate School had no right to use the word "Graduate," since its admission requirements called for only a high schol education, no previous degree. It wasn't even a true school, since it had no core curriculum, serving chiefly as an agency that assigned students to faculty teachers and paid for the lessons.

The JGS didn't even have a charter. The naive will of the textile magnate Augustus Juilliard had left an enabling bequest of between $125 and $150 million (in today's dollars), but inadequate instructions. The Juilliard Musical Foundation consequently fell under the control of an unscrupulous, musically ignorant autocrat, Edgar Noble.

Noble wasted three years and a lot of the Foundation's money misapplying and misappropriating its resources. Under today's laws he would have been prosecuted by the state attorney general to a fare-thee-well.

The New York newspapers conveniently looked the other way, for, as Olmstead points out, the JGS and the JMF, as well, had co-opted the press by hiring the city's leading music critics. However, thanks to the editor of the independent Musical Digest, Pierre Key, who really got on the Juilliard case, the New York Times and other papers finally had to pursue the story.

His outrageous performance exposed, Noble was forced to resign the presidency in 1927, remaining on as a trustee for another ten years.

In 1924, the Juilliard so-called Graduate, so-called School was set up handsomely in a large apartment house of 50 lavishly appointed rooms, the former Vanderbilt guest house at the posh address of 49 East 52nd St. Noble took up residence, rent-free, on the sixth of its seven floors. At that time, a distinguished seven-man examining committee was created, and a stellar faculty of 12 acquired, including the great soprano Marcella Sembrich, Francis Rogers, Ernest Hutcheson, Josef Lhevine, Olga Samaroff-Stokowski, Erno von Dohnanyi, Georges Enesco, Felix Salmond, and Rubin Goldmark. Offering fellowships with free lessons, the JGS received 500 applications and chose 81 for its first class in 1924.

By that time, after 19 years of successful operation, Damrosch's IMA, ensconced in its uptown home at 120 Claremont Ave., near 122nd St. and Broadway, had 943 students working under its distinguished faculty. (Damrosch started out with 45 teachers). Additional inspiration was provided by visiting guests who were the greats of the time, including D'Indy, Schnabel, Bachaus, Boulanger, Klemperer, Glazunov, and Rachmaninoff.

Most important, the IMA students were immersed in a curriculum that, for its era, was a model for comprehensive musical education. With the noble goal of producing musicians of thoroughness, of wide horizons, Damrosch had established a remarkably thorough, if narrowly focused music curriculum that held up, essentially, for 28 years. The Damrosch discipline that governed student performance in studies and behavior was strict and enforced--also comprehensive.

The Institute of Musical Art, the implementation of Damrosch's vision, was made possible by the generous philanthropy of James Loeb, of the Wall Street firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company. A psychologically complex, often troubled man, Loeb was the son of the firm's founder, and allied through arranged marriages to the great financier Otto Kahn and the noted Warburg family, prominent members of which were active board members of the IMA.

In 1927, after extensive secret negotiations, the JGS and the IMA merged. The impetus for the I. M. A. to accede to a merger is not explained by Olmstead. Presumably that information is no longer available. The Juilliard Foundation's money was obviously a major factor.

John Erskine, a noted writer and eminent literary figure, but as a musician not more than a proficient amateur pianist, was made President. Ernest Hutcheson, a pianist of considerable reputation, also a conductor and composer, was named Dean of the new Juilliard School of Music.

Damrosch, passed over and now placed under these two, was named Dean of the IMA. In 1933, Hutcheson took over Damrosch's deanship as well, and succeeded Erskine as President in 1937.

In the mid-1930s, when I began my studies at the IMA, the situation and nature of the split-level institution was apparent even to one of my youth and inexperience. The most gifted students, working under the master teachers, excelled and were frightfully competitive. There was a palpable separation between students of different instruments and between those and the singers.

The ear-training, sight-singing and especially the analysis and theory often seemed mechanical, formulaic, and not connected with the actual music the students were practicing and preparing. Very little new muic was heard or encouraged. Debussy and Ravel were considered moderninsts. And the spirit of the students, reflecting, no doubt, their teachers, was hypercritical and competitive.

The glass door that separated the Juillliard (graduate) School from the IMA felt like a wall.

In sum, by the late 1930s, the two schools, wedded though they were, joined at the administrative head, were firmly set in their ways, solidly conservative. Change was inevitable, and it would come, radically, but after the War.

Olmstead, a violinist, former teacher of music history at Juilliard, now coordinator of the Department of Music History and Literature at the Boston Conservatory, probes into the modern phase of the Juilliard history penetratingly, making it immediate and real.

The transformation of the Juilliard School, following the fusion of the two entities, was thorough, radical, troubled, controversial, and often brilliant. Olmstead makes it as provocative in the reading as it seemed when it was happening.

(To be continued)

(Robert P. Commanday, the editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)

©2000 Robert P. Commanday, all rights reserved