The phone rings. You pick up the receiver, guessing it will be your friend or your mother-at worst, a telemarketer. Instead, the caller explains that you have won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, an award you cannot apply or campaign for. Out of the blue, you have received $500,000 to use in any way during the next five years, with no strings attached. Last month 23 people received this phone call. One of them was Juilliard alumnus Stephen Hough (MM '83, piano).

"It's not often that you get phone calls like that in the middle of the day. It was a bit of a pleasant one," Hough said from London when asked about the momentous conversation of October 23. He believes it was his commitment to a multi-faceted career that made him a candidate for the fellowship. Hough has focused not only on championing contemporary composers by commissioning and performing many new works but also has highlighted composers who have been neglected by history. He said, "I have tried to look into all sorts of different repertoire for the piano and explore different avenues and not been content to just stay with the regular repertoire. So in a way it's a nice recognition that what I do is not just exclusively focused on playing the piano, on pressing down black and white keys. I'd like to feel that it's awarding sort of a more off-beat or less one-dimensional career, perhaps."

Mark Fitzsimmons of the MacArthur Foundation added that Hough was selected because the committee believed that he would contribute exceptional creative work in his field in the future. The foundation asked leading figures in the field of music about Hough's talents and potential as part of the selection process. The 2001 grant recipients also include Roseanne Haggerty, an entrepreneur who brings unprecedented scale and scope to housing the homeless; Dirk Obbink, a papyrologist rescuing damaged texts and interpreting the wisdom of ancient authors; and Cynthia Moss, a natural historian studying the ecology and social behavior of wild African elephants at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya.

Only allowed to inform one person about the award, Hough chose to tell his mother the good news, he said, both because he knew she'd be excited and because she could keep a secret. Although he has yet to decide how to spend the grant, he anticipates using it for a studio in London where he can have a soundproof space available 24 hours a day to rehearse and teach.

When asked about the "genius" label that often accompanies the MacArthur Fellowship, Hough responded humbly: "It seems to me so ridiculous that I don't even feel any pressure from it." Genius or not, receiving the grant was especially gratifying, Hough said, because it acknowledges people in so many disciplines, and he feels honored to be in their company.

-Lisa Yelon

Allen Maniker: Coming Full Circle
December, 2001

It's been said that there are eight million stories in the naked city. and more of them emerged on September 11 than at any other time in New York's history. One might not expect to find a neurosurgeon at University Hospital in Newark, N.J. (one of the main triage centers when the disaster struck) profiled in these pages-but Dr. Allen H. Maniker (BFA '77, dance) happens to be a Juilliard alumnus.

"Coming from the Midwest, I might have gotten lost in the size of the city," says Maniker, who arrived in 1974. "Anybody who's gone through the dance experience in New York has seen people kind of get swallowed up. But Juilliard gave me a real home base, a chance to learn the art of dance in a somewhat sheltered way, going to class every day and concentrating on what I had to." While still at Juilliard, Maniker spent summers as an apprentice with the Joffrey. Upon graduation, he headed to Israel ("my apartment given away, my whole life in two bags," he laughs) for a year with the Bat-Dor Dance Company. A stint with Joyce Trisler's company followed upon his return to the U.S.

Then he decided to go back to school. "I thought maybe I'd take French, but the Alliance Franaise was too expensive and French at Hunter College was full-so I signed up for biology instead." His choice wasn't so farfetched; Maniker had done a year at the University of Michigan as a dance and pre-med double major before transferring to Juilliard. Now, he finished his pre-med credits at Hunter and entered Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit-his hometown-in 1982. Following general surgery training at Beth Israel Medical Center from 1986-88, Maniker became the first resident in the neurosurgery program at the New Jersey Medical School in Newark. After fellowships in neurotrauma in Virginia and peripheral nerve surgery in Louisiana and Washington, Maniker returned to Newark, where he now teaches (and heads both departments).

With University Hospital designated a Level I trauma center (the most sophisticated) on September 11, Dr. Maniker and his faculty were on standby. But his neurosurgery group also provides care to Jersey City Medical Center, which was closer to the disaster. As events progressed, Dr. Maniker was brought by police escort to Jersey City, where several patients awaited him. (Interestingly, among them was the chief surgeon for the NYC Police-one of Dr. Maniker's teachers during his internship.)

The next day, Dr. Maniker operated on a firefighter with a fractured neck-who, in yet another coincidence, belonged to the firehouse around the corner from Juilliard. "Apparently he had been placed on a missing persons list, and six of his colleagues showed up here at University Hospital on Friday, thinking that he had died. It was a pretty tearful reunion," recalls Dr. Maniker. (The fireman is doing fine now.)

Allen Maniker considers himself blessed to have enjoyed two careers-both fulfilling in very different, but somehow oddly similar, ways. "Both reach for ideals that are somehow just beyond your grasp. In medicine, can we know more about helping people? Can we do more to make them better, make them healthier? As much as we know, there's always more to learn. In dance, it's the same thing: can you do that step a little faster, a little more accurately? Can you do it with greater beauty? That, too, is always just beyond your reach, no matter how well you do it."

"Regardless of what you do, I don't think any one walk of life is more important than another," observes Maniker-for whom the power of the arts to heal was again made apparent when he debated about attending "The Producers" on Broadway three days after the attacks. The last-minute tickets had seemed such a prize when they were snagged on September 10; now, it hardly seemed appropriate. But he went anyway. "To just be entertained, to laugh and relax for a couple hours, was so therapeutic. And at the end, people stood up and sang 'God Bless America.' How could you say that what those people were doing was not important?"

-Jane Rubinsky