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Excellent Performances Are Not the Only Goal By PAUL KWAK
A few Saturdays ago, as I sleepily shuffled through the various sections of the Sunday New York Times while sipping my requisite coffee, a headline on an Arts & Leisure story caught my attention: "The Juilliard Effect: Ten Years Later." The title suggested that the article would examine a conservatory education and the viability of a career in the arts, all topics that confront me and my peers on a daily basis.
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| Paul Kwak |
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As I started reading, I found it difficult to understand the point that the article's author, Daniel J. Wakin, was trying to make. When I reached the end, the point still eluded me. Was it simply that it is difficult to succeed as an artist? Was there a sinister implication about Juilliard's failure to prepare its students for the real world? Or was he making a broader statement about the relevance of conservatories to American education in general? The answer seemed to lie more along the lines of "all of the above." Ultimately, however, the article answered none of those questions satisfactorily. In reinforcing the idea that admission to Juilliard does not equate with success in the world of performing arts, the article not only beat a familiar dead horse, but prompted, on the eve of Juilliard's centennial celebration, a more relevant and persistent question: Why do we go to Juilliard? At the most basic level, it would seem obligatory to acknowledge that "the prime goal [is] to create excellent performers," according to President Joseph Polisi, as quoted in the article.Concomitantly, though, the article implied a more interesting and specific question that would have been better served as an explicit inquiry: What lessons does Juilliard offer outside of the practicalities of forging a career in the performing arts? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in that formidable three-letter word: Art. In seeking to understand beauty, the depth of human emotion, the range of human experience, and even harder, in seeking to understand how to convey these things in performance, it is difficult to see how our education could be at all valueless. The problem is that it can be so intangible as to be completely unhelpful in the matter of daily subsistence, despite what they say about man not living on bread alone.
The lessons of Juilliard then, may not just be about music or art, and we should hope that they are not. But the crucial irony is thus: How does a music student learn the extra-musical lessons of a conservatory if in fact the lenses of perception acquired are so overwhelmingly music-based? Is it possible to spend some of the most formative years of one's life—and here I generally mean the undergraduate years—in a conservatory, drilling technique and in constant rehearsal and coaching, and to meaningfully process the world? In some ways, it is like asking, can art exist in a vacuum? Can young artists practice performance a priori or is good performance inextricably bound to a broader understanding of life outside music, dance, and/or drama?Perhaps we miss the point if we make the central question one about success in the arts world, for to acknowledge that not everyone will "make it" would seem defeatist, and to pretend that everyone will seems delusional. Instead, we would do well to ask ourselves more carefully what it is we are doing here and why we are doing it. The ultimate problem might be that the answers are likely to be different for everyone—or perhaps therein lies the inherent logic and unspoken contribution of a conservatory to a nation that constantly seems in peril of willful neglect of the arts. As technology, industry, and foreign relations continue to demand the attention of 21st-century America, conservatories like Juilliard must be vigilant of the important roles they can have in training students to serve as ambassadors of art in ways that do not necessarily involve performance, and as disciples of the universal relevance of art across disciplines and sectors. Excellent performance may be the foremost goal, but it is important to remember that it may be a mere one of many more enriching manifestations of the "Juilliard Effect."Paul Kwak is a master's student in collaborative piano.
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