By DAVID PRATT

For the 325 students in Juilliard's Pre-College Division, Saturdays are demanding. There's theory, orchestra rehearsal, and lunch if there's time because oh-my-God-I-forgot-we-had-that-solfège-assignment! Not to mention private lessons, which, for most students—especially those who travel great distances just to attend Juilliard—happen during the busy Saturday schedule. (Some private lessons take place during the week.)

A class in "Creative Music" in the Preparatory Department of the Institute of Musical Art, c. 1934.

Indeed, not only Saturday mornings, but afternoons, and sometimes even evenings, in the Pre-College are intense. You have to know what you're doing and you must hop to. Watching these young people, ages 6 to 17, one can see that they are at once focused yet still finding their way, serious about what they do—about all they do—but with some things necessarily undetermined. With their passions and ideas all smartly coalesced, and yet, at the same time, still coalescing, these young people are fascinating, exciting to talk to and to be around.

On a Saturday last fall, I visited with some Pre-College students in the office of Andrew Thomas, a composer and Juilliard graduate himself, who has directed the Pre-College Division since 1994. In spite of the administrative demands he must juggle, Thomas casts a calm, balanced, beneficent aura, and the feeling that Saturday morning was of students coming and going not just because they had administrative issues to resolve, but because they liked hanging out near Thomas and his crew. (Yes, Juilliard students do find time to hang out!) One girl, while devoted to her music, also calls Saturday at Juilliard "the biggest social event of the week." As Thomas says, "Our students do not lose their childhoods. Interaction with other talented youngsters becomes a central point of their development. They're young kids in the lunch room, adult professionals in the practice rooms and concert halls."

Andrew Thomas, director of the Pre-College Division. (Photo by Howard Kessler)

They are also poised and polite in an interview, voluble and articulate but with little ego, and impressively curious about and at home in the world.

Miran Kim has been playing violin for 12 of her 16 years. In 1999 she and her family moved to New Jersey from Kansas specifically because of Juilliard, and she has attended the Pre-College for five out of the past six years. "I take things into my own hands a lot," Miran told me that morning, revealing another—perhaps the—central point in the development of young people with what Thomas calls "multiple excellences." After consulting with her parents, Miran took the 2004-05 year off from Juilliard, and at the same time switched violin teachers. Though she gives her previous teacher enormous credit for her development, she says "it's healthy to find different views." Coming to this conclusion at 16, from experience, and taking action based upon it, must be, of course, another central point in a young person's growth.

Popular entertainment hands down to us the image of the young performing arts student subjected to crushing pressure and competition. Miran turns this image around, suggesting that she takes into her own hands the question of how much pressure she feels she can take. "If I'm not busy it drives me insane," she says. "I like waking up early. I'm definitely motivated. I'm definitely ambitious and I'm definitely competitive, but not in an unhealthy way. Everyone's nice and friendly and pretty open here. And my friends here know what they're doing and what they want to do. In public school in Kansas, no one knew what they were doing."

Current Pre-College student Neena Deb-Sen. (Photo by Nan Melville)

Neena Deb-Sen, 17, adds a certain shading to Miran's sentiments. "I do feel a lot of pressure, but it's not a bad thing," says Neena, a cello student since the age of 7, and a lover of Schumann, Beethoven, Crumb, Kodaly, Ellington, and Basie, who dreams of possibly crossing over into jazz or the classical music of her parents' native India. "It's the kind of pressure I enjoy. I never feel overwhelmed. For me, music is not a chore."

So it's been since 1916, when the Preparatory Center (as the Pre-College was first called) was established. In the beginning, according to Frank Damrosch, founder and dean of the Institute of Musical Art and Franz Liszt's godson, eight students were enrolled in remote "Preparatory Centers" around the city.

The following fall, those eight had more than quintupled, and two years later, in 1919, 100 elementary and high school students were taking lessons twice a week in piano or violin, along with instruction in the "rudiments of notation and sight-singing" (as Damrosch described in his book Institute of Musical Art, 1905-1926, published by The Juilliard School of Music in 1936). The Institute for Musical Art of course became Juilliard, and the Preparatory Centers, run in public and private buildings throughout the New York area, consolidated into Juilliard's Preparatory Division, to be rechristened the Pre-College Division upon the move to Lincoln Center in 1969. Hundreds, finally thousands, would come through, including Van Cliburn, Yo-Yo Ma, Sarah Chang, Marvin Hamlisch, and many others who would go on to lives in music, or to lives informed and enriched by music, even if careers happened in other areas.

A 1971 recital at Molloy College, Rockville Centre, L.I., by the Dorchester String Quartet, all Pre-College students.

In fact, early Preparatory Center brochures did not discuss the possibility that students would make music their lives. The Institute was not marketing to prodigies. The majority of those coming in, Damrosch wrote, "lacked the most fundamental training either in technique or musicianship." Soon, though, that would change.

In the early 1920s, demand grew with each season. High-schoolers sought admission to intermediate courses in ear training, elementary theory, Dalcroze Eurythmics, string orchestra, and class singing that brought students of the Preparatory Centers—scattered throughout the five boroughs and even in the suburbs—together every Saturday at the Institute. In 1922, according to the catalog, a year's instruction cost $125.

By the 1933-34 school year, apparently unfazed by the Great Depression, the Preparatory Center had added cello instruction, and choral and sight-singing. There were 18 piano teachers (all women, most billed as "Miss") and 5 violin teachers. There were auditions now. And upon completion of their studies, piano students were expected to be able to play a Bach two-part invention, a Haydn sonata, and one of the "easier" Mozart sonatas. The Department of Stringed Instruments, supervised by Constance Seeger, had a Preparatory Center Orchestra, which rehearsed on Saturday mornings at 120 Claremont Avenue under the baton of Louis J. Bostelmann. By the end of World War II, tuition had jumped to $175 a year, centers had opened as far away as Mount Vernon and Belleville, and instruction had been added in (among other things) harp, trumpet, flute, clarinet, oboe, and two-piano ensemble. Composition was first offered in 1949, taught by Suzanne Bloch; two years later, dance classes were offered. William Polisi (father of Juilliard's current president, Joseph W. Polisi) taught bassoon from 1953-1965. Depending on the student's age and discipline, the price, according to the 1954-55 catalog, was $250 to $285. Another dozen years brought an elaborate schedule of classes that included recorder, keyboard studies for singers, and dance ensemble. It was the eve of the move to Lincoln Center.

Left to right: Bion Tsang, Sarah Chang, and Avery Fisher in 1992. (Photo © Steve J. Sherman)

"The move made Juilliard rethink amateur-versus-professional," says Thomas. "The original idea was that, since all components of Lincoln Center were at such a professional level, Juilliard Pre-College would enroll 20 kids, and they'd all be geniuses." But Peter Mennin, then Juilliard's president, realized that, to be economically feasible and to act as a feeder for the college, Pre-College needed a larger group. Nonetheless, enrollment dropped from highs near 1,000 on Claremont Avenue to the low 300s (where it has more or less stayed). The target audience was, according to the 1976 catalog, "talented young people who plan to pursue a career in music." The price tag was $800. Violin students under 13 had to render adequately "an étude on the level of Laoureux, Wohlfahrt, Mazas, or Kayser." At 13, the requirement advanced to études of Kreutzer and Fiorillo, and concerti of Viotti, Bach, and Mozart. Professionalism and specialization had moved into the new travertine marble building at Broadway and 65th Street.

Not that the Pre-College Division tries to enroll all prodigies, or tries to graduate all Van Cliburns. "Today's assumption," says Thomas, "is that anyone accepted could be a professional. They are taken on the basis of having that capability. But at that age, young people are trying on different things, and considering numerous possibilities. For those who don't continue in music, the most common reason is that they have multiple excellences. They may be tremendously gifted in science and math, too. This is pretty consistent. Gifted kids tend to be gifted in every area."

No matter what division of Juilliard you are discussing, the faculty emerges time and again as the great strength, and the Pre-College is no exception. "I was 6 when I started going to Juilliard," says violinist Sarah Chang. "A lot of my peers were 12 or 13, and I always felt that these older colleagues and friends and my teachers took really good care of me."

Current Pre-College student Miran Kim. (Photo by Nan Melville)

Sarah fondly remembers Eric Ewazen—"a great teacher and a great composer"—and her theory teacher, Ira Taxin, who later on, in the company of his son, visited Sarah backstage after a New York Philharmonic concert. "It's so nice," Sarah says, "when you've spent so many hours in their classroom, and then they take time to come see what you do when you're not in class. It was very touching for me."

And Juilliard teachers seem to do more than impart specific wisdom or perform specific kindnesses. When Sarah remembers "wonderful hours spent lounging around," she specifies that the lounging took place "outside Dorothy DeLay's studio," where there were "comfy sofas, and everyone migrated to mingle and catch up with friends, see what each other was playing and wearing, and what was going on." Sarah conveys the sense that, no matter how plush the sofas were, it was the nearby spirit of legendary Juilliard violin teacher Dorothy DeLay that students found most "comfy."

Even long-ago graduates attest to Andy Thomas's kindness. Jon Darnell, an oboist and one of Thomas's composition students, made the "incredibly hard decision" in 1978 to attend a liberal arts college rather than a conservatory. Darnell had "multiple excellences," then enrolled at Princeton and discovered even more, and today works for Morgan Stanley. But he never lost the Juilliard connection. Darnell stayed in touch with and attended concerts by his one-time fellow students. Then, a few years ago, when his mother died, he was called upon, after years of not playing, to perform at her memorial concert. "I reached out and got in touch with Andy," Darnell says. "He was very supportive and kind. He knew what a big loss it was for me."

A young Marvin Hamlisch in 1951.

Students may, of course, develop "multiple excellences" within their studies at Juilliard. Here is where the School bestows what may be its greatest gift. Some years ago, when he realized he just wanted to compose and was not going to be "the next Horowitz," a New York teenager named Marvin Hamlisch asked his father why he needed all the Juilliard piano instruction. Today, the son recalls the father's reply: "If you like to write music, then you're going to have to play your music, and you might as well be able to show if off well, the best you can play it."

"Not only was my dad right," says Hamlisch, "but I can do all I do these days because I was taught really well at Juilliard. I'm conducting orchestras—the National Symphony Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Royal Philharmonic are coming up… I never took a composition course, but I took lots of theory, and Literature and Materials [of Music], and analysis. Juilliard helped in situations like one of my first jobs, as a rehearsal pianist on The Bell Telephone Hour. I could transpose anything. I could play for Andy Williams or Leontyne Price, because I had a really good foundation from Juilliard. What makes you feel you can go out and do something is having confidence in your abilities. That's where Juilliard comes in. Whether or not you get to be first chair in the New York Philharmonic, whether or not you even go on in music, that training gives you confidence in your abilities, and that reads—in any situation. People can tell that you know what you're doing. It lets you say to someone, 'it can be done,' or 'it can't,' or 'we'll work on this.' People trust in your talent and ability."

A perfectly rounded description of the effect Juilliard can have on a young person, from someone who knows what it is to hang out with Leontyne Price. And generations of Juilliard Pre-College alumni, wherever they are today, however they have moved in and out of the orbit of the popular or concert music worlds, would surely agree.

Later on the morning of my visit, I watch a boy of maybe 7 slip into an orchestra rehearsal late and have trouble finding his music. An older colleague shares his score without missing a note. "Nice and friendly," as Miran Kim says. With a touch of childhood and a touch of professionalism, and every bit as confident as a young Marvin Hamlisch transposing an aria. I want to keep an eye out for them all.

David Pratt is a freelance arts writer and development consultant living in New York City. In addition to The Juilliard Journal, he has written for The New York Times, Playbill, and many other publications.