Albert Fuller
Harpsichord, Chamber Music, and Graduate Studies Faculty

Born in our nation's capital, Albert Fuller studied organ with Paul Callaway and harpsichord with Ralph Kirkpatrick. A Juilliard faculty member since 1964, he founded both the Aston Magna Foundation for Music and the Humanities in 1972, and the Helicon Foundation in 1985.

Albert Fuller in July 1940, on his last day as a member of the Washington Cathedral Choir.

When did you first know you wanted to be a musician?
As a child I was a soprano in the choir of men and boys at the Washington Cathedral. There music touched my heart so deeply that I clung to it fiercely against all admonitions that I would never amount to anything if I became an adult musician.

What was the first recording that you ever bought?
I remember buying an album of very hot conga recordings played by the orchestra of the Hotel Nacional, in Havana. Dancing was a passionate exercise for me, and going to small Latin-American dance bars with a date was a weekly occurrence in my early teenage social life. Earlier, as a choirboy, I heard the 78-rpm recording of Verdi's Requiem, conducted in 1939 by Tullio Serafin, an outstanding conductor of Italian Romantic opera. The passion of his performance came close to driving my young mind almost crazy. As I listened almost constantly for a month, I had ecstatic experiences, drawing closer to Verdi's genius through this work than with his operas, which, in 1945, I had not as yet come to know.

What's the most embarrassing moment you've had as a performer?
It was as a harpsichordist, in my first performance in New York, in public, of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, conducted by Margaret Hillis at Town Hall. Having dined so often with Paul Callaway before he conducted important works in public, I had noticed that he always had two martinis before dinner. He said they calmed him down. Well, at my supper before the Town Hall concert I followed his lead and had two martinis. When the opening downbeat came, I realized I was somewhat drunk. I panicked; I felt I couldn't find the proper chords at the proper time, and yet I couldn't let anybody know the state I was in. This feeling only worsened at the first recitative, and I forced myself to focus and say my prayers as never before. Twenty minutes into the work, the alcohol had begun to wear off and I began to feel that I might not have disgraced myself as a continuo player for all time. It all ended up well and people complimented me on my inventiveness, but I never forgot that terrible, nearly humiliating experience and saw to it that it never occurred again.

If you could have your students visit any place in the world, where would it be, and why?
Italy, the birthplace of "modern music" and where Claudio Monteverdi wrote his greatest compositions. Monteverdi's greatest achievement lay in his penetrating expression of human psychology. The early madrigals can be considered as studies of emotions more varied and powerful that those of any other composer. His first opera, L'Orfeo, was the earliest to reveal the potential of this then novel genre, and the refinement of psychological attitudes in his late operas meant the form became capable, like all great drama, of creating a new and satisfying world of theater, mirroring the lives of popular human figures.

What is your proudest accomplishment in life?
The conceptualization and realization of the Aston Magna Foundation for Music and the Humanities.

What's the most satisfying aspect of teaching for you?
Passing on of knowledge so that the student not only understands it but is able to use it in his work to produce his own new understanding. This, in turn, should act as fertile ground for new imagination and new creativity, either in the privacy of his own life or in exercising it with others.

And the most frustrating?
When a student has never made the connection that music has with his own feelings, the feelings of his heart. As a remedy for this, students should be encouraged to increase their verbal abilities so that they have words to express the feelings of their hearts.

What "words of wisdom" can you offer young people today?
As Madonna said at the end of her "scandalous" book, Sex: "Most people don't get what they want because they don't know what they want." Or, to paraphrase the great teacher from Nazareth, "Ask, and you'll receive; Seek, and you'll find, and, Knock and it will open." The first letters of each of these admonitions combine to spell the word, ASK. Never stop posing questions in order to achieve your goals.