5 Honorary Degrees to Be Bestowed

Juilliard commencement will be historic in a number of ways this year.

At the ceremony in New York City, more than 300 College Division students will receive their diplomas. The same week, the first class of master’s students will graduate from the Tianjin Juilliard School. And, for the first time, there will be a joint Preparatory Division commencement ceremony, at which both Music Advancement Program (MAP) and Pre-College students will graduate. See box below for more details.

The College Division ceremony—the school’s 117th—will also include the bestowing of honorary doctorates to five arts world luminaries. In addition to conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who will also deliver the commencement speech, they are dancer, teacher, and stager Masazumi Chaya; bass-baritone Simon Estes (’64, voice); playwright Suzan-Lori Parks; and ethnomusicologist Ahmad Sarmast.

Masazumi Chaya
Masazumi Chaya was born in 1947 in Fukuoka, Japan, where he began classical ballet training. Upon moving to New York as a young adult in 1970, he studied modern dance and performed with the Richard Englund Repertory Company. Chaya joined Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1972 and performed with the company for 15 years before becoming its rehearsal director and, from 1991 to 2019, associate artistic director. In 2002, he coordinated the company’s appearance at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting. A recipient of the prestigious Dance Magazine award, Chaya provides creative assistance to the Masazumi Chaya Fund & Alvin Ailey Choreographic Legacy Project.

Chaya has restaged numerous ballets, including Ailey’s Flowers for the State Ballet of Missouri and The River for North Carolina Dance Theatre, Julio Bocca’s Ballet Argentino, Ballet Florida, the National Ballet of Prague, and the La Scala, Royal Swedish, Pennsylvania, and Colorado ballet companies. He has also restaged The Mooche, The Stack-Up, Episodes, Bad Blood, Hidden Rites, Witness, Blues Suite, Forgotten Time, Streams, Urban Folk Dance, and Vespers for the Ailey company as well as For ‘Bird’—With Love for a Great Performances: Dance in America program called Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Steps Ahead. As a performer, Chaya has appeared on Japanese television in dramatic and musical productions.

Simon Estes
Simon Estes (’64, voice; former faculty) has sung in 84 opera houses, with more than 115 orchestras and 90 conductors. The 102 roles he has performed include the Flying Dutchman, Boris Godunov, Attila, Nabucco, Macbeth, Figaro, Porgy, and Moses. The companies he has performed with include the Metropolitan, Chicago Lyric, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle operas; and the National Opera in Washington, D.C. In Europe, he has sung at the Liceu; Palais Garnier; Opéra Bastille; La Scala; and with the Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart operas. In 1978, as the Flying Dutchman, Estes became the first black male singer to perform at the Bayreuth Festival.

Born in Centerville, Iowa, in 1938, Estes did his undergraduate work at the University of Iowa before coming to Juilliard to study. He has sung for seven U.S. presidents and notable figures including Nelson Mandela, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, François Mitterrand, Boris Yeltsin, and Desmond Tutu. He has also sung for the Nobel Prize committee and is the only person who performed for the 25th, 50th, and 75th anniversaries of the United Nations. His humanitarian efforts with Nothing but Nets have helped provide mosquito nets for families across Africa and other countries where mosquitos spread malaria, while his foundations in Switzerland, Oklahoma, and Iowa have awarded more than 600 college scholarships for needy students. He also founded the Simon Estes Music High School in Cape Town, South Africa. In addition to having served on the Juilliard faculty, Estes has taught at Boston and Iowa State universities and Wartburg College and given lectures and master classes at Harvard, Duke, the University of Iowa, and around the world.

Suzan-Lori Parks
Tony, Pulitzer, and MacArthur “genius”-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most acclaimed voices in American drama. Born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 1963, she is an alumna of New Dramatists and Mount Holyoke College. Parks’ 365 Days/365 Plays project, in which she wrote a play daily for a year, was produced in more than 700 theaters worldwide. Her other plays include Topdog/Underdog (2002 Pulitzer Prize winner); The Book of Grace; Unchain My Heart: The Ray Charles Musical; In the Blood; Venus; The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World...; Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom; The America Play, and Fucking A.

Parks’ adaptation of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess won a Tony for best revival of a musical and her Father Comes Home From the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3), which was awarded Horton Foote and Edward M. Kennedy prizes, was a Pulitzer finalist. Her work for television and film includes adaptations of Native Son (NAACP Image Award) and Their Eyes Were Watching God and the original screenplays Girl 6 and The United States vs. Billie Holiday. She was also the showrunner for the Aretha Franklin season of Genius. During the pandemic, Parks embarked on another play-a-day writing project, resulting in Plays for the Plague Year, currently being workshopped at the Public Theater, where she is writer in residence and regularly offers her free online creativity class Watch Me Work.

Ahmad Naser Sarmast
A music educator and trumpeter born in Afghanistan, Ahmad Sarmast fled his home country in the 1990s, when music was forbidden under Taliban rule. Following the nation’s liberation, he returned to Kabul to establish the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM), of which he is the director. ANIM offers traditional Afghan and Western classical music education to children regardless of gender, ethnicity, or social background. When the Taliban retook power in 2021, musical rights and girls’ education were again jeopardized, and Sarmast worked with an international coalition of supporters to rescue the school’s 273 members and re-establish the school in Lisbon.

Sarmast and ANIM are winners of the 2018 Polar Prize. He is an honorary member of the Royal Philharmonic Society, London; an honorary fellow of London’s National College of Music; and he received the Asia Game Changer Award, Priorità Cultura’s Cultural Heritage Rescue Prize, a citation from the International Society for the Performing Arts, and, from the president of Afghanistan. the state medal of Sayed Jamaluddin and the honorary Civil Service Excellence and Innovation Award. Sarmast and ANIM have been the subject of films including Orchestre Zohra, seul ensemble musical 100% féminin d’Afghanistan (2022), Dangerous Music (2017), and Dr. Sarmast’s Music School (2012). He received his PhD in music from Monash University and his bachelor’s in performance and music education and a master’s in musicology/ethnomusicology from Moscow State Conservatory.

Michael Tilson Thomas
Grammy-winning conductor Michael Tilson Thomas was born in Los Angeles in 1944, studied conducting and composition at the University of Southern California, and, as a young musician, worked with artists including Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland. He became assistant conductor—and later principal guest conductor—of the Boston Symphony Orchestra before serving as music director and principal guest conductor with the Buffalo and Los Angeles philharmonics and the London Symphony Orchestra. In 1987, he co-founded the New World Symphony (NWS) and has worked with more than 1,200 NWS Fellows; in June, he becomes artistic director laureate. Tilson Thomas was named music director of the San Francisco Symphony in 1995, ushering in a period of growth and international recognition for the orchestra and championing contemporary and American composers alongside classical masters. His discography includes more than 120 recordings and his numerous televised performances include series for the BBC and PBS as well as the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts.

An active composer, Tilson Thomas has written such major works as From the Diary of Anne Frank, premiered with narrator Audrey Hepburn, and Meditations on Rilke. He is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France, a member of the American Academies of Arts & Sciences and Arts & Letters, National Medal of Arts recipient, and 2019 Kennedy Center honoree.

A Trio of Ceremonies

Tianjin Juilliard School Commencement

Time: May 20 at 10am (which is 10pm May 19 NY time)
Place: Tianjin Juilliard Concert Hall
Graduates: 33
Degree: master’s
Speaker: Joseph W. Polisi (president emeritus and chief China officer) plus additional speakers 
Performances: will include a first-year brass trio, the MILA Quartet, and the Spring Quintet

The Juilliard School Commencement

Time: May 20 at 10:30am 
Place: Damrosch Park (Peter Jay Sharp Theater in case of rain)
Stream: livestream available at juilliard.edu
Graduates: 316
Degrees: bachelor’s, master’s, artist diploma, doctorate 
Speaker: Michael Tilson Thomas plus additional speakers
Performances: will feature dance, drama, and music students

Preparatory Division Commencement

Time: May 21 at Noon
Place: Peter Jay Sharp Theater 
Stream: livestream; link by invitation
Graduates: about 100 
Degrees: certificates for Music Advancement Program (MAP) and Pre-College graduates 
Speaker: Wynton Marsalis (’81, trumpet; director of Juilliard Jazz)
Performances: will feature students from the programs