Sep 18, 2020 · by Heather O’Donovan

The music world has been devastated by the effects of the global pandemic. But for all of the challenges facing professional musicians during this time, an equally herculean obstacle has been facing another part of the music industry: our conservatories. When the pandemic reached the United States just over six months ago, students were in the middle of their spring semesters. Many of these schools had to suddenly pivot as they reluctantly embraced a fully online format. Voice lessons had to happen over Zoom with inconsistent audio and shoddy microphones; students without personal access to instruments like pianos, harps, and organs were left without anything to play; and international students who had returned home were up at 2 am for classes with their peers back in the United States. Conservatories were doing all they could to provide the highest level of education, but the change had come so swiftly that most were knocked off their feet, stumbling to regain their balance.

Fast forward to today, and music schools around the country are opening their doors — whether literally or figuratively — for the new semester. Unlike six months ago, however, they’re prepared to face the challenges. I spoke with leadership at conservatories across the country to get a sense of how they’ve adapted to these unprecedented times. What they shared with me was a deeply heartening show of ingenuity, creativity, and resilience.

The Big Decision: Online vs. Hybrid Instruction

Conversations around reopening plans began as early as last spring, as leadership liaised with faculty, boards of trustees, government officials, health consultants, building engineers, members of greater university leadership teams, and students to develop plans that would not only ensure the health and safety of all parties involved, but also promise a consistently high level of education. With every virus surge and policy change came new obstacles to tackle, but now as the fall semester begins, the dust has settled, allowing us a peek inside.

In New York City, three conservatories — the Manhattan School of Music, The Juilliard School, and The College of Performing Arts at The New School — decided upon three distinct plans. For The New School’s College of Performing Arts, which includes the Mannes School of Music, the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, and the School of Drama, the decision was made in the spring: all instruction would be fully remote. But the Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard opted instead for hybrid models, including remote academic instruction and a degree of in-person performance work. As Richard Kessler, Dean of Mannes, told me in a Zoom interview, “We had some level of anxiety over the number of schools and universities that were stating they were going to be hybrid or in-person. And we received a lot of criticism from students about that over the summer.”

The dichotomy between online and hybrid fall semesters isn’t just limited to New York City. Across the country, schools made similarly difficult decisions. While the Thornton School of Music at USC and Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University chose to have a fully remote semester, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Yale School of Music, Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, and New England Conservatory opted instead for different iterations of the hybrid solution.

The Manhattan School of Music’s hybrid model includes what they’re calling a “track” plan: In-person performance work extends throughout the semester (socially-distanced and with small groups only) as a complement to their online academic instruction. It’s staggered among various tracks, with those in track A, for example, meeting in-person September 9 to December 18, while those in track B have a delayed start (November 1) and end (January 29). Track C is an intensive four-week program running from January 4–29, and track D is an entirely remote option.

Juilliard, in contrast, chose a “block”-based hybrid model. The school offered a summer term that allowed students to get a jumpstart on their academic coursework, and extended the fall term from 15 to 21 weeks, divided into three “blocks,” the first two devoted largely to academics and the third to performance. According to Juilliard’s Provost Adam Meyer, “What that allowed us to do is to start conservatively. Our building is open right now … but really only to students who absolutely need the building as a resource to do their work — an organist, for example, who needs an instrument to practice on. And the idea is that by the time we get to block two, we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to phase in more in-person and small ensemble work, obviously socially-distanced, and have more people with regular access to the building. And then, by the time the academic coursework is completed in blocks one and two, then block three, which is January and February, is really focused on performance, and more of a performance festival–like schedule.”

The Yale School of Music instituted a similar block-based approach, with academics being front-ended into the semester and performance work delayed until its completion. As Dean Robert Blocker explained, “One of the reasons that we wanted a block approach to study is because we have so many international students. We wanted to maximize the opportunity for many of them to get back to campus.”

Working Across Time Zones

Indeed, many of the conservatories I spoke with have high populations of international students, and a major challenge was how to ensure inclusivity for them, spread across wildly-incompatible time zones. Manhattan School of Music Provost Joyce Griggs shared the conservatory’s approach: “Within the tracks … we’ve created three primary time bands, two of which include the bulk of our online experiences for academic courses.” Classes are being split between morning and evening time blocks to accommodate 12- to 13-hour time differences, and afternoon time blocks to accommodate those students in Europe or on the West Coast. “It wasn’t just, ‘Let’s just take the fall schedule from 2019 and implant it onto the fall of 2020,’ without any regard to where our students are at.’”

Additionally, schools are also working to accommodate time zone differences by ensuring online academic instruction is offered asynchronously — meaning that it can be accessed at any time of day.

Adapting Classes to the Zoom “Room”

But with all this talk of scheduling and asynchronicity, I couldn’t help but wonder how academic coursework itself was adapting in response to the changing format. Had classes been reimagined in any significant way for this new remote learning module, or were faculty members largely implanting the old onto a very different new? More broadly, had curricula experienced any significant, purposeful changes?

At San Francisco Conservatory, they realized throughout the spring that having two instructors in a Zoom class (rather than one) helped increase engagement, so they decided to extend this to other academic courses in preparation for the fall. At the Manhattan School of Music, keyboard skills instructor and Associate Dean for Assessment and Programs Lisa Yui realized that if she embedded lecture notes with audio recordings explaining complex concepts, students could experience the lectures remotely in advance, and then use class time for more discussion-based learning. “She’s finding that by using this technology, it’s helping her actually accelerate the learning of the students,” explained Griggs.

And at The New School’s College of Performing Arts, as just one example, the entire curriculum has been revamped for the fall. Taking a cue from the successes and failures of the spring, they pulled down every single course from the catalog. “We decided we wanted to create a structure that would be accordion-like, that could expand or contract depending on the number of students, and we wanted to run more of the courses that we felt worked well online in the spring and run fewer of the courses that didn’t.”

Ensuring Access to Technology

Throughout my conversations with deans, provosts, and presidents, the same theme kept coming up again and again — that of technological advancements that would otherwise have taken years to implement suddenly materializing in a matter of weeks, and sometimes, even days. My conversations were filled with talk of performance software, USB microphones, USB keyboards, audio interfaces, Zoom, Canvas, SoundTrap, ToneRow, Dante … But as Dean Robert Cutietta of USC’s Thornton School of Music pointed out, “The thing we’re finding is the hardest is not us giving the instruction, but it’s the receiving of the instruction.”

For students with inconsistent access to laptops or tablets, slow Wi-Fi speeds, and any number of distractions that come with family or roommates, it can be difficult to get the most out of remote classes, no matter how much work goes into perfecting them on the conservatory’s end. One response to such challenges for students local to New Haven is that Yale has opened the technologically-advanced private instruction studios of faculty members who are teaching from home, so students who wish to take their private lessons remotely have access to the best-quality audio and video technology. But many conservatories, including Yale, have tried a simpler approach: In an effort to assuage inequities in the ways students receive remote academic instruction, they have established funds, generously provided by donors, to provide financial assistance.

Performing in Remote and Socially-Distanced Settings

Performance is an integral element of conservatory life, but how are students supposed to perform if even professionals can’t get back in the theaters? While there won’t be any large pieces performed at schools this fall, we will get a rich breadth of chamber and small ensemble music that, in other academic years, may have been otherwise overshadowed by the larger orchestral and operatic works. As New England Conservatory’s Vice President and Provost Tom Novak explained to me, “It is not playing a Mahler Symphony, but there still are some really specific and meaningful learning outcomes that can happen with this repertoire, and I would say one of the things that we’ve all kind of learned, in any industry, is the idea of resilience and flexibility and kind of adaptability. As things continue to evolve, we’ve had to evolve with them.”

Indeed, for those schools that have elected to offer performance work to students this fall, things will look vastly different.

At the Thornton School of Music, which is all remote this semester, students will pre-record tracks, which will then be spliced together. Cutietta sees an unexpected learning benefit from this: “[The students will] record several times and decide [which take is best], so they’re doing their own analysis. Pedagogically, you could not be stronger than that. Yeah, the interaction and the human aspect where there’s a little glance between performers so that you know what’s going on [is missing]. We’re never going to replace that. But this is really a great way to do it. It’s so much more pedagogically student-centric.”

And as Dean and Chief Academic Officer of San Francisco Conservatory Jonas Wright explained to me, “One of the things that we can do now with a system called Dante here in the building is that we could put a pianist in one hall and a vocalist in another, and stream sort of split screen that way, and they can be listening to each other and playing music.”

For all of these alternatives, there will be rehearsals and coachings and, yes, even some performances this fall. At schools like Manhattan School of Music and the Jacobs School of Music, for example, there will be in-person, socially-distanced rehearsals and performances, with a cap on the number of performers permitted in the same space, and with no outside audiences. According to MSM’s Griggs, “We also have some outdoor performances planned.”

And there’s a plethora of creative remote solutions for those students who have remained at home. At Thornton, they created Thornton/LIVE, a virtual stage for students, and at San Francisco Conservatory, they created a similar series called Tiny Dorm Concerts. And at a school like Peabody, while there may be no live performances or in-person performance work this fall, the students are still working hard. According to Dean Fred Bronstein, in addition to remote performance opportunities and remote recitals, voice students will also have the opportunity to learn a full role. “[This] is not something you necessarily always do in an opera program, but everybody’s learning a full role in Così fan tutte and Turn of the Screw.”

My favorite solution is a partnership that Jonas Wright of San Francisco Conservatory shared with me: “San Francisco has had a partnership with Shanghai Conservatory since 1978. It’s the longest running partnership between a Chinese and American conservatory in the country. And we have been great friends with them for a long time.” The two schools have worked out a partnership for the fall semester that allows between 30 to 40 SFCM international students based in China to pursue their performance studies at the Shanghai Conservatory. “Students from SFCM that are enrolled here will be doing their academic coursework online, but they’ll be doing ensemble work with Shanghai.” The New England Conservatory and Manhattan School of Music also have partnerships of their own with the conservatory, and so both schools will be following SFCM’s lead. Ultimately, approximately 100 students will be pursuing their performance work at Shanghai Conservatory. “This makes me really proud to see us reaching across the ocean and across the country, to our partners in Boston, New York, and then in Shanghai and find a way to come together.”

Certain programs have been more fortunate than others during this time. For schools like Yale, Jacobs, and Peabody, which are all part of larger universities, their financial and special resources have allowed for a degree of flexibility that other conservatories have not benefited from. Jacobs, for example, benefits from Indiana University’s rigorous testing system and other resources. As Dean Jeremy Allen explained, “We feel lucky to be part of a bigger institution, both for resources but also for square footage. We have a lot of square footage to work with here, and we recognize that that’s an incredible benefit that we don’t want to take for granted. And that is enabling us to keep some activities going.” One particular perk is that they’ve been able to keep their residence halls open, while a school like the New England Conservatory has made the painful decision to close them in an effort to preserve the health and safety of students. Similarly, Allen explained that they were able to retain much of their performance season in one way or another: “We are doing all of the chamber music concerts, and we’re still doing historical performance, jazz, and large ensembles because they fit within the restrictions that we have.” Choral ensembles pose a challenge, as do large-scale operas and ballets, but they’ve made modifications to try to offer the best opportunities possible. “If you’re looking at total numbers, we are probably going to do 70 to 80% of what we normally would have done in terms of just performance activities.”

Building in Adaptability

Despite all of the planning, ever-changing conditions still pose challenges. At the time of my conversation with San Francisco Conservatory’s Wright, the school leadership was in the process of revamping their plan in response to government pushback. “Our plan is a little bit in limbo at the moment. We appealed to the current regulations that the city put in, and we actually feel pretty strong with our appeal. I think that we’ll be able to continue as we planned, but it doesn’t seem like these days anything is very easy.” In a worst-case scenario, if their request for in-person performance instruction does not get approved, they’ve got a backup ask: allow them to use the technological systems they’ve developed to connect students in practice rooms with their teachers in the studios next door.

Schools have built adaptability into their plans, and, of course, in the event of a virus surge, everything will go fully remote. Yet despite all the challenges and uncertainty, leaders see the silver lining. As NEC’s Novak emphasized, “Some outcomes of this are going to be enormously influential in how we think about our futures, and I think it’s a good thing.” It’s a sentiment echoed by Allen: “What we really see happening is a wonderful opportunity for all of us … to sort of recognize that the environment has changed the typical path forward that we’re all used to walking on. It has become obscured. And so this is this incredible opportunity for people to reevaluate their motivations, and why it is that they’re doing this, and how they can continue to do it. It’s offered this clarity that I didn’t know we were expecting.”

The future isn’t looking too shabby, either. At MSM, Griggs told me, they’ve built a digital literacy module to teach the basics of how to use whatever technology students have to make optimal video and audio recordings. According to Griggs, “That will likely become a consistent learning piece of our curriculum.”

And when we do come back in person, Blocker ponders, “The real trick will be how you develop a curriculum for your students and help them launch a career in a post COVID world. That’s really going to be a huge challenge for all of us, I think. And I’m optimistic about it because there’s always been music. But the challenge now is a little bit different because we’re at a very interesting intersection of several crises. And hopefully music is going to be at the table for these conversations.”

via www.wqxr.org