2006 Commencement Address

By Anthony Tommasini

Presented at the Westminster Choir College of Rider University Commencement, May 12, 2006, in the Princeton University Chapel.  This speech may not be reprinted without the permission of the author.

We have all seen movies and television shows with scenes of little children singing a song together in a school play or at a birthday party. Almost always the children sing very badly. Yet, inevitably in such scenes the kiddies are watched by beaming parents who find their off-pitch performance just adorable.

Not me. Such scenes, on film or in life, make me cringe. And I know that today I am speaking to a group of musicians who absolutely agree. There is no excuse for children singing badly. There’s nothing cute about it.

All children can sing in tune and in sync if they are simply taught to do so. Of course, some children are more innately musical than others. But to suggest that some children are just NOT musical--so what are you going to do?--is like saying that some children just can’t draw. Or that some children are just not athletic. I’m sorry, if a child can run and kick a ball, that child can be taught to play sports, at least for fun.

I know that those of you graduating today have diverse specialties and objectives. You are chorus directors and conductors, singers and accompanists, music teachers, composers, instrumentalists, church musicians, musical theater performers. But you all share a connection to the great tradition of choral music. And no tradition is more basic, more essential to musical culture.

I wish America’s public schools understood this better, though, finally, after letting music and the arts languish for decades, governments, at least certain state governments, are realizing what has been lost and are starting to restore arts programs. In Scandinavian countries they have long made the performing arts an educational priority.

A few years ago I spent a week in Risor, a lovely little town in southeastern Norway, where the young pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, who is just about my favorite pianist these days, runs an annual week-long chamber music festival: some two dozen concerts are performed over six days--concerts morning, noon and night, and sometimes midnight, since Norway in June has 20 hours of sunlight each day. Well, in the middle of this little Norwegian fishing village and vacation spot, there was a well-equipped and modern music building. Every town in Norway is required by the government to have a music building as a resource for the local schools.

Look at Finland. Why are so many accomplished composers, conductors and singers coming out of Finland? It’s simple: you get what you pay for. And music is a priority in today’s Finland.

Music education there begins with choral singing. Children are taught to sing together and sight-read long before they are encouraged to take up individual instruments. So when the students are a little older and choose, say, the violin, they are already well-trained little musicians who have learned that music is a social activity, not just something you do at the piano, by yourself, in lonely practice sessions while other kids are off having fun.

I know that many of you will work with highly skilled professional musicians in ensembles, universities, major metropolitan churches, on Broadway. Others among you will work with earnest amateurs, and there is nothing more important. Only by offering everyone a direct involvement with music will we develop not just future artists but future audiences.

Today in America, amateur choruses in cities, churches and schools are bastions of the venerable amateur music-making tradition. I’ll never forget an experience I had with the Harvard Glee Club in 1983. It was the chorus’s 125th anniversary and the composer Virgil Thomson, whom I wrote a book about and who was an important mentor to me as a critic, had composed a piece for the Harvard Glee Club gala concert. Virgil had sung in the chorus as a Harvard undergraduate. His piece was scored for chorus and piano, and the piano part was rather tricky. Well, on the day of the dress rehearsal, which I attended with Virgil, the glee club’s regular accompanist had to be absent to take an exam. So, for the run-through the piano part was played by the president of the glee club, a med school-bound chemistry major who had made it a point to learn the piano part, just in case. He played it very well. Now that’s dedication. How wonderful that many of you will teach and foster amateur musicians like that gifted young man.

Choosing the arts as a profession takes dedication. And courage. Every time someone starts talking about the long, hard path to a career in medicine, I roll my eyes and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” It’s a long and grueling path. But at the end there is a definite payoff. As a fledgling doctor you have seemingly unlimited choices: you can work in a rural clinic, or an urban hospital; you can make a handsome living, or be a modern-day apostle to the poor.

Now, think of all the young people in the arts, singularly talented people like yourselves, who take out loans and earn degrees with no real assurance at the time that it will lead to anything. Now that is a long, hard path. That’s what you have done, and that’s why I so admire you.

So where’s your payoff? The payoff has come already. The payoff is that you deeply love what you do. And it’s a minority of people in the world who can say this about their work.

But, rest assured--and I’m speaking here especially to the parents--these young musicians have chosen some of the most pragmatic areas in the field of music. Here’s a statistic about Westminster Choir College that caught the attention of this journalist in preparing to speak to you: the music education program here boasts 11 consecutive years of 100 percent placement of graduates; and the masters program in sacred music has placed 100 percent of its students for the last 21 years. Can Columbia Law School boast such success? I doubt it.

While I’m on the topic of parents, let me offer my congratulations to the all parents who are here today. You could have fretted over your children’s futures and economic security, and counseled them to find sensible and safe professions. Yet, here you are, supporting them in their passions, and that is just wonderful.

Traditionally, a commencement speaker is supposed to offer advice, right? Well, I have some advice. Here it comes.

It’s of course important to have a clear goal, an artistic ambition, and to have the tenaciousness to stick to it until you realize your ambition. On the other hand, it can be just as important to sense when some interesting variation in your plan presents itself, some twist in the path that you did not anticipate. You don’t want to be so fixed on a goal that you close yourself off to potential opportunities.

Let me give you a couple of illustrations. Here’s one of the most amazing examples of a tenacious creative artist, a story both inspirational and tragic.

In January of 1996 I went to the New York Theater Workshop, a scrappy company that operates in a 150-seat theater in East Greenwich Village. I was there to watch the final dress rehearsal of a new rock musical. The show was an updating of the opera “La Boheme,” with Puccini’s hungry young bohemians transformed and relocated to the East Village in the 1990s. The show, of course was, “Rent.”

After the dress rehearsal, I sat down for an interview with the composer and lyricist of the show, Jonathan Larson. Then 35, a bushy-haired guy with soft brown eyes, Jonathan was living in a ramshackle West Village apartment, and had worked for ten years as a waiter to support his musical theater ambitions. Finally, with “Rent,” he had his first, full-fledged professional production, scheduled for a run of six weeks.

Because of this production he had recently been able to quit his restaurant job, as he proudly told me that night. “I have other commissions coming in,” he said, “and it looks like I am going to be able to have a life as a composer.”

As some of you may know, he left that interview with me at close to midnight, went home alone, collapsed on his kitchen floor, and died of an aortic aneurysm. It was a fluky, awful and probably preventable death. “Rent” went on to win for Jonathan Larson, posthumously, two Tony Awards (Best Score and Best Book) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In the last ten years “Rent” has had some 200 productions around the world. And it’s still going strong at the Nederlander Theater on Broadway.

That Jonathan Larson died when he was on the verge of such achievement is horrible. But I don’t mean to sentimentalize the guy. He had big ambitions and was terribly frustrated. Prior to “Rent,” he had written and performed an autobiographical one-man show that was basically an anguished, angry monologue about his struggle to gain acceptance for his art. But what came across to me while talking with him in the last hour of his life was how deeply he loved theater, how quietly confident he was about his work, how gratified he was with the support he had received over the years from mentors like Stephen Sondheim, and how much he ached to fulfill his potential. He used to tell his friends, “Just wait until I win my Tony, just wait until I get my first New York Times interview.” So before he died he knew that at least one of his fantasies was coming true. I feel honored to have played, however inadvertently, a part in that.

Now, on the other hand: While you must put your energy and soul into what you do artistically, you should also be open to change, to evolution, open to other aspects of the field that you may not have thought about. Here, my own case is a good example.

As a music student I had a clear goal: to be the best pianist I could be, and to teach music in a college. That seemed achievable at the time, though it took me until I was 29 to get that full-time teaching job--at Emerson College in Boston. After seven years of doing what I thought was good work, work that was acknowledged with awards from the college and such, I lost my job in one of those absurd tenure decisions. But don’t get me started on that.

Anyway, at 36 I was looking for another teaching job and not having much success. Then, I had this notion about maybe writing music criticism. I approached the Boston Globe, they tried me out, then started using me as a regular freelance critic. Suddenly, I was carving out a living as a journalist.

In 1994 I moved to New York, or back to New York I should say, since I was born in Brooklyn. One thing led to another and here I am, the chief classical music critic at the Times.

The point is, if anyone had told me when I was your age that someday I would be a Times critic and an author I would have laughed. I didn’t plan this. Yet, when I look back at my life, it all makes a kind of sense. I was always an avid reader, and I loved to write--I had even enjoyed writing course papers. I wrote lots of what I thought were very amusing letters to friends. At Yale I had toyed for a while with majoring in English, but I loved music too much. Maybe this was meant to be.

So, have I failed at my initial plan to be a pianist and teacher? Or has my career just taken an unanticipated turn? To me it feels like the latter. To some of you it may seem like I gave up the struggle and joined the other side. But I bet we share the same goals. We all want the cultural resources of our communities to be rich, varied, and accessible. We all admire artists who have honest, dedicated relationships to their arts.

In retrospect, even though at the time it was a kick in the teeth, I am so glad that I did not get tenure at Emerson College. None of what has happened to me since would have happened.

So stick to your goals, yet be alert to change, and for better or worse, global change is coming to all fields of communications. Take journalism. There are some very smart people at the New York Times whose jobs, basically, involve sitting around and trying to address some looming questions, like: Will there be a printed New York Times in 20 years? Or, How do we maintain the Times’ website as an enrichment to what we do, without letting it render the newspaper obsolete?

It’s a tumultuous time to be in journalism. But I am privileged to have my job. As a critic I can champion remarkable veteran artists who have been overlooked, or bring attention to exciting new artists, people like you. This summer I’m covering performances at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany and the Salzburg Festival in Austria, two of the most prestigious festivals in the world. Yet next Sunday I’m reviewing a performance by the New York Youth Symphony at Carnegie Hall. These musicians, mostly high school aged, are going to tackle Mahler’s mighty Sixth Symphony. I love hearing the concerts of unjaded student musicians who are thrilled to be playing a Mahler symphony or a Stravinsky ballet score for the first time.

But let me tell you a secret. My job is hard; it involves a lot of writing, a lot of responsibility and a lot of pressure. But what you graduates are going to do in our field is harder and, in the end, more essential. And not just because you are going to teach little kids to sing in tune. It truly inspires me to be with you today.

Still, I can be a help to your careers. So, let me end with something Virgil Thomson wrote about the role of the critic. When visiting Spain, a country he loved, Thomson observed that that it took three children to play at bullfighting: one to be the bull, one to be the toreador, and one to stand off to the side and shout, “Ole.” Music criticism is like that, he wrote. So, to all the graduates on this joyful day, I say, “Ole.”