In this essay, the author examines one of the most essential challenges facing the field: How should we train future early musicians?
Higher education typically emphasizes both scholarship and performance, and many North American schools offer excellent training. But at the extremes, one approach seeks a ‘deeper understanding’ of what’s played; the other might be closer to how an actual musician in the Baroque era would have learned.
The landscape of early music in North America would look fundamentally different without the network of North American conservatories, universities, and colleges cultivating historical performance as a bonafide field. These schools not only offer crucial sources for the kinds of institutional support needed for an interdisciplinary, research-intensive arena, but also serve as incubators for burgeoning professional musicians.
Although the study of historical performance demands a mutualistic relationship between playing and rigorous scholarship, in the pressure-cooker of a conservatory environment where time and energy can be scarce, things can quickly become a zero-sum game. Do I read a chapter for my seminar or prepare for a lesson? These are real questions with meaningful ramifications for a student’s success and artistic identity.
The traditional script for institutions across the country — from Indiana University (IU) and University of Southern California to Ohio’s Oberlin Conservatory, Montreal’s McGill University, and Baltimore’s Peabody Institute, among others— emphasizes performance and scholarship with the objective of giving students a wide view of the field while also cultivating the kind of individual curiosity that drives innovation and discovery.
Dana Marsh, artistic director of the Washington Bach Consort and chair of IU’s Historical Performance Institute, argues that the basic objective of an early-music program should be to offer not only offer technical training, but also to “establish something in terms of curriculum that answers the question, ‘What should students know when they leave?’” informing their ability to “carry on an intelligent discussion in reference to their playing.”
For Marsh, drawing a clear border between learning and playing is, if not a false dichotomy, then certainly a messy one. “Often the folks who want to read more — or play more — treat the issue as a sort of Cartesian problem, inferring that [it’s] a one-way street of research to performance. It should flow in both directions.”
Dorian Bandy, coordinator for McGill’s Early Music Area, echoes this point, telling me that “a lot of the reading and writing I’ve done in my life, I’ve done with my violin in my hand. To someone peering into the practice room years ago when I was first grappling with Geminiani, it wouldn’t be obvious whether this was ‘violin time’ or ‘reading time.’”
For his 2023 book, Mozart the Performer: Variations on the Showman’s Art, Bandy recalls that “large portions were written at the piano in an act that, to an outside observer, might have looked like practicing.”
Compared to their European counterparts, North American conservatories tend to impose greater structure — mandatory ensemble playing, coursework both in and out of musical arenas — to an extent that students often feel their days are largely pre-planned. That may not always be a good thing.
“One of my main goals as an educator,” Bandy says, “is to let the students be free and not impose a prescriptive agenda on them, to let them decide what they want to get from the McGill early-music experience. Of course, this is not a substitute for technical rigor on their instruments — but beyond that, I do my best to protect their time from the encroachment of coursework and school responsibilities.
“I’m sure that if you look back in your own life,” he adds, “you did some of your best learning when you were least burdened with coursework.”
If you look back, ‘you did some of your best learning when you were least burdened with coursework.’
Perhaps no two institutions represent the two extremes of the scholarship vs. performance continuum more — at least by reputation— than Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University and the Juilliard School’s Historical Performance program in New York City.
To tease apart the differences and consider the relative merits, I had conversations with several current and past Case and Juilliard students. They each tended to follow a familiar cadence. For the former school, they might be paraphrased as “I’m glad I went, but I sure did read a lot.” For the latter: “I’m glad I went, but I sure did play a lot.”
On paper, both programs offer similar fare: comparable academic requirements, leading instructors, and the promise of working with world-class guest talent. And, importantly, both provide free tuition; Case also gives students a living stipend.
In practice, however, the differences are glaring: Juilliard’s career-based approach centers on music from 1600 onward, whereas Case exposes students to music from the Middle Ages to the Romantic era. The Juilliard Historical Performance program is geared towards master’s students, whereas a slight majority of Case students either start or end up in the DMA program. Juilliard’s focus on large ensembles is, at a glance, wildly different from the prominence given to chamber ensembles at Case. The list goes on.
But this isn’t just a comparison of methodology. In many ways, these two approaches represent a larger tension as to what should be emphasized in early-music education going forward: playing or studying. And it’s a question whose answers — and there are many — will shape the futures of the field of early music for decades to come.
The Case for Case
When he auditioned for a spot in Case Western Reserve’s Historical Performance Practice department, Judah Coffman recalls feeling “so enamored by how much everyone took everything so seriously.”
“I really, really got bit hard by the early-music bug,” he says. “I was considering maybe getting a Ph.D. in musicology. And I was also into Medieval stuff. Case just seemed like the place where I could try everything.”
Coffman began as an M.A. student focusing on vocal performance, but soon found himself devoting more and more time to the viola da gamba, which became a primary focus by the time he entered the DMA program. (Students in the master’s program can, after just a few semesters, petition to enroll in a Ph.D. or DMA.)
“The neat thing about Case is that there really isn’t an instrument name in the degree we get. You just get a degree in historical performance practice. They really do want us to try everything. They really do want you to be thrust into Medieval ensemble, or they want you to do a Schubert project at A=430 Hz.”
Questioning whether the things they were doing in rehearsal had any real historical basis, or were modern inventions
And then there was the research. On average, Coffman estimates that time devoted to performance and scholarship shared “a pretty even split.” Particularly among the DMA candidates, he describes an environment characterized by constant, tireless scrutiny as to whether or not the things they were doing in rehearsal had any real historical basis, “or whether they were modern inventions. And then we had to decide what to do about it.”
Predictably, this often resulted in delirious (albeit productive) exhaustion. As Coffman looks back on his time at Case, he observes, “I think the hardest part was just that there weren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things you wanted to do. I think it’s because our department was so small and so full of really brilliant, hardworking people who cared so deeply. But no one was really telling us to slow down.”
“The ideal Case student,” says violinist Julie Andrijeski, head of the Historical Performance Practice Department and a product of Case herself, “is a curious, self-motivated, highly trained individual with a passion to pursue both research and performance in early music. Our goal is to provide them with solid performance, leadership, and teaching skills while leaving them space to hone their own specialized interests.”
Intellectual scope and academic rigor, Andrijeski argues, are what sets Case graduates apart from many of their peers: “Graduates of our program, as well as colleagues who employ them, often say that there is something special about their performances, that they have a deeper understanding of the music they play.” One aim is “exploring newly rediscovered repertoire, or more nuanced ways of playing and singing that move the early-music field forward.”
Violinist Alan Choo’s choice to attend Case largely centered around Andrijeski’s teaching, particularly how she opened him up to new ways of thinking about phrasing inspired by her expertise as a Baroque dancer. (There are few things more central to understanding Baroque music than intimate knowledge of the dance suite, and Case’s Baroque dance class takes this a step further, so to speak, than most.)
‘You can’t run away from the scholarly aspect…otherwise you won’t really grow as a mature performer’
Although the program’s course load is notoriously demanding, Choo found that there was still room to hand-tailor his education. During his first two years, he entered competitions to keep motivated to learn new repertoire quickly, even if it prevented him from taking part in offerings like the Medieval and Renaissance ensembles until his third or fourth years. He also was able to spend time gigging with Cleveland groups like Apollo’s Fire — of which he’s now concertmaster and assistant artistic director alongside the ensemble’s founder, Jeannette Sorrell.
“I always tell new people going in that it’s important to be very clear what your priorities are,” Choo advises. “You can’t run away from the scholarly aspect of things. You definitely have to spend some time on it, otherwise you won’t really grow as a mature performer. But going to Case, I was getting what I wanted to get, which was to become a better Baroque violinist.”
Juilliard: Game Changer or Re-arranger?
By now, Juilliard’s Historical Performance program needs little introduction. Though still relatively young — the first degrees were conferred in 2011 — it’s known as a top-tier training ground. In conversations with educators and musicians across the country, descriptors like “launch pad” and “springboard” make frequent appearances.
Indeed, the cover story in the May 2024 edition of this magazine outlines its meteoric rise with a title appropriate for the Juilliard luster: “The Game Changer.”
Game changer? I admit to being skeptical of such a moniker in a field whose rich and vibrant array of post-secondary institutions enjoy such a storied history, and whose mission statements are each motivated by expanding the field, albeit in different ways.
But there is also no denying that Juilliard’s is a very different kind of program. It resembles a cross between a traditional conservatory environment and a pre-professional training orchestra akin to modern counterparts like Miami’s New World Symphony or the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, particularly with its emphasis on Juilliard415 (or J415), the program’s crack period-instrument ensemble.
Juilliard’s mentorship-focused, performance-oriented approach may seem careerist. But it’s arguably closer to the kind of education a musician alive in the 17th or 18th century would have experienced than one of today’s Baroque-informed musicians. After all, there is a reason Couperin claimed that anyone who isn’t French shouldn’t bother attempting French music — there is more to style than can be found in a treatise.
It’s no exaggeration to say that J415 informs just about every aspect of the Juilliard experience.
“Juilliard’s biggest priority is J415 and on playing together with other students,” says violinist Eleanor Legault, who I managed to catch just days before a J415 European tour, one of many the ensemble takes annually to places as far flung as Bolivia, India, or New Zealand. “I love the teachers and the coursework, but we also learn a lot from each other. There’s nothing like this kind of on-the-job training.”
But in terms of leaving time for scholarly discussion in rehearsal, it varies. “So much depends on the guest director,” Legault says. “I would say certain guest directors have done so phenomenally and made space for [stylistic discussion], and we have sounded incredible. It’s been such a privilege to be a part of that orchestra when everyone gives everything on stage, and there’s one cohesive, convincing musical idea that’s presented.” Other times, “I feel there are a lot of similarities to a modern orchestra: Follow the concertmaster’s bow to the ends of the earth, and play together.”
Lutenist and music theorist Charles Weaver, who began teaching at Juilliard in 2014 and was appointed a full-time instructor last year, remarks that “over time we’ve wanted to incorporate a historically informed way of thinking into more aspects of what the students do academically, not just what they experience in their private lessons and in ensembles.”
Much of Weaver’s pedagogy centers around historical traditions that may offer contemporary value to today’s early-music performers. His students don’t just spend a few minutes in class learning about the Guidonian Hand, they learn to sing with it. He also places a heavy emphasis on partimento, the playing of fully fledged harmony and counterpoint from a bassline and abbreviations — since, in the 18th century, Weaver argues, a “complete” musician needed to improvise and compose as well as play. If it was true then, why not today?
That said, “we do have to tailor our teaching schedule around J415. It’s just the nature of our department that, every once in a while, they’re going to pack up and go to New Zealand for three weeks, or whatever, on tour. But I don’t feel that there’s any conflict.”
In 2018, pioneering musicologist Thomas Forrest Kelly was invited to teach core studies courses at Juilliard. It was a far cry from the almost exclusively academic environment of Harvard University, where he has long served on faculty. By contrast, Juilliard’s HP program “is essentially an apprenticeship and, in that sense, I think it’s working,” says Kelly. “They get to meet all the best performers and get to play for people like William Christie and Ton Koopman who might hire them one day. They basically play their asses off.”
Kelly finds the students to be curious, albeit busy: “I taught a boot camp in early notation where we would sing Dufay chansons from manuscripts, for instance. They enjoyed it, but it’s not clear that any of those skills are absolutely necessary to be a good HP performer. Although they are needed to be a good HP historian or scholar.”
An Imperfect Harmony
As our early-music revival continues to evolve, early-music education will need to evolve with it. Students now have access to an incredible array of recordings and resources beyond the manuscripts that their teachers, or at least their teachers’ teachers, needed to rely upon. It is, for better or for worse, now possible for a Baroque violin student to become a convincing player without ever having read Geminiani, or a flutist Quantz.
So are we returning to the kind of learning more familiar to musicians centuries ago? Or does the only way forward still require constant scholarly re-evaluation of familiar sources and repertoires?
Both, and neither. While there’s no way to restore the distant past, there’s also no point in limiting ourselves to existing methodologies. The trick is to find a balance: a pre-professional program such as Juilliard’s is by no means throwing baby Dolmetsch out with the bath water, nor has Case locked itself within its ivory tower.
Ultimately, these are two different programs with two different approaches. Yet in many ways, they may be moving closer together. Case, for instance, is transitioning to a project-based approach to its ensemble work, not unlike Juilliard. Juilliard, conversely, has been making increasing attempts in recent years to provide more structure in its coursework.
There is, thankfully, no one-size-fits-all approach to early-music education. To pretend that one program has it all is to also assume that there is one ideal path to study early music. Fundraising, audience-building, and equity in representation are among our ever-present concerns. I might argue, however, that re-examining the ways we train future early musicians may now be at the forefront, with the potential to shape all other aspects of the field. What might become of that remains to be seen and heard but, as in all things musical, we can only hope for better harmony.
Jacob Jahiel is a writer, arts administrator, and viola da gamba player living in Baltimore.
