Stefan Weisman
Kristi Martel
Ana Cervantes


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Stefan Weisman
Candidate for Ph.D. in Composition
at Princeton University

The Bard Music Department does not provide "cookie-cutter" conservatory training. Instead the faculty cultivates musicality, a critical sense and an understanding and appreciation of new developments in the language of contemporary music. I benefited greatly from working one-on-one with the Bard music faculty, and from hearing all of my work publicly performed by professional musicians. This support encouraged me to study music seriously. Looking back, I appreciate more than ever how fortunate I was to have attended Bard.

I remember as a freshman deciding to call Joan Tower to ask for permission take her composition class -- I loved music so I just thought it would be fun, but I had no previous experience with composition at all. Joan told me that I could take her class, but that before the semester began I should write a piece for solo clarinet. Oh, how I struggled over that ninety-second solo piece! And how thrilled I was to have Laura Flax, then a member of the Da Capo Chamber Players perform it. Just a few years later I was composing my first orchestral work and my Senior Project, "flea circus," which was premiered by the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, conducted by Leon Botstein.

I remember that as the time approached for me to invite professors to sit on my Senior Project board I found it difficult to limit myself to only three members. I studied composition with Joan Tower and Daron Hagen, but also worked closely with both Sarah Rothenberg, who at the time was a member of the Da Capo Chamber Players, and Luis Garcia-Renart. I requested them all to be on my panel, but was surprised and honored that two additional faculty members decided to sit in: Richard Teitelbaum and Leo Smith. Thus, the panel’s total went from the usual three to six. This faculty involvement was typical of the intimate and personalized education I received in the Bard Music Department. I only truly began to appreciate all that I had gained as I prepared to leave.

Even now, after receiving a Master’s in Music from Yale, and as I am working towards a Ph.D. in music composition at Princeton University, it is still Joan’s voice I hear in my ears as I work, admonishing me to work slowly and carefully, and to seek "one's own voice." That’s a phrase I remember being tossed around among Bard’s student composers, along with the inevitable: "drowning." I suspect that words like this are still commonplace among Bard music majors. And I suspect that they will not appreciate how lucky they are to have studied music at Bard until after they have left…

-Stefan Weisman

AUDIO CLIP: Light, light, light, light, light, 1:55

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I left high school a year early to go to Bard. I was some kind of runaway kid with tons of talent and direction but a serious lack of support that deeply challenged my ability to see my success as possible. Bard's music department was housed in a little building that reminded us of a trailer home. There were only three practice rooms with pianos on the whole campus. But the support and dedication of the faculty truly changed my life. I was taken on as brilliant and was encouraged to define and manifest every single idea I had for a composition or performance. I questioned every thing -- from why I had to take music theory to why the department was hiring or firing so-and-so. I was very angry and very demanding and created some of the most intense and beautiful and creative work while at Bard. During my moderation I tried to abandon the department by transferring to another school, and my faculty fought me, wouldn't let me. I don't know that I'd ever been so well taken care of before. The challenge at Bard is that you kind of have to know what you want. Otherwise, you can get lost in all the freedom and do very little during your four years there. But if you know what you want and need support to figure out how to do it, Bard is perfect.

-Kristi Martel

AUDIO CLIP: See You Sweet, 2:00
www.kmetal.net

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As a young pianist just beginning to spread her wings, I elected to go to Bard, and not to a professional school. I knew absolutely beyond the shadow of a doubt that I wanted to be a musician, and had since I was fifteen. Nevertheless I wanted to be in a place where the other parts of me would be nourished as well. Not only have I never regretted that choice, as I go on in my life I continue to see new ways in which it was completely right.

When I came to Bard I was ready to gobble up everything there was to learn, and Bard obligingly kept putting more on my plate. To fill my brain and heart, to question, to take risks: these were daily, hourly facts of life in an almost hothouse atmosphere which for me was absolutely exhilarating. There were times when it was painful: growth often is, as we stretch and challenge ourselves. But I started to learn at Bard that the discomfort of growth is supportable. I was fabulously encouraged to take artistic risks, and I also learned the tools to elect worthwhile ones and make them realizable: not only was I welcome to spread my wings, I was learning how to make them strong. What an extraordinary lesson to learn as a young musician! It is a kind of strength that stays with you in your bones through your entire life.

The things I learned in Luis García-Renart’s chamber music class -the air electric with a listening so intense it was almost tangible- are still true, and continue to teach me as I teach them to my own chamber music students. The absolute loyalty to the composer’s intention as we see it on the page that I learned from Joan Tower, the listening between the lines as we try to divine what the composer may have heard in his or her inner ear ­ that loyalty still lives within me whether I am playing the music of Schubert or of Federico Ibarra. Surely, one of the greatest lessons I began to learn at Bard is that the intellect, the heart and the imagination do not live in separate compartments: that balanced together they can make artistic statements of great authenticity and force.

-Ana Cervantes

ANA CERVANTES ’73 was a Fulbright Scholar to Mexico in 1999-2000; her project was to develop repertoire of Mexican contemporary music for performance in the US. Now "a kind of musical ambassador", she concertizes extensively in this hemisphere, playing music of Mexican composers (of whom Federico Ibarra is one) as well as that of US composers, often combining this music with that of the "traditional" repertoire. Her "firstborn" CD, Amor de la Danza, received critical acclaim from (among others) American Record Guide and the Newark Star-Ledger. Currently Cervantes divides her time between Washington, DC and Guanajuato, Mexico, where her Mexican grandparents were married in 1914. There she teaches a chamber music workshop and is advisor on music to the State Institute of Culture. She fell off the Bard Alumni database for a considerable time and is happy to be back now.

AUDIO CLIP: Pavana, 2:16
www.cervantespiano.com

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