This man and his school are in the process of tackling that question. His answer so far: Change the world, beginning with New Haven.
Specifically, Thomas C. Duffy wants to change the way teachers teach music. Especially in urban schools. Especially in New Haven.
The Yale School of Music has a chance to do that, and much more, now that it has received an anonymous $100 million grant. Duffy, the school’s passionate 50-year-old acting dean (and longtime leader of Yale’s marching band), announced the donation on Oct. 28.
It’s believed to be the largest single donation to a music school, ever, anywhere. It’s certainly the largest single donation Yale has ever received. The gift is even more striking when one notes that the music school has only 200 students.
The grant had no strings attached. That means Duffy and the rest of the school have to figure out what to do with all that money.
They have lots of ideas. Beginning with a modest goal.
“I would like to see that $100 million change the world,” Duffy said in an interview Thursday in his first-floor office inside the music school’s renovated College Street HQ. “If it didn’t, wouldn’t that be a mistake?”
The “Easy” Stuff
Once the entire gift arrives (phased in over five years), the school of music will have an endowment from which to drawn down about $5 million annually. Part of that money will go toward free tuition for all students, forever. Part of the money will go toward stipends that help students pay to live in New Haven.
Part will go toward making the school’s technology — and use of technology — state of the art, including streaming live performances. The first technological experiment will come this spring, Duffy said, when guitarists at Yale and at New Zealand’s Massey University hold a joint class by satellite. Yale’s renowned guitar professor Benjamin Verdery helped that university establish a Center for the Study of Guitar. In the spring satellite session, Verdery and his students will learn and communicate with Massey’s guitar prof Matthew Marshall and Marshall’s students.
“We put a screen up in Sprague Hall. We’re seeing New Zealand. They’re seeing us,” Duffy said, mapping the scene like a movie director.
Some of the $100 million will also boost Yale’s growing program of exchanges with top conservatories around the globe. That will help Yale compete for top students with Julliard, which students sometimes choose over New Haven in order to be in New York.
“New York?” Duffy said, imagining a conversation with a prospective student and listing the exchanges in the works. “Come to Yale, and I’ll give you New York, Seoul, Beijing, Budapest, Manheim, and Paris.”
Those Who Can, (Should) Teach
Some of the $100 million will go toward another less defined, but in some ways more ambitious, goal: outreach, in New Haven and in the broader world of music education and advocacy.
Yale’s music school is already one of the university’s unsung treasures in the town-gown community chest. It offers more than 100 concerts a year, many of them free, open to the public. Renovated Sprague Hall is a gem of a concert space. Plus, the school has become a center for some of the most daring, cutting-edge and genre-busting music being written and performed in the world.
The music school also sends students into New Haven public schools to teach.
That’s where Duffy would like to see some of the $100 million make a difference. He’d like to see Yale add an extra one-year post-masters program for students to learn how not just to play music, but to teach it, in an urban setting. They’d volunteer in the public schools. And they’d work under a Yale music school staffer who would help them figure out how to improve urban public school music education in general.
Right now, Duffy said, music teachers are trained for very different settings — where, for instance, schools allow kids to bring instruments home to practice.
“If we don’t have some impact on how people are trained to teach music, we are abdicating our responsibility to shape the future of American culture,” Duffy argued, warming to the subject like a jazz saxophonist (his training) leaping from the theme into a solo.
“This is one of my dreams. The school can be positioned through this gift to be the force by which we change the way this country trains music teachers. They’re not prepared [to work in cities].”
He wasn’t done riffing.
“Education has to be about giving students the opportunity to experience everything the world has to offer. To have a flawed delivery system in any discipline that would deny students that opportunity is antithetical to that idea. All students should develop musicality. Not everybody is going to be an author, but they need to write. Not everybody is going to be a mathematician, but they need to add. I believe the world is flawed. The best way to address this is through the arts.”
You can do a lot of addressing with $100 million.
The gift has awed Duffy, who stepped into the acting dean’s slot only this July. It infuses him with a mix of boundless excitement about the possibilities and a reverent sense of responsibility for spending the money well.
“It’s like having a kid,” he said of the process of mapping out a plan. “I have a kid who’s a 5 year-old. Before that I didn’t know what it was like to have a kid. You accommodate the total shock to your way of life and make it part of your way of life.”