The Conservatory

The Conservatory

(Excerpt from Occupational Studies by Jeff Namian)

The most intense atmosphere I experienced in higher ed wasn’t in a college. It was in a world famous conservatory. At the time, I was comfortable at a nursing school with a mean Dean. This conservatory recruited me hard core every single day. Upping the salary faster than the NASDAQ and conceding on just about every demand I could think of to deter them. Finally I gave in.

The most regrettable mistake I ever made. They claimed to embrace change. They said they wanted to reassess their procedures and make them more student friendly. They wanted to modernize the campus experience to improve their presence on a global level. All bullshit. I should have caught on when a Human Resources person asked me to fax over a copy of my Driver’s License.

FAX? They still exist? Beyond being younger than a stone tablet, it’s one of the most dangerous ways to share information.

I quickly learned that conservatories are not colleges in any sense of the word. They’re resistant to change since their talent and discipline is steeped in tradition. Whether studying piano, cello or vocal pedagogy there’s a standard to maintain and (hopefully) carry forward. I respected their commitment yet found them completely intolerable of considering anything veering off their one hundred plus years routine. This surprised me as my prior assessment of musicians was that they favored creative skills over analytical. Then again, when you’re teaching and studying the technique of anything, I guess it makes sense you’d be more technically focused. While that excused some of the student behavior, it had nothing to do with the ancient pathway the administration blazed.

What a miserable environment, lest I haven’t emphasized that. It was great entering the building each morning and hear someone running their scales or the warmth of Robert Schumann easing out of a baby grand. My office shared a wall with the harpsichord practice room. Now everyone gushes over the charm of one of the most beautiful instruments. But when someone’s running thesame four measures over and over for an hour to get the phrase to flow correctly ... not so soothing. There were eight students in the harpsichord department. One semester their final jury was The Young Person’s Guide to Orchestra, and let’s just say it’s a tad repetitive. On a Friday afternoon while I was clock watching, I wanted to take a sharp knife to their tightly strung strings.

The administration spent more time concocting excuses why procedural changes wouldn’t work, even after they’d labeled all their current procedures ineffective. I couldn’t follow the logic, but eventually noticed that most of these administrative leaders were merely head nodders. Head nodders don’t process anything. They endorse whatever the head honcho prefers. While this particular president may have had a decent career as a tenor (rumored to be the neediest of all vocalists) he had no business running a school. Nasty thing too. Never bothered introducing himself or introducing me to the rest of the administration. Instead he went out of his way to make me uncomfortable in front of others. No idea why. I’m a tone deaf baritone.

I got a surprise mid-March when asked how I was coming along with organizing the final jury week of the academic year. I’m sure my face expressed complete bewilderment. I didn’t know what a jury even was. Like OJ’s?

It’s not a typical registrar’s duty. The president pounced on me.

It’s the most important facet of your job and you don’t even know what it is?

Sorry but I guess I don’t.

Well this is a complete disaster. I don’t know how you got hired. I thought you came so highly recommended.

He sort of tossed what was left of his hair on highly and I think I smirked because he turned a little red.

For things that are my responsibility, I’m one of the best.

This is your sole responsibility this month. I have no idea how you’ll organize it if you haven’t even started yet.

Well that was motivating. I still had no idea what a jury was. When I asked anyone they responded with oh it’s something the Registrar does. Supportive and nurturing. Just the person you trust grabbing your diaphragm and squeezing it until your lunch has its encore.

So what’s a jury? It’s sort of like American Idol. Every student from each department performs a piece in front of their department’s faculty, as well as experts invited from all over the world. I should have already contacted them to secure dates, flights and hotel arrangements. Some of the air fares were over a thousand bucks due to the delay, yet no one flinched about it. They had a thick financial portfolio. New York’s social elite loves donating money to the arts and it seems New York’s artistic types have zero financial sense. In hindsight, someone in the administration wanted me to fail with this jury thing. I wasn’t informed at all and it was far too perfectly orchestrated of a knee jerker when they unveiled me naked.

A thousand students from various departments at various levels of talent and time in the conservatory, warm up times, performance times, updating the scoring criteria with absolutely zero input from anyone in the know.

I like loud. If they’re not loud enough fuck ‘em, is what I wanted the criteria to state.

I also had to calculate and post the results. Talk about the kiss and cry area. It was just outside my office!

The previous Registrar took an entire semester just to organize one week, and he was apparently out of control the entire time. This tidbit was thrown at me for sarcastic encouragement. These people truly resented me. I really wanted to let them know how mutual the resentment was. If the prior guy barely did it in six months while losing his shit on a daily basis, how would the clueless and unsupported new guy manage it in just two weeks?

Well fuck ‘em cuz I did. Impeccably. Faculty commented it was the smoothest jury week in recent memory! No one from the administration acknowledged it at all. Assholes.

As previously stated, conservatories are rather adverse to change. They want it (it being everything) to be the sameyear after year. One vocal teacher was upset she didn’t get her usual jury folder and was in tears until I found it for her. Like most of the vocal department faculty, she was a fading opera singer who once stood in for Beverly Sills at the Met. But just once. Apparently Beverly had a turbo charged immune system. How did the understudy do on her one night only performance? I think the angst and hysteria over a three hole punch folder portrays her demeanor. The critics were concise. She was a one night only event.

I was forewarned to keep an eye on the strings students. Largely made up of Chinese and Koreans, this department was more tightly strung than their instrument. First of allthey despised each other. They were easy to spot with bruises on their shoulders due to constantly rehearsing every day prior to jury week. Many were government funded and under a lot of pressure to excel. As a matter of fact, recruiting International students was the main goal of the admissions department. Many trips abroad were taken for auditions. Naturally all expenses were paid for by the school. International students even held priority over all other applicants by the Admissions office. Why? International students are required to document their ability to pay all of their tuition and expenses for their entire stay prior to being accepted. Depending on the length of the program they choose, that’s a lot of dough. It’s why most admissions people refer to them as cash cows. Nice, right?

(Funny how they’re viewed dispensable under the current US administration.)

If they had a bad jury, they’d likely be sent home and never given another chance. Some tried to bribe me with money to either perform before or after a fellow juror.

Hold your money and practice harder please.

They cheated in several ways. The Chinese students would make sure one of their own was scheduled first to be critiqued. Why? Only the first juror of the day gets to tune their violin or cello with the piano accompanying them. Once the first juror is critiqued, they remained in the area to share their tuning note solely with the other Chinese students. The next day found the Koreans in control, employing the same tactic. As evidence of their hatred, one Chinese cellist opened a Korean student’s case and slit her strings. Another student literally threw herself down a stairwell, breaking her wrist in order to postpone her critique. She wasn’t ready to be perfect. If you were a governmentsponsored student, failure was not an option. They’d be sent home and considered a disgrace. Shortly thereafter, the only thing they’d be plucking would be rice.

When she walked into my office in a cast requesting a postponement, I asked if she considered the possibility that she’d never be able to play the piano again?

Doctor says four months.

But your visa expires in two weeks.

Doctor says four months.

Well you can’t stay in the States just to rehabilitate.

She hadn’t anticipated that regulation, so off she went harboring a broken wrist and severe regret. I had the pleasure of watching the security video of her tumbling act several time to justify her dismissal to the school’s administration.

She held such promise. Why are you getting rid of her?

Earth to musical morons, there’s rules to follow. They looked at me as if I was making these regulations up. Like expecting me to look the other way when I discovered they had this special post-doctoral program where you could study indefinitely in a remote location.

Like a suite at the Waldorf.

Undocumented visitors don’t just clean offices. The school’s vocal students found an ear, nose and throat doctor in Columbus Circle that (for a price) would sign a medical condition form to postpone their jury. He’d claim their vocal cords were ruptured due to excessive rehearsal. I believed one of them that came in sounding like Lauren Bacall after smoking ten cartons of Pall Malls. The others (try as they did) returned home to renew their student visa, provided their government was willing to invest further in their talent.

Some came back. Most didn’t.

A lot of them healed miraculously, wreaking of menthol from all the cough drops they popped.Once I got to know the faculty, I adored them. Especially the vocal department. They swore like pirates and talked smack about every student they tutored and tortured.

You can have her next semester. She’s fuck’n useless.

That one? I already had her.

Well then maybe that’s why she sucks.

And they’d all cackle away at the lunch table. Most of them wore draped velvet frocks with waist length grey hair. Once their careers were finished, it looked like many of them took to the bottle, and not a hair dye bottle. During Jury Week, I spent most of my time in the vocal jury since it was fun. I remember a tiny Korean girl that opened her mouth and absolutely nothing came out! They gave her a second chance. Some sort of sound came out but you'd need two Dixie cups and a string to hear it. Once she left the auditorium, the faculty swapped notes.

She’s done nothing to fix her pitch issues.

Then they’d turn to me and say:

Oh Jeffie poo, pack her bags and kindly get her the fuck outta here please.

Then I’d escort this popsicle stick to her dorm room, watch her pack while weeping like a willow, call a cab to drive her to JFK airport and made sure she got in it and that it left. Those are the legal obligations of terminating a student visa. The school must document they did everything to get the person out of the country once they ceased to be enrolled. Now while there was a person who was the International Student Advisor, shockingly this unpleasantry also fell on my Registrar plate. God knows why. I got the feeling the Registrar job description got a huge overhaul just prior to me accepting the job.Regardless, I got pretty good at kicking them out. One time I told one of them to step up the pace on the packing cuz I was hungry.

The conservatory was a brutal talent tank disguised as a school, and the President was far more arrogant than Simon Cowell. I was starting to catch onto the cold shoulder treatment. He or someone was hellbent on making me fail, despite the fact that they lured me away from a job I loved. It was so mean. After a while I found it impossible to sustain their game of bullshit.

The conservatory was my final job in higher education. I was so irritated with the administration for not letting me do what I was hired to do. I made no secret of my disdain for the place, much like they made no secret of their disdain for me. My stomach knotted up each day I walked through the front door. We parted ways based on a gross misrepresentation of the job description and their lack of knowing what a real Registrar does.

The severance package made up for some of the humiliation, but completely destroyed my confidence. Sadly, it wasn’t the last time that would happen to me.

Higher ed became my career by accident, but I could have done worse. If you want to get a front row seat to witness completely dysfunctional people fly under the radar, get yourself checked into a mental health institution (done that too) or get paid handsomely to supervisor one that fronts itself as a school.