Remaining Voice Students Sing the Blues at CalArts

Scattered protests could be heard at CalArts’ graduation last spring. A handful of people were shouting from the audience.

During the commencement speech that May afternoon, when new president Steven Lavine professed his love for opera, the cries rose loudest. CalArts’ voice students--sprinkled through the crowd--were hoping to bend the president’s ear.

“Save the voice program!” they yelled.

A year and a half ago, CalArts decided that its School of Music would no longer offer a degree in vocal studies. The Valencia institute has built a national reputation for encompassing the breadth of visual and performance art, but administrators felt, for a number of reasons, that they could not continue to offer a first-rate voice program.

“We’ve got to concentrate on the things we can do best,” Lavine said.

So, in 1987, CalArts stopped admitting voice majors and held funding in that department to a minimum.

There were 11 students already in the program. Some were too far along to transfer to another school. Others wanted to remain out of loyalty to their professors. They have been allowed to stay at CalArts and finish their degrees.

Now, as they move closer to graduation, these students say they live and work as if they were ghosts.

Whereas other departments mount exhibits and produce plays, the voice students toil anonymously on their own campus. They have too few singers to fill a chorus and no money to stage performances. Other departments combine talents: The music and theater schools might work together on a play, for example. The voice students work alone.

They continue to pester administrators and faculty, hoping to save the program. But such protests, they fear, fall on deaf ears.

“It’s sort of like someone who’s dying,” said voice student Eileen Dorn. “They are waiting for us to subside.”

Budget concerns were among the most pressing reasons for phasing out the voice program, administrators and faculty said.

“A lot of money has to be spent on the School of Music, and the other schools resent this,” said Henrietta Pelta, a professor of vocal studies and opera history at CalArts for 18 years. “Music takes more teachers because you have to have a teacher for each instrument, each specialty. They are trying to save money, and that’s the way they can do it, by getting rid of the voice department.”

Even if there was enough money, CalArts cannot stage full-scale operas because there aren’t enough instrumental students to fill an orchestra, Lavine said.

Perhaps more important, the voice program found itself at artistic odds with the institute.

CalArts’ vocal studies have concentrated on traditional operatic performance while the rest of the School of Music, and the institute as a whole, has increasingly committed itself to contemporary work.

Such 20th-Century music is difficult to sing, especially for voice students who have only begun to study their craft. Young singers cannot seriously pursue voice training until after their voices mature and, at the college level, cannot perform as well as instrumentalists who have been practicing since age 5.

This incompatibility is of paramount importance at CalArts, where performance is emphasized.

Voice students argue that performance has replaced teaching at the institute. They say that CalArts’ various music ensembles--most notably the 20th-Century Players, which features well-known faculty and select students--are simply a means of showing off.

Administrators disagree.

“One of the concepts of the music program is that students play alongside faculty,” said Alan Chaplin, acting dean of the School of Music. “The idea of this kind of apprentice situation is the main mode of education here. It is something that doesn’t happen at most other music institutes.”

Other art institutes like New York City’s Juilliard School and the Eastman School of Music do have extensive voice programs, and CalArts administrators insist that they will not forsake singing.

“We’ll have a choral program that will be much expanded over anything we’ve had in recent years,” Chaplin said, noting that the voice instructors will continue to teach on campus. “And within our general music program, we will offer voice instruction.”

Meanwhile, the last of the voice majors pursue their art. Mornings are reserved for music theory classes. Afternoons are spent singing under the tutelage of coaches.

“They’ll say ‘Hey, you’re pulling in your stomach, you’re tensing your jaw, you’re pulling in your tongue,” Dorn said. “They can tell by the way you’re singing.”

At night, the students practice. Julie Kay sings best near midnight, so she finds an empty dance studio after everyone else has left for the day.

As for performing, the voice program makes do with what it has. The students recently gave a makeshift performance of opera scenes with no costumes, no sets and no special lighting. Last spring Kay, a third-year student, took matters into her own hands by singing Puccini while perched in a tree on the campus grounds.

And Todd Maxwell, who will graduate this spring, worries about his future.

“If I were to have a bachelors from Juilliard, it would speak for itself,” Maxwell said. “I’m concerned about having a degree in voice from an institute that no longer has a reputation for vocal studies,” he said.

Chaplin acknowledged that the program suffers because no new students are being admitted despite the fact that CalArts continues to receive applications from people who want to study voice there. Administrators said they are doing everything possible to give students the education in voice that they were promised upon arriving at CalArts.

“Sure, I would like to be at a place that could mount full-scale operas,” said Lavine, who was hired a year after the decision to cut back on vocal instruction. “CalArts, with all the other arts here, could be in a position to change opera.

“But we’ve got to be realistic about what we can do.”

The voice students aren’t swayed by such pragmatism.

“Let everyone think that the voice department is already gone, that seems to be the philosophy here,” Dorn said. “We’re not gone yet.”