In student accommodation, Demiray quickly makes new friends. She was closest to her roommate, a horn player. They would gather on the stairs of Lenfest with other students to sing choral music for fun. After attending a party during her first week, she joined a group to organize her own holiday masquerade.
During the semester, she also completed a string quartet that she had started on the flight from Turkey. As she rehearsed it, she realized how open she was to her music changing in the hands of others; it was the kind of lesson that can’t really be taught in a classroom. “It reminded me,” she said, “that everything we have in music is a matter of perspective.”
SOME OF CURTIS’ STUDENTS really take time off during the month between semesters. Demiray, back in Ankara, read Kant and watched films, but also continued to compose. Gleason, having started his spring work early, took on a conducting project at the Dallas Opera. Cheung, at least, made room to meet up with friends and family in Seattle and go skiing.
Scott struggled to complete the fall semester, which he found extremely intense; life at home, he said, was like “a void.” At first he didn’t sleep well because he felt like he should be doing something. After a few days, he felt relaxed taking his dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback called Nandi, for long walks.
Tacchino returned home to France, but as resident coordinator, he had to return early to prepare Lenfest for the spring semester. She also organized a tour to Florida, where she had never been. She saw more alligators than she would have liked and it was uncomfortably hot, but she felt reinvigorated when she returned to school for more auditions and a starring role in the Poulenc’s one-act opera “Les Mamelles de Tirésias”.
