Music to No One’s Ears
We pianists know the feeling.
It’s a crisp fall afternoon, and you are walking through a bustling public thoroughfare. The sky is vast, the vibes electric and at the edge of your periphery, a piano enters. Everything slows. Your vision tunnels. All you see is the piano. It begs you to play.
So when I arrived on campus for the first time this January, I expected the same. After all, a 100-year-old, well-established college surely must have a robust music facility.
Little did I know, I had begun an endless search for a place that didn’t exist.
Remember that crisp autumn afternoon? The one where you caught a glimpse of the piano and couldn’t break its stare? Now, imagine strutting over to that piano, laying your fingers on its keys, only for the most horrendous of noises to be emitted from its depths.
Welcome to Yeshiva University.
Like many before me, I fell prey to a piece of misinformation on the internet. Within “The Philip and Sarah Belz Department of Music” page on the YU website, you will find a subsection titled “Facilities.” Below it reads: The Philip and Sarah Belz Department of Music is housed on the second floor of the Schottenstein Center. A Steinway grand piano resides in the Recital Room, and two other baby grand pianos plus five Baldwin upright pianos are available for practice. The second floor features four sound-proof practice booths … [and] a MIDI Electronic Music Studio.
As a naive first-semester college student, I took this description seriously and made the trek out to the second floor of Schottenstein, where I was greeted by an ornate sheet of printer paper taped to a heavy metal door, which read “Yeshiva College Department of Music.” Not thinking much of it, I pried the door open and instantly walked into a thick cloud of dust. Most lights in the hallway were off. Trash was strewn everywhere. Worn-out books were thrown into a pile on a bench. Planks of wood leaned against the walls. A tattered sofa sat in the middle of the hallway. Broken musical instruments littered the floor. An eerie silence hovered throughout, yet I persisted and found myself in front of the practice rooms.
Contrary to the website, only one of the practice rooms housed a piano. To my chagrin, the door was locked. Actually, all four rooms were locked. Strange. The other three rooms wouldn’t have been helpful even if they were open. Instead of containing anything musical, each room contained a miscellaneous assortment of items, and one room even had a sign that calmly stated “THIS DOOR MUST REMAIN LOCKED AT ALL TIMES,” because the fact that it was already locked wasn’t enough of a dead giveaway.
The one room that was fully illuminated was the main recital room, which did, in fact, house a Steinway grand piano as the website claimed. A few of the keys were jammed, but it was a better alternative to anything I had discovered until then. Though I was pleasantly surprised that such a nice piano could exist in an alcove as far from campus as Shenk, I quickly realized that no one is helped when the only drumset and in-tune acoustic piano on campus are both in the same room. A single functional room does not make a music department.
What shocked me the most was a discovery I made on my way out. A glass-encased billboard on one of the hallway walls caught my attention. Inside were a few books presumably written by music professors who currently work or previously worked at YU. Old newspaper clippings were taped to the back of the billboard, highlighting various events that occurred over the Belz School’s history. A list of offered classes was posted too: “Musaf Rosh HaShanah,” “Voice Culture,” “Sephardic Liturgical Music” et cetera. Classes I certainly had never heard of. A school calendar was posted for the months of February through May. The font was retro, and “Passover Recess” spanned the first two weeks of April. My eyes kept scanning the calendar until they fell upon the year: 2015.
Founded in 1954 as the Cantorial Training Institute, YU’s music program once played a serious role in campus life. Expanded in the 1980s through Belz family philanthropy, it offered dozens of courses ranging from keyboard and guitar to Jewish liturgy and performance. Concerts were common. Students participated. Music mattered.
A sudden change happened in 2015 when YU downsized its music department due to financial struggles. This transition caused a split between the department’s cantorial and general musical education divisions. The Belz School of Jewish Music turned to teaching many of its cantorial courses online, leaving behind the hollow casket of a music department (still under the Belz name) to fend for itself. What remains today are a few select classes and the occasional chamber performance. A handful of pianos donated by Philip and Sarah Belz are dispersed throughout campus, gathering dust. Many of them sit, clamped shut in the corner of MTA classrooms, symbols of a once-vibrant program now left to decay.
I understand why this happened. Certain economic realities are impossible to control, and it is laudable that a religious and academic institution would choose to maintain its core classes and learning programs over niche arts like music education. And yet, a resuscitated music program would enhance our academic and spiritual pursuits without detracting from our institution’s higher goals.
The billboard on the second floor of Shenk remains a time capsule, trapped in its glory days for the past eleven years. Although the occasional drummer will practice in the recital room and the occasional performance takes place there, an entire wing of the Schottenstein building remains largely untouched for posterity.
It is deeply saddening to see a religious institution discarding one of God’s greatest gifts. But abandoned halls do not fix themselves, and forgotten programs rarely revive on their own. A simple restoration of a few rooms isn’t particularly burdensome on a grand scale, and its positive effects would heavily outscale the effort invested.
This doesn’t have to be a one-sided endeavor.
The metronome is ticking.
Photo caption: The untouched billboard in Schottenstein
Photo credit: Gavriel Sokolic
