In the student residence, Demire quickly made new friends. She was very close to her roommate, a horn player. They would gather on the stairs at Lenfest with other students and sing choir music for fun. After attending a party in her first week, she joins a group to dress up in a mask for the holidays.
During the semester, he also completed a string quartet he had begun on a flight from Turkey. As she rehearsed it, she realized how open she was to her music changing hands; That’s a lesson that can’t really be taught in a classroom. “It reminded me,” he said, “that everything we have in music is a matter of perspective.”
Some Curtis students Actually take the month off between semesters. Demire, back in Ankara, read Kant and watched movies, but continued to compose. Gleason began spring work and planned to conduct the Dallas Opera. Cheung, at least, made room in Seattle to hang out with friends and family and go skiing.
Scott had a hard time coming out of the fall semester, which he found exciting and intense; Life at home, he said, was like “a vacuum.” At first, he didn’t sleep well because he felt he had to do something. A few days later, he felt relaxed when he took his dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Nandi, for a long walk.
Tacchino went home to France, but as a resident coordinator, had to return early to prepare Lenfest for the spring semester. She also took a tour of Florida, which she had never been to before. She saw more crocodiles than she wanted, and it was uncomfortably hot, but she was refreshed when she went back to school with more auditions and a role in Poulenc’s one-act opera “Les Mamelles de Tirésias.”
