Catherine Hunt's freshman year lasted exactly one week. That was all the time it took her to realize that in turning down Yale for Harvard she had made a serious mistake. Almost too late, she discovered that the Music Department here had neither the facilities nor the attitude to help further her life's ambition: to become a concert pianist.

"I guess I was expecting a Wellesley or an Oberlia, where there are hundreds of instruments. I could have adjusted to playing on mediocre pianos, but I really needed to have access to one whenever I wanted," she explains from her home in Michigan, where she is now taking the year off, practicing and studying music theory.

Harvard does not pretend to be a music conservatory. Yet its admissions department strongly encourages serious musicians to apply. Performers can participate in any one of a number of organized ensembles, including the Harvard/Radcliffe Orchestra, the Bach Society, the Ensemble Society, the Wind Ensemble, the Harvard Jazz Band, and numerous choral groups. They have access to facilities as good as any in the Ivy League, and they can major in a department that specializes in music theory, composition and history.

But many musicians are simply dissatisfied with what they find here. They arrive to discover insufficient practice facilities and uniformly express frustration with a Music Department which they say discourages performance. Pianists, in particular, face a difficult situation: Few opportunities exist for organized music performance, and even finding a good practice piano can prove time-consuming and fruitless. These musicians--not all of whom are necessarily headed for professional careers--have two options. They either leave--as Hunt did--or they quietly re-adjust their habits, and perhaps even their ambitions, to conform to the conditions of an unashamedly academic environment.

Jessica Krash hated living in Matthews. So when January of her freshman year rolled around she decided to move off campus. "I couldn't stand the food. I wanted to live with my boyfriend, and most of all I was going crazy not having anywhere to practice. I used to spend hours wandering around searching for a piano."

Unfortunately, the Freshman Dean's Office was less than thrilled about Krash's moving plans. "Our policy on this is that it never happens," says senior adviser Will Marquess, and Henry C. Moses, dean of freshmen, emphatically agrees. But after petitions, letters, and parental intervention, Moses and company gave in and made her a rare exception. Krash moved out of Matthews, turned vegetarian, and bought her own piano.

"During my first half-year here my confidence in my playing dropped dramatically because I wasn't practicing and performing enough. At home I'd been practicing four to five hours a day, performing, and teaching," she says, adding. "I don't think I could have made it to junior year without a piano."

Moving off campus is just one of the ways Krash adjusted the musical situation here to fit her needs. When she discovered that taking fewer than four courses a year--to create more practice time--would mean paying an extra year's tuition, she simply took an entire year off. When she found the Music Department "unmusical and unintellectual," she created her own concentration. "The Philosophy and Psychology of Music." And when she discovered that music professors were unresponsive to her complaints about poor facilities and anti-performance attitudes, she decided to form a coalition of Harvard musicians to try to improve the situation.

"I'm still in the process of talking with people about it," she says, "I hope we can eventually improve access to pianos, raise money, and generally encourage interest and concertizing."

Yet Krash believes that the problems of piano playing at Harvard go far beyond a lack of facilities. "Of course there should be more pianos, of course the music building should be open past ten o'clock." But the real problem, she says, is attitude. "The Music Department could really be an advocate of performance, but instead professors say to me. 'Oh, you probably want to do something more intellectual with your life than perform. 'It's one thing if they don't want to teach it, but they look down on it as well," she says, noting that none of her professors has ever attended any of her numerous recitals or chamber-music concerts.

This attitude, she insists, is one of the main reasons the facilities are so poor. She recalls a run-in with a department secretary who controlled the keys to all the piano practice rooms. "When I asked her for the key to the grand piano, she looked up at me with this little smile and said. "You mean the pianos downstairs aren't good enough for you?'"

Krash joins the chorus of Harvard pianists who bemoan the inaccessibility of the Music Department's new Bosendorfer grand (believed by some to be the finest brand of piano in the world today). Only professors and graduate composition classes are allowed to use the instrument, which is kept locked up at all times. "The department seems to feel that instruments somehow get used up if you play them," she says. "Of course they deteriorate just as quickly if you don't play them."

Krash, however, is not wholly negative about her experience here. Harvard, she says, allows one to "get out of circulation in the competitive music world--you lose your class rank, which is great, although you also lose some perspective." She notes that Houses eagerly invite musicians to give recitals, which are relaxed and informal.

"I think there are some brilliant people here," she continues. "The problem is that they don't really stop and consider how much they could be teaching, given the resources of an enormous university. There is very little questioning about why people play--about what music is and how it relates to other arts. This is much sadder and more serious than the fact that the building closes at ten."

Music professors understandably defend their department. Although he admits that professors often develop "methodologies" that get in the way of truly inspirational teaching. Leon Kirchner, Rosen Professor of Music and teacher of Harvard's only credited music performance course, argues. "I think that very talented musicians can use the University as a sort of pump primer intellectually which will ultimately realize itself in musical values.