Frank Zappa once said, “Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.” To the outsider, it might appear that making something out of nothing poses the real challenge; selling the product should be easy. But to the traveling art student, quite the opposite seems true. The creating is easy; it’s the selling that’s hard.
Each year, Harvard offers an extensive list of grants of up to $5,000 to students with artistic inclinations. The list includes Artistic Development Fellowships, meant to “nurture the artistic development of promising and/or accomplished students in the arts;” the Isenberg Fellowship for traveling dramatists; and the Sydney Williams, Jr. Traveling Fund for the Visual Arts. These grants provide opportunities for aspiring artists to expand their horizons, develop their talents, and gain real world experience in their fields of interest.
Ironically, though, Harvard’s financial and institutional support this summer allowed traveling artists to realize that a successful career in the arts requires far more than a degree. Ultimately, these students learned that real-world artistic production is much more difficult outside of the Harvard Bubble. A few summer months in professional settings taught them an entirely new skill set, one that requires collaboration, proactive networking, and perhaps even more work than they receive at Harvard.
BEYOND THE GATES
Using her Artistic Development Fellowship, Sofia M. Selowsky ’12 spent her summer participating in the Salzburger Festspiele, an annual festival of music and theatre in Salzburg, Austria. The program, funded by Harvard and hosted by the University of Miami, opened her eyes to the demands of an opera singer’s lifestyle.
“In Austria and Germany, when you’re working as an opera singer, you get a contract,” says Selowsky. “You sing there for two years. You can be singing six hours a day. It’s pretty crazy but you get the benefits of a steady job.” Not all American performers can say the same.
In this way, the life of the opera singer is not too different from that of the young writer. Molly O. Fitzpatrick ’11, an editor for the Crimson Arts Board, spent her Artistic Development Fellowship on a busy summer in New York City. She balanced internships at Gawker, the New Yorker, and the online movie magazine Premiere.com with screenwriting classes at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
“It was odd,” she says, “because the class met in the evenings and it was tough because I was in the city, interning full-time. [When] I took the screenwriting classes I took at Harvard, they were top priority, whereas this one, I would be tired from work, and I would get home, and I would be wearing horrible business casual pants, and then I would have to start writing. In a lot of ways it was a close approximation to working on assignment.”
Abigail F. Schoenberg ’12, a Visual and Environmental Studies concentrator, funded her filmmaking trip to Uganda through the Williams Fund. One of her particular missions was to make a documentary for the Kasiisi Foundation, a non-profit run by Currier House Master Elizabeth A. Ross dedicated to improving women’s health and hygiene in third-world countries. During her project, Schoenberg found herself grappling with the classic paradox of artistic observation. “The biggest challenge that I had to face was that the kids there—whether I had the camera or not—would see me and just stop what they were doing. It was very hard to capture things on the camera because they would stop and just look at me.”
In a third-world country, these challenges were particularly pronounced. “Access in filming is always an issue,” she says. “Especially in the U.S., everybody is so paranoid, but access abroad is a totally different beast all together. People either don’t know what the camera is—they’re really curious—or a couple times I got, ‘Oh, this mzunga, this white girl, she’s just here to make money off of our pieces, we don’t want you to film us.’”
MEAT AND POTATOES
Above and beyond scheduling challenges and technical details, these itinerant artists had to make more conceptual adjustments. Chad R. Cannon ’11, a Music concentrator, spent his Artistic Development Fellowship on experiences in both Paris and Los Angeles. In Paris he developed the theoretical skills necessary for a career in musical composition. In contrast, his time in Los Angeles was spent honing far more practical skills.
In Paris, Cannon took part in a program run by the European American Music Alliance in memory of the twentieth century classical musical teacher Nadia Boulanger. The rigor of the program gave him a solid foundation for the more intangible aspects of his art. “So much of what composers nowadays are concerned with is style,” he says. “You know, ‘Who do you sound like?’ But in this program in Paris we boiled it down to ‘What is harmony? How do these notes function?’ It really gives you the meat and potatoes of composition and then you can take that back to style.”
In L.A., Cannon experienced first-hand the professional world of composition by working closely with Hollywood composer Chris Bacon. Bacon has composed for such films as Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” and M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Last Airbender.”
“The Paris program was very academic, very analytical,” he says, “but the Los Angeles experience was definitely on-site. This was how he was making his living. He was creating a product that he sells. It was very commercial—making music that you sell as opposed to an academic pursuit where you create art.”
The dichotomy between art and product was the linchpin of his experience. “Going into the film world, you know when you’re writing for film you’re going to have to give to a director’s will. You’re writing for a director, or the director’s writing through you,” says Cannon.
This creative process was far less personal for Cannon than the cerebral process he uses for composition classes within the Harvard sphere. “A lot of what you’re writing is for effect instead of for deeper art. It’s a lot more surface writing.”
Selowsky made similar observations. “Harvard’s music major is very academic,” she says. “It’s history of music, theory of music, analytical seminar music, it’s not based on performance.”While Fitzpatrick had taken creative writing classes at Harvard, her Tisch class taught her a different breed of creative writing: creating scripts for a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry. “Classes at Harvard tend to focus more abstractly on artistic form,” says Fitzpatrick, “whereas in general this class was more industry focused, which was interesting.”
Fitzpatrick found herself learning a whole new way of approaching writing. “My teacher was very focused on story structure,” said Fitzpatrick, “As a writer I’m all about jokes and characters, but being forced... to make sure that that aspect of my script was good was really enlightening.”
THE ART OF THE NETWORK
As in any career, names matter in the art world. The connections these artists made turned out to be just as valuable as the skills they learned.
“The most important thing I achieved was the connections that I was able to make. Especially for film, that’s what you have to have, you have to have the skill set and the talent pool necessary, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to go and meet these people,” says Cannon. “It really helped to have Harvard’s name saying, ‘We support him in doing this project’ to make that direct connection. If I’m considering applying to grad schools, it was really important to go and meet people who were teaching at Julliard... It was helpful in a professional sense.”
Selowsky was fortunate to find herself in the company of professionals willing to share their own experiences with her. “Artistically in Austria, I got a ton of performance experience,” she says, “but I also met a lot of people who work in the opera houses around Europe and they gave me a sense of, ‘This is how hard you have to work, this is what you have to do to get from A to B.’”
The adults in their programs were not the only ones to know. “It helped to meet my peers in Paris,” says Cannon, “to know the personalities of other composers my age. You get some strange ones but obviously there are a lot of great, driven, talented people.”
“The other people in the program were really talented,” adds Selowsky, “and I feel like you learn a lot from the people you’re working with.”
PRODUCING THE ARTIST
After creating an informational video on proper washing in Rotooru, the regional Ugandan language, Schoenberg found her film could capture far bigger pictures.
“It actually opened up into a portrait of the region,” she says, “the interaction between the schools and the community, because the children in the schools are considered very privileged compared to others in the community.” The footage she gathered to explore this relationship will form the basis for work in her junior tutorial this year.
Cannon also is using his summer abroad to inform his academic work in the coming semester. “This year I’m going to be writing a senior thesis,” he says. “I’m excited to be able to blend my experiences into that.” The thesis, a piece based heavily on Japanese tradition, will draw significantly from his summer experiences.
Along with her raw footage, Shoenberg also brought back a sense of perspective from her travels abroad. “I feel like there are two ways to look at my experience,” she says. “You can look at it through my academic growth or my artistic growth, but when I think about having gone to Africa and having had this experience, I think about it in a personal way... I feel like my eyes have been opened to things that would seem obvious but I never really grasped.”
“It definitely gives you a greater appreciation of a different culture,” says Selowsky, who spoke no German before the summer began. “Austrian culture is completely different from America. They’re very conservative, they’re much quieter, so it was very interesting to be able to observe that and be able to appreciate it in contrast with American culture which is so loud and brusque.”
“As an artist, we’ll see, once I get editing and see the final product,” Schoenberg adds, “But as a person, as a global citizen, I think it was absolutely worth it.”
—Staff writer Eleanor T. Regan can be reached at eleanor.t.regan@college.harvard.edu.
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