Among notables who were part of the faculty in the Thornton School of Music were William Primrose, Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky. They all began teaching at USC in 1962.
Visitors have been known to get lost at USC, a 226-acre scholastic oasis in the middle of a sprawling city. This year the university has added some helpful signposts, like the huge banners trumpeting the 125th anniversary of the Thornton School of Music -- although it might be easier to follow the sounds of a jazz guitar or angelic voices singing choral music to a grand piano.
Not an institution to miss a chance for a party or a concert, USC is in the midst of a 125-day celebration to honor its music school, whose instructors have included Jascha Heifetz, Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg and whose alumni include Herb Alpert, Michael Tilson Thomas, Marilyn Horne and Presidential Medal of the Arts recipient Morten Lauridsen, who is now a distinguished professor of composition at his alma mater. The school is in the process of a renovation and expansion, having recently added several degree programs, including one in popular music performance, the first of its kind.
But in a way the music school has been defining and redefining itself since it first opened only four years after the birth of the university.
“It used to be that a music school was a conservatory," says Rob Cutietta, the school's dean since 2002. “Music schools had one focus -- the canon. Now the school does what colleges should do: open the minds of students to opportunities they didn't even know existed."
USC was one of the first universities to offer a free-standing jazz studies department. Still, some people held on to the old ways. When USC created its program, Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television (in 1984), an irate member of the composition department threatened to resign. Today that program is practically a feeder to the industry, with graduates going on to compose music for such recent films as “Michael Clayton," “Hellboy II" and “3:10 to Yuma."
Cutietta positively radiates in the school's pragmatism. “I always laugh, inside, when a freshman tells me he knows exactly what he wants to do in his profession. We're here, basically, to blow that freshman's mind. We don't want to take the focused student away from his focus. But we want to broaden each one of them."
And then he adds one more thought: “We have a lack of guilt about commercialism. If someone thinks we lack integrity, he should tell Midori that."
He's referring to Midori Goto, who became an international star in 1986 at age 14 when she performed Leonard Bernstein's “Serenade" from memory at Tanglewood using three violins (in her passion, she broke two strings). Now she's one of the most famous violinists in the world, and, although she studied at Juilliard, she teaches at USC. One of her reasons: She wanted to work in a university setting with a wider range of interests and resources than a conservatory. (And probably the weather didn't hurt.)
