Staller Family Starts $1.7 Million Fund for Graduate Music Program to Woo Talented Students

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Eddie and Irwin Staller started a $1.7 million fund for Stony Brook's graduate music program. Photo by Rachel O'Brien.

By Rachel O'Brien

Erwin and Freddie Staller started a $1.7 million fund for Stony Brook's graduate music program so it can compete against top-name music schools for the most talented students. The endowment will go toward scholarships and fellowships awarded to incoming graduate music students majoring in performance. The move seeks to increase the school’s competitive grasp on an incentive some music schools are moving toward: no tuition.

“Yale’s graduate students are all there tuition-free,” said Judith Lochhead, director of the graduate music program housed in the Staller Center for the Arts. “[The] Curtis [Institute of Music] in Philadelphia is tuition-free and Juilliard is moving in that direction,” she said, offering hefty scholarships to students.

“The School of Music in Indiana got a $40 million gift and they’re using that partly for tuition,” Lochhead said.

These music schools and others like them are moving toward awarding many full-tuition scholarships, if not providing full-tuition scholarships for all of the students they accept. This attractive offering leaves Stony Brook with the task of appealing to the same students the other schools are courting.

The endowment "will help us provide tuition-free training for our performers," Lochhead said. "Because of our proximity to New York City, we compete a lot with the area schools like Juilliard, Manhattan School [of Music], Yale and Curtis."

Lochhead said the department will most likely be giving 10 full-tuition scholarships to the incoming class of fall 2008. It remains to be seen exactly how the remainder of the endowment funds will be spent in coming years, she said. Out of about 400 applications per year for the graduate music program, about 70 are accepted, Lochhead estimated.

"Stony Brook has one of the preeminent music programs in the country, and we wanted to help make it more accessible to students who might not otherwise be able to afford to advance their education and training," said Erwin Staller, in a press release. "We want the program to attract the most talented students it possibly can."

Bethany Cencer is one of those talented musicians Stony Brook succeeded in attracting. A doctoral student studying the harpsichord, she said that although tuition costs and the scholarships available to students are a factor in their decision where to go to school, as it was a factor in her decision, she chose Stony Brook over Juilliard because of her admiration for her harpsichord teacher, Arthur Haas.

“I thought this program was the highest caliber program,” Cencer said.
A fellow harpsichord player agreed. “I thought this school was a lot better suited for me,” said Daniel Corneliussen.

Although it was the professor who made the decision worth making for Cencer and Corneliussen, other graduate students in the music department agree that Stony Brook needs to offer scholarships to their music students in order to compete with the schools that are doing to same.

Ayah is a first-year graduate student studying musicology who received a full-scholarship along with a paid TA position. Although she is grateful for her scholarship, she thinks that musicology and the other concentrations in the music department don’t get the sort of funding and recognition as the performance portion of the program.

“I’m happy for the performers,” she said. “If anything they need to give more money to ethnomusicology, it’s not very competitive.” She said that Rutgers, Columbia and Yale offer their TAs more money than Stony Brook.

An ethnomusicology student, Jana, said that she has a full-scholarship and TA position as well but that Stony Brook stands as a good school for students to perform, not necessarily study musicology.

Ethnomusicology “is a relatively new discipline and more money is needed for the program to grow,” she said.