Cello program rigorous but rewarding

BY CASEY MICHEL
Special to the Rice News

On one of the walls in Norman Fischer’s office hang snapshots of the cello professor surrounded by beaming college students. They are memories, souvenirs from each class that has passed through his Shepherd School of Music studio during the last 18 years. As Fischer looks over them, a timeline from his respected career at Rice, he can pinpoint how the study of the cello has aided each one of his students: as a soloist, as a member of a quartet or as a fellow teacher like himself.

	NORMAN FISCHER

Over the last few months, Fischer has been able to tack on a few more accolades received by his former students. Rice grads have snagged the last four nationwide orchestral auditions for the cello, landing in the St. Louis, Atlanta, San Antonio and Virginia orchestras. It was an almost unheard-of string of success for a program whose renown only continues to grow.

”For any audition there will be maybe 80 to 90 applicants that are all capable of doing the job,” Fischer said. ”You have to be completely on. The success of them getting a rare job like this is incredibly thrilling.”

Such an impressive feat can certainly be credited to the cello program’s thorough training, but Fischer also attributed the placements to the Shepherd School’s communal focus. As Fischer’s photographs illustrate, he and his fellow cello professors – Desmond Hoebig, Brinton Averil Smith and Christopher French – have sought to foster a sense of family not only within the cello program, but within the Shepherd School as a whole.

Still, Fischer is quick to point out that that sense of community has not diminished the rigors of study. ”The program is very intense,” he said. ”One of the things that’s amazing about Rice is that the faculty is consistently great – in all the academic areas; it’s amazing. And in all the instrumental areas, the professors are among the top in their professions.”

Fischer, who has seen the Shepherd School grow into one of the top music schools in the nation, said the type of student now matriculating at Rice must have a dual passion for both academics and music. Such a focus puts Rice in a unique position. Not only must the students succeed through the rigors of a Rice education, but they must also succeed in a music school comparable to, as Fischer noted, Julliard, Curtis and Eastman.

”One of my former students became a Rhodes Scholar, and at the orientation for the Rhodes she was told that it was going to be really rigorous at Oxford, that she was going to have a really difficult time,” Fischer said. ”She responded, ‘I did my undergraduate at Rice – you can’t scare me.”’

In addition to seeing the reputation of the Shepherd School rise throughout the last 18 years, Fischer noted, the school has begun attracting increasingly talented students. ”The difference in ability between the highest level and lowest level of cellists has gotten so close,” Fischer said, ”so much so that the incoming freshmen have no problems performing chamber music with graduate students.”

While another run of four straight orchestral positions may be a bit much to ask for, Fischer said, he is only happy when he knows that all of his students, not merely those at the very top, have achieved a level of harmony he and his colleagues have tried to impart.

”It’s our job to see that they have a balance in their life, in their art, in their relationship to music and their relationship to people,” he said. ”We want to make sure that they’re incredibly happy doing what they’re doing. When that happens, there’s a kind of unity, of resonance, that they have in their life.”

With this, Fischer, a renowned cellist in his own right, looks at the wall opposite the photographs. On it hangs a series of foreign masks he has collected through different tours and performances. However, the wall also contains masks his former students have sent him from around the world, from Brazil to East Asia to Africa. All Fischer has to do is look up at the masks to see just how far – and how many thankful students – the cello program has reached.