“In light of the ongoing investigation, and following discussions with Bob earlier this afternoon, we want to notify you that Bob will step away from his teaching duties and other faculty responsibilities while the investigation is being conducted,” Juilliard Provost Adam Meyer wrote in a letter to composition college members on Friday. “This change will be effective immediately.”
Last week, the Berlin-based classical music web site VAN journal revealed the outcomes of a six-month investigation into allegations of misconduct in opposition to a number of Juilliard college members, together with Beaser, who, the journal mentioned, “faces multiple, previously-undisclosed allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct from the late 1990s and 2000s.”
These embrace alleged “repeated sexual advances to sexual relationships with students,” in addition to claims that these relationships straight affected crucial selections Beaser enacted as division chair at Juilliard.
The report cites the account of 1 nameless former scholar who described an “instance in which Beaser offered her a promising career opportunity before attempting to obtain sexual favors in return.”
“What will you do for me?” Beaser allegedly requested.
“I am more than willing to participate in Juilliard’s outside investigation in order to protect and defend my reputation,” Beaser wrote Sunday in an announcement to The Washington Post. “Until the school concludes this process, I have agreed to be on leave from my teaching position.”
The VAN story additionally included accounts of different abuses at the college, together with claims from a scholar alleging uninvited advances by Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning composer and Juilliard professor Christopher Rouse, who died in 2019, in addition to allegations in opposition to Juilliard professor John Corigliano, a longtime composer and college member accused by eight former Juilliard attendees for an alleged “unofficial policy” in opposition to taking over feminine college students. (Corigliano denied the claims in an electronic mail to VAN.)
The open letter — hosted on a Medium account attributed to “Composers Collective” — skilled concentrate on Beaser.
“Though we recognize and appreciate the need for due process,” the letter reads, “the volume of allegations, testimony, and supporting evidence of Beaser’s misconduct are undeniably unsettling. Until the investigation is resolved, Beaser’s presence in the Juilliard composition department could jeopardize the emotional well-being of students and inhibit a safe and healthy learning environment.”
“Sexual discrimination and sexual harassment have no place in our school community,” wrote Rosalie Contreras, Juilliard vice chairman of public affairs, in an announcement Saturday. “We take all such allegations extremely seriously.”
Although the VAN report was unable to verify whether or not complaints from two college students lodged in opposition to Beaser in 2018 ever led to Juilliard officers launching Title IX investigations, Contreras confirmed that inside investigations befell at the college “in the late ’90s as well as in 2017/18” however didn’t elaborate on their findings.
“Allegations that were previously reported to The Juilliard School were handled at the time, based on the information that was provided,” the assertion reads. “However, in order to review new information and to better understand these past allegations, the school’s current administration has launched an independent investigation.”
Juilliard’s coverage on faculty-student consensual relationships explicitly forbids relationships between college and undergraduates, and “discourages” them for graduate college students.
“In addition to creating the potential for coercion, any such relationship jeopardizes the integrity of the education process by creating a conflict of interest and may impair the learning environment for other students.”
Students contacted for VAN’s report characterised Beaser’s conduct as being effectively past an “open secret,” and paint an image of the general local weather for girls enrolled at the celebrated music college as stubbornly poisonous.
Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, who helped write and submit the open letter Friday, is certainly one of an alliance of nameless feminine composers confronting the college’s alleged “long history of tolerating and covering up sexual misconduct and discrimination.” Snider assembled the coalition within the wake of #MeToo to supply a discussion board for feminine composers to debate their very own experiences of abuse and harassment of their career.
Snider didn’t attend Juilliard, nor does she have any skilled affiliation with it (along with working as a composer, Snider can be co-artistic director of New Amsterdam Records), however believes this distance from the establishment — in addition to the attain of its affect over composers’ careers — is what has given her the freedom “to speak on behalf of my many female colleagues who could not.”
She can be fast to level out that the scourge of sexual harassment inside composition packages extends far past one college; it’s embedded deep into the tradition of classical music training, she says. As a scholar, Snider had her personal run-ins with sexual harassment at the palms of a robust professor (whom she declines to establish) that she says proceed to be “painful and traumatic.”
“That was the reason I got connected with these women in the first place,” she says. “I could really sympathize with what they’d been through and the feeling of powerlessness and helplessness, because it tends not to be about your abuser; it’s about the network of men at the top of our field who are friends and who protect each other. … If you come forward and name one person, you’re asking for retribution from basically a cabal of older, successful men who hold the keys to all the opportunities.”
Following the posting of the open letter, Snider has acquired notes from males at Juilliard who equally really feel unable to come back ahead for concern of retribution.
“They are the masters, and they are infallible, and they can make you or break you,” a male conservatory professor of composition who spoke on the situation of anonymity for concern {of professional} retribution wrote to Snider in a textual content message proven to The Post. “Gatekeeping doesn’t even cover it.”
Composer Jefferson Friedman, who attended Juilliard from 1998 to 2001, then taught at the college for a number of years, left a touch upon certainly one of Snider’s latest Facebook posts through which he recalled feeling “actually afraid of [Beaser].”
“Did I know what Beaser was doing at the time?” Friedman wrote. “Yes, everyone did. Do I wish I had spoken up? In hindsight, of course, yes I do. But Beaser was the ultimate gatekeeper back then. … His entire deal has been creating a fiefdom where he has as much of a power imbalance as possible.”
As of Sunday, a number of high-profile names from throughout the classical and new-music fields had signed the open letter, together with Missy Mazzoli, Gabriela Lena Frank, Vijay Iyer, Tyondai Braxton, Andrew Norman, Claire Chase and Nico Muhly.
Snider encountered explicit trepidation from males within the music neighborhood, hesitant to signal for concern of retribution. Though sympathetic, the dissonance wasn’t misplaced.
“What I gently tried to tell them was that this is the same kind of fear that women have always had,” Snider says. “We’re so frequently harassed or mistreated or abused, and there’s no one to speak up about it to. Additionally, we then need to try to get those abusers to still like us enough to write letters of recommendation or to recommend us for prizes. It’s an impossible situation for women to advocate for themselves.”
By the signing deadline of three p.m. Friday, Snider says 90 p.c of the boys who had been on the fence got here by at the final minute with signatures.
“I think they started to see that there’s more safety in numbers.”
Snider and the as-yet-unnamed coalition of composers are planning their first in-person strategic assembly in January to debate additional actions in straight addressing “intersectional” abuse and harassment throughout the composition neighborhood and classical music normally — the place systemic inequities and imbalances have roots that run centuries deep.
“The positive thing to say about all of this,” Snider says, “is that it’s one of the very first times — maybe the first time in the history of our composition community — that men and women and people of all genders have come together to stand up and protect one another. It’s such a momentous occasion in our field, and I think it speaks volumes about the possibility for growth and change.”
