FSU's Fine Arts: hard work, high ranking

By Bayard Stern
Special to the Florida State Times

In a windowless room in the Housewright Building, just large enough for one piano and two chairs, Sarah Koonce practices piano for hours every day. This day in February, she sits down, comments on the condition of the piano, and without sheet music starts playing a piece by Claude Debussy. A smiling, relaxed 21-year-old college junior becomes a musician, intensely focused on her instrument, her hands and her music. Her intensity does not waver until the piece is complete.

Koonce's talent may be extraordinary, but her dedication isn't. Fine arts students at Florida State ­ whether music, dance, theater, film or visual arts ­ work hard, even by university standards. They have to. The best of them are preparing for a lifetime of striving ­ endless practice ­ with uncertain rewards.

And they're doing it in a demanding milieu. Four of FSU's five fine-arts programs are ranked in the top ten in the nation. And the artists in training are also getting a broad-based liberal-arts education, in itself enough to keep most students busy.

The oldest of FSU's fine-arts programs is the School of Music, founded in 1911 and now ranked in the top ten in the nation by US News and World Report.

The music school "has a long and illustrious history," said Jon Piersol, dean since 1991. "Not only were we one of the first music schools to be accredited in the nation, for decades we have been the preeminent music school in the South. Today it's one of the most respected, highly ranked, comprehensive ­ and the third largest ­ university music program in the country."

The school has produced some notable alumni, such as Ellen Zwillich, the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize in composition, and Charles Rex, an associate concert master in the New York Philharmonic.

Koonce, with her talent and hours of daily practice, seems headed for success as well.

"I like the culture here," said the piano performance major from Vienna, Va. "The music school has 950 people, so it has all the ensembles under the sun, but it's still small enough so you get to know everybody. I wanted to go to FSU because it's such a well-rounded school. I didn't want to go to a conservatory because I still wanted to be part of society."

This semester, for the first time, she's taking only music courses: piano pedagogy, key board literature and music theory. She also plays in a chamber trio with piano, violin and cello. And she's in the steel drum group.

Like the music school, the dance program has its roots in the all-women days of FSCW, when students took dance classes in the physical education department.

Now part of the School of Visual Arts and Dance, the program was named second best in the country by the magazine, Dance Teacher Now .

It was built by dance-department chairwoman Nancy Smith Fichter and her predecessor, Nellie-Bond Dickinson.

"What I wanted to do in developing the dance program was based on the model of the conservatory within the university," said Fichter, who is retiring this year after 33 years as chairwoman of the department. "So you would have intensive professional training as demanding, and as of high a caliber, as anything you would find in a conservatory or a professional studio, but you had it couched in the base of a liberal education."

That vision has produced some highly notable dancers, one of which is Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, founder and director of the Urban Bush Women in New York. Zollar received her masters degree from FSU in the '70s and has returned to teach dance.

Another highly ranked program (No. 9 among public institutions, according to US News and World Report) is the School of Theatre, founded in 1973. It has produced many well known actors, including Charles Nelson Riley; Delane Mathews, the wife on Dave's World; Davis Gaines, the lead in Phantom of the Opera on Broadway; Henry Polic; and Stephen Sears, executive producer and creator of Xena: Warrior Princess.

The newest of the fine-arts programs is the film school, which opened in 1989 and was ranked No. 9 in the nation this year by U. S. News & World Report. The school immediately attracted to the faculty established names in the world of cinema, including the schools first dean, Dr. Ray Fielding, who has spent more than 35 years in film and video education at five universities, and Richard Portman, an academy-award winning sound engineer, now teaching at FSU.

The art program has also attracted well known names. Jochen Gerz, for example, is an internationally known conceptual artist from Germany. Gerz is teaching two classes at FSU and is working on a project called Reasons for Smiles with FSU and FAMU graduate students. The show will be seen in Vancouver, Paris, Berlin and perhaps Tallahassee.

Gerz's students - like Koonce in her practice cubicle, the dancers and actors on stage and the filmmakers on location - spend hours developing their art.

They aren't just getting ready to make a living. According to Fichter, they're cultivating the human spirit.

"To me the fine arts ... are the things that deal with our deepest human centers," Fichter said. "Look at the instrumentality of dance. You're working with the most intimate and one of the most potent instruments that an artist can have, which is the physical, emotional and psychological self. I mean the body is our instrument; that's rather direct."

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