“Waking up here and going to sleep here is way more peaceful than when I’m at home sometimes,” says BUTI student Dorian Parker of Boston. Photos by Linda Campos

BUTI

Bringing Different Voices to BU Tanglewood Institute

Partners program draws talented high school musicians from underserved communities

“This is an opportunity for me,” says Dorian Parker, a 19-year-old singer from Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood. “An opportunity to understand my capabilities and enhance my potential in whatever I may do in life.”

Parker is spending six weeks this summer singing and learning at the BU Tanglewood Institute (BUTI), the preeminent summer classical music program for high-school musicians, singers, and composers in Lenox, Mass., just down the road from the fabled summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Many BUTI graduates go on to careers in classical music with the BSO and other leading orchestras around the country.

He chuckles when asked about the talents of his fellow students. “The level here is—I’m not going to say shocking, I’m not going to say startling, but it was thrilling to me to come in here.’”

Parker just graduated from Boston Arts Academy, the city’s public high school for the arts, serving students who reflect the diversity of Boston’s neighborhoods. The school is a member of the BUTI Partner Network, 13 organizations around the country (among others are the Chicago Musical Pathways Initiative and the Philadelphia Music Alliance for Youth) that funnel talented students from underserved communities to BUTI. Most are offered partial or full-ride scholarships to the program.

“We are looking for people who bring something to the table that is above and beyond just technical proficiency,” says Nicole Wendl, BUTI’s interim executive director. “My vision, at least, is that that future generation of BSO players and singers is active in all areas of community life, starting to think about how their existence and their musicality impact the world around them.”

Leadership from 10 of the partner organizations will be in Lenox this weekend for discussions and brainstorming aimed at building and strengthening the program and maximizing support for the students.

The visitors will attend a student concert Sunday at Tanglewood’s Seiji Ozawa Hall. All the works on the program are by Black women composers, including two by BUTI alum Valerie Coleman (CFA’95). The concert celebrates Ann Hobson Pilot, former principal harpist with the BSO and director of BUTI’s Young Artists Harp Program from 2002 to 2021, who will be in attendance.

One thing everyone at BUTI this summer seems to agree on is that it’s great to be making music together in person again after two years of pandemic disruptions and remote classes.

“There’s a big difference between talking to somebody on Zoom and being able to put your hand on someone’s shoulder,” Wendl says, looking out over the broad green lawns of the BUTI campus. “There is a physicality, a materiality to music, that is sort of unquantifiable. You can feel music in the air, it’s palpable, and you just can’t get that over the internet.”

Raw talent and a willingness to learn

“Dorian came to us with some really great raw talent, but he had very little vocal training,” says Molly Jo Rivelli, Dorian’s classical voice teacher at Boston Arts Academy. “His voice is extremely flexible and sort of the epitome of what we try to teach, which is that basic vocal training based on classical technique allows you to sing any style you want to, healthfully.”

After four years at the Academy, she says, he is an accomplished sight reader who can sing in all styles, from lead vocals on 70s hits with the school’s contemporary band to musical theater and opera to classical, gospel, and jazz with its choirs.

The only child of a single mother, Parker grew up singing in church and favors R&B and jazz today; he sang John Legend’s “So High” for his senior recital. BUTI’s high-level classical focus is a new challenge, but one he’s glad to take on.

BUTI “was a chance for me to learn something new, a new way of singing, and a new genre,” he says. “Miss Rivelli was like, ‘You should try BUTI, I feel like it would help you. Your main focus is jazz, but you have a sound, you have a thing for classical technique. You should try it.’” 

He feels comfortable singing at BUTI, but notes with a smile that he is not going to break out his piano skills in public here. “It’s been a big shift to go from ‘Giant Steps’ and other jazz stuff, or gospel stuff”—styles where personal expression is paramount—“to here, where it has to be like this every time, on the note, and on the words. It’s hard, but it’s an adjustment I like.”

A life in music has long been his aim. “If my mother was here, she’d tell you I’ve been singing since I was about four, sitting in the back of the car, singing along to Sam Cooke and Billie Holiday and all those people, because that’s what my grandfather played in his car,” he says.

He recalls the moment when he decided to become a musician: “I was in my grandfather’s car, driving home from grocery shopping. I had to have been 11 or 12, and I was listening to ‘Georgia on My Mind’ by Ray Charles, and I was sitting there crying, ’cause I was like, how can I feel this much emotion just from listening to somebody singing? If someone else can do that to me and make me feel this emotion, then I can do the same thing.”

“Dorian is a special kid,” says Wendl. “He is not from a background of resources, who from an early age said, I’m going to take private lessons. He really has been nurtured by the Boston Arts Academy and attributes a lot of his success to that and the dedication of his family, which he speaks wonderfully of. And I think coming to BUTI has opened his eyes to what could come next and where he really still has room to grow.

“Understandably, those with more resources and more privilege often have more opportunities to grow and excel at a young age…which is why I think the BUTI partners program is so important,” she says.

“Just simply going to a different place can change how you think about and approach your playing or your singing and your musicality. All these influences from different backgrounds and different places and different levels of access really help to change and shape people, and I think that advances the world as a whole.”

Summer in the Berkshires is a big change for Parker, for sure. “Waking up here and going to sleep here is way more peaceful than when I’m at home sometimes,” says Parker, who lives close by the Mattapan T stop and plans to attend Bunker Hill Community College in the fall. “Sure, I’m homesick, and waking up and not hearing my mom making breakfast is weird. But to wake up and all you hear is bird sounds and nature is a little refreshing from the inner city.”

For students like Parker, BUTI gives the a chance to continue to build the vocal and performance skills needed to compete with students who have had lessons most of their lives, Rivelli says, and have heard classical music performances often. “In terms of systemic racial issues and inequality,” she says, “I think it’s important that our students, who are mostly people of color, have the opportunity to hear classical music and determine for themselves if they see themselves in it.”

Parker says that while he is hardly blind to issues of race and class, they haven’t really been a factor in his time at BUTI: “I think everyone’s just focused on their thing. We are all musicians, we all have the same baseline understanding of things.”