2015 Alumni Commencement Remarks: Cathy Fuller

Cathy Fuller—a piano major at NEC who went on to a career in broadcasting—is currently a producer/host at 99.5 WCRB, a service of WGBH. At New England Conservatory's 144th Commencement ceremony on May 17, 2015, she offered these remarks to the graduating Class of 2015, on behalf of the NEC Alumni Association.

The Good Benches

I’m very touched to have been asked to speak on behalf of the Alumni Association—it’s a great honor. Thank you!

I have a very close friend who often warns against performances that overload the smaller details with too much sentiment, so that the beauty of the big design collapses.

“You can’t sit on every bench in the park” he says.

I think he’s right. But some benches you must sit on. And when you’re on one of those benches, I say savor absolutely everything about it.

And I think that today, whatever shape your life’s larger design may take—you’re on the right bench. Soak it in. Congratulations!

I’m proud to have two degrees from NEC—both of them in piano performance. So, like you, I spent many, many hours sitting alone in a small, closed room, grappling with the meaning of music and coming up with clever ways of hiding prohibited cups of coffee.

But when I changed my path and went into classical broadcasting, it felt like a new beginning. (Until I realized I was still sitting alone in a small, closed room, grappling with the meaning of music, and coming up with clever ways of hiding prohibited cups of coffee.)

But I love it.

In fact, for the very first assignment I was given in radio—to come up with a series of specials on music, after about three months in the business—I didn’t even have to think twice. I grabbed an engineer and found my way to Lexington, to interview one of the most fascinating thinkers in the world: Russell Sherman.

Now with the power of hindsight, I can say that when I was sitting where you are, thinking whatever in the world I was thinking, I actually was on one of those good benches. In fact, if I’d become a doctor or a landscaper or a poet or a chauffeur—I’d still want to have learned to think and to hear and to listen to the world like a musician.

The great New Yorker critic Alex Ross calls music a “trance—a sensual disorder of the senses.” You know how life-changing it is. How it threads its way all through you and brings you closer to your best self. That feeling is something I think we’re all desperate to share. I remember sitting in that very [Jordan Hall] balcony and hearing Schumann’s Fantasy for piano for the very first time—it was Leonard Shure on this stage—and in the last movement, there is a heartbreaking melody that tries again and again to rise up and come loose, and time after time it falls back … I remember weeping uncontrollably. There’s a breathtaking, hopeful moment when the melody finds a partner and begins to sail up as a duet—and one of my tears fell off my cheek, over the balcony and through the air, down onto someone’s head in the seats below. I was a wreck. And I really wanted everyone else to be a wreck, too.

And that’s really our job—to keep looking for every possible way to open every possible door into this music. Whether you perform it or compose it or teach it or analyze it or write about it or bring it into the world of children—or if you move into another realm where it speaks to you at some other level—whatever you finally do, remember your many hours in these small, closed rooms—how they helped you to become a wreck like me. (You know what I mean …)

And please—stay in touch with NEC. It will always be there with a hand extended, anxious to share your story.

Welcome to the fabulous family of alums!

Enjoy this day—and I join everyone here in wishing you all the very, very best.