“It’s like this scary abyss of going into the performing arts where you have to figure out how to do it,” said Castro Kiltz, who plans to enroll in a Master of Fine Arts program in either acting or dance next year.
Michael Cadden, director of the Program in Theater, explained that creative careers challenge aspiring artists both because of their subjective nature and their lack of a defined career ladder.
“The fact is that far more human beings have what it takes to be lawyers, doctors and investment bankers,” Cadden said. “And the path to those jobs is clearer.”
Despite the challenges, undergraduates every year decide to become musicians and actors. Steven Mackey, chair of the music department, estimated that 80–90 percent of the undergraduate music concentrators, as well as two or three students earning music performance certificates, go on to graduate school in music performance. Cadden said that five to eight theater students per year are typically interested in professional careers, and noted that the number is growing.
Princeton students pursuing careers in the performing arts follow paths that diverge from those of peers at conservatories or other specialized performing arts schools.
“There are tradeoffs,” Mackey said. “If a composer comes to Princeton to study composition, they’ll get a lot of things they wouldn’t get at a place like Juilliard, like individualized attention, more opportunities because there are fewer people to compete with and a broader intellectual context. What they don’t get here is that they don’t get to spend as much time pursuing music.”
Alison Beskin ’13, a flutist who hopes to join a professional orchestra, explained that the curriculum at a music conservatory would be much narrower than a Princeton education, consisting of three or four years of music theory, several music history classes and performance-based classes, with other academic courses considered electives.
Both Mackey and Cadden, however, said that a liberal arts education may provide a better foundation for performing arts students.
“It may improve their chances of carving out an imaginative, creative niche for themselves that someone who’s been through a music factory like Juilliard maybe wouldn’t think of,” Mackey said.
“We don’t have law and medicine majors because it’s assumed that those professions are best served by people with broad and varied educational backgrounds,” Cadden noted. “Same goes for the arts. In the long run — and a successful career in the arts means you’re in it for the long run, not for 15 minutes of fame — a liberal arts education will serve you best.”
Max Mamon ’10, a music concentrator who will pursue a Master of Fine Arts in musical theater writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, considered attending a conservatory but thought the focus would have been too narrow — not just for his development as a musician but as a person.
“I wanted to be a well-rounded person who can have an intelligent conversation on a variety of topics,” Mamon said.
Mamon experienced the intensive programming for one semester, studying abroad at the Royal College of Music in London, which he said fulfilled his desire to experience a music-centered program within the context of a broader undergraduate education.
Castro Kiltz also contemplated a conservatory education — not just for a semester, but for a degree — before deciding against it.
“At 17, I wasn’t sure I wanted to become a performer,” she said. “Being at Princeton really solidified my desire to pursue it professionally, and there is always time to specialize later.”
Still, putting in the necessary preparation for a career in the performing arts and pursuing a liberal arts education presents certain challenges. Castro Kiltz has always taken at least five classes a semester in order to fit in acting and dance courses, and all students interviewed for this article said they average several hours a day training or rehearsing.
“I just tell myself that I know academics are extremely important, but music is what I want to do with my life,” Beskin said.
“Graduate conservatories don’t care much about how well you’ve balanced things in college,” Cadden noted. “A Princeton student with the worst academic record I’ve ever seen got into the M.F.A. acting program at Yale. The transcript didn’t matter. What they cared about was his audition and what it told them about his talent, vision, knowledge and artistic ambition.”
Though most student actors and musicians here will not pursue the performing arts professionally, Castro Kiltz said that there are opportunities on campus for students with a variety of artistic interests.
“It’s really nice that there is the opportunity to participate in the arts on a very extracurricular level, and then there’s the next level, the certificate track,” Castro Kiltz said. “Being able to do both has allowed me to do even more arts and balance it with my course load.”
Castro Kiltz’s training at the University has positioned her to pursue her diverse interests in the future. She was accepted to the Tisch School’s M.F.A. program in dance and is also an alternate to Harvard’s M.F.A. program in acting.
She said she aspires to pursue a performance career before running a theater that would “explore the integration of dance, music and theater, and pieces that use dance but also use the spoken word and music to tell stories.”
Beskin said that her classmates’ varying commitment to pursuing music professionally is not a problem. “Music is a huge part of all their lives. It’s great being with people who really enjoy performing,” she said.
Mamon and Castro Kiltz also praised the mentoring they received from professors, as well as the support and opportunities provided by the Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2006, President Shirley Tilghman announced a new arts initiative for the University, following a $101 million donation by Peter Lewis ’55 to support creative and performing art studies.
“We’re on the third year of a marked upswing in how we prepare students for careers in the arts,” Mackey said. “Given five more years, I think we’ll be preparing students as well as Princeton prepares students pursuing more conventional paths.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Pilar Castro Kiltz '10 as Kiltz, when in fact her surname is Castro Kiltz.
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