Bandwidth at the Curtis Institute of Music: A Concert Built in a Week

Three percussionists in black tank tops were hitting drums and cymbals beside a marimba, and above them a portrait as big as the wall itself, a face painted in thick red strokes with its eyes closed, looked down over a dark room of silhouetted heads. I took that photograph on Friday night, September 25, in Gould Rehearsal Hall at the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, and it is the frame I keep going back to. I did not have a running order in my hand, because there was not one to have. The printed program said the music would be announced from the stage, and Curtis’s own event page lists the program as to be determined, because of what it calls the exploratory nature of the residency. What I did have was the premise: a group of ridiculously talented Curtis students, one intensive week, three alumni guiding them, and a whole lot of creative freedom. I spent the evening with some good friends and collaborators, and I am still thinking about it.

How Bandwidth Works at Curtis

Bandwidth is a residency at the Curtis Institute of Music, and Curtis describes it simply. Over one intensive week, students build a concert entirely from their own ideas, with guidance from three alumni, and then they put it on a stage. The event page names the raw materials as original arrangements, new compositions, multimedia integration and interdisciplinary collaborations. The rules of the week, as I read them, are to work fast, trust your instincts and put perfectionism aside, while the work still demands the students’ technical mastery and then asks them to reach past it. The artists’ note in my printed program defines the title word as “the capacity to transmit and receive.” So what happens when you give people who can play anything one week and no script? Turns out, some pretty cool stuff happens.

This was not a one night experiment. Curtis put a Nate’s World residency recital with current students on its calendar for December 7, 2024, and a Bandwidth Residency recital on it for January 31 of this year, which WRTI’s weekend listings described as students building quickly assembled programs from newly composed music, original arrangements and elements from outside traditional instrumentation. Curtis marked the January concert sold out, and the September event page says the same and offers a waitlist.

Three Alumni Who Came Back to Their Own School

The names on the program are Nate Farrington, Gabriel Globus-Hoenich and Teddy Abrams, and all three are Curtis graduates who came home to guide the week. Curtis’s biographies list Nate, under the name Nathan, as a double bass graduate of 2006 and the principal bassist of LA Opera since 2016. He regularly sits in the bass section of orchestras that include the Philadelphia Orchestra, and he also plays guitar and sings operatic arias and folk songs alongside his bass. The same biographies list Gabriel as a percussion graduate of 2008, a Montreal native now based in New York, formerly a teaching artist with Play On Philly!, and the founder in 2017 of People of Earth, a group of 13 musicians playing Latin fusion. Teddy is listed as a conducting graduate of 2008, and the Louisville Orchestra says he has been its music director since 2014 and calls him a Grammy Award winner. Nate’s biography on the BroadStage site credits him with developing Bandwidth.

Curtis says the three have made music together since their student days, as a trio called Nate’s World and as a larger ensemble called Musicians from Garden Music. BroadStage says their programs move freely between Bach and the Beatles and between Chopin and Chick Corea. I would guess the Garden Music name traces back to GardenMusic, the chamber music festival that Teddy’s Sixth Floor Trio started in 2012 at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in South Florida, as the Knight Foundation profiled it in 2015. Teddy called styles in music artificial boundaries there and said the festival was about breaking those barriers down, and Curtis lists Gabriel as the festival’s education director. Put that history next to the week at Curtis and the assignment stops looking strange. You hand a room of students to three people who have made a habit of ignoring the border between one kind of music and another.

What the Room Looked Like

Gould Rehearsal Hall sits on the second floor of Lenfest Hall at 1616 Locust Street and holds about 165 seats. Curtis’s campus page describes an acoustically designed hall that can hold a full orchestra, with teaching studios for percussion, double bass and harp beside it, a fitting neighborhood for a week guided by a bassist and a percussionist.

In another of my photographs the screen is deep blue, and across it in big serif capitals runs The Many Faces of Desire, ringed by small icons: a flame, a heart, a magnet, a moon, a burger, a drink with a straw. Two performers stand at the front holding microphones, which fits the printed promise that the program would be announced from the stage, while other players sit at their instruments around a marimba. The stands near it are labeled Curtis GRH, which I took to mean Gould Rehearsal Hall. I cannot give you a running order, and I will not guess at titles. I can tell you how it felt.

They composed, rearranged, experimented, made each other laugh and definitely took the music places I was not expecting. Some of it was beautiful. Some of it was wonderfully strange, and some of it was funny on purpose. All of it felt alive.

A School of 165 in a Room of 165

Here is a number that rearranged my thinking. WHYY reported that Curtis has 165 students and 115 faculty members to teach them. Gould, by Curtis’s own count, holds about 165 seats. Sit the whole student body down in that hall and you would just about fill it. WHYY also reported that in 2005, more than 60 percent of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s musicians had come out of Curtis, which is a lot of Philadelphia sound to trace back to a school that small.

Where does a school like that come from? From someone who ran into the problem head on. According to Curtis’s history page, Mary Louise Curtis Bok was president of the Settlement Music School in South Philadelphia, where she met children with the talent for a career in classical music and no means to train for it. She bought three historic mansions to form the foundation of a campus at Rittenhouse Square, a park that first appears on William Penn’s 1682 plan of the city, and Curtis opened on October 13, 1924. In 1928 a gift from her lifted the endowment to $12 million and the school stopped charging tuition. One of my photographs shows the doorway of the main building at 1726 Locust Street: a carved stone arch with fruit and cherub faces, iron scrolls in the door glass, a plaque with the address. Curtis’s campus page calls that building two connected 19th century mansions.

The promise has a price. For the 2026 to 2027 school year, Curtis puts the annual value of the scholarship at $55,995 for an undergraduate and $69,527 for a graduate student, and no application is required to receive it. The Inquirer reported in June 2025 that keeping tuition at zero took an eleven year campaign of more than 17,000 donations from 4,654 donors, and that the school and the Mary Louise Curtis Bok Foundation held a combined endowment worth $325 million in March 2025.

I keep saying that culture is infrastructure, and I have rarely seen it laid out this plainly. A century of endowment, mansions and donors sits underneath a Friday night when students got to decide what a concert was.

Free on a Weeknight

This is the part I want you to steal from this post. The night belonged to the Curtis Recital Series, which Curtis says brings more than 100 free student, studio and faculty recitals to Philadelphia every year, mostly on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings at 7:30. Admission is complimentary with advance registration, capped at four tickets per request, and there is no standing room, so you reserve ahead. WRTI’s John T.K. Scherch counted the free performances at Curtis at roughly three a week in his January listings.

The program in my photograph credits the Edith L. and Robert Prostkoff Memorial Concert Series, and Curtis’s series page carries the same credit, along with a note that the school received funding from Pennsylvania Creative Industries, powered by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Two names are on the series, and the state arts agency is on the page. A night like this rests on a lot of quiet decisions by people who are never in the photograph.

The Curtis calendar is public. Pick a Monday, a Wednesday or a Friday, and go see some live music, especially something you do not already know you are going to like.

Honor What Came Before, Then Make Your Own

Curtis has an extraordinary history of training some of the world’s greatest musicians, and its own history page says as much. It counts Leonard Bernstein among the composers who polished their craft there, notes that Samuel Barber wrote his Adagio for Strings as an early student, and lists Teddy Abrams among the alumni who performed alongside students in the centennial season. This time it was the students’ turn to lead. They were not up there simply recreating what somebody else had already done. They were screwing around with it, taking risks and figuring out what they wanted to do with all that talent.

That is how art stays alive. You honor what came before you and then go make your own damn thing.

Cities get judged in big years by their big stages, and I understand why. One smaller stage stays with me, a rehearsal hall on Locust Street with about 165 seats and a waitlist. Curtis has been doing this since 1924, and 2026 is only now walking past the front door.

The artists say no two of their performances are the same, and I believe them. Walking out into Philadelphia afterward, I had that wonderful feeling of having witnessed something that existed only for that room, those musicians and that moment. Bravo to the students, the alumni and everyone at Curtis. Bravo to Philadelphia for staying a city where nights like this can happen. Long live live music. Long live experimentation. And long live Curtis.