“It’s a really great opportunity that I never even thought was possible,” she said.

Rochetti unveiled her piece alongside seven other student musicians at the Fordham Composers Concert, held on May 1 at Fordham Lincoln Center’s 12th-Floor Lounge. The annual event is the culmination of a semester’s work, where students develop their new pieces with top professionals who rehearse, provide advice, and ultimately perform the compositions for a live audience.  

Working at a Professional Level 

The Fordham Composers Workshop is a one-of-a-kind combination of theory and practice designed to give undergraduate students the experience of creating an original concert work at the professional level. Each student is assigned a different ensemble of three instruments to write for, culminating in a five-minute piece played on some combination of flute, clarinet, oboe, violin, or cello. 

The students then workshop the piece through multiple drafts which are read and played throughout the semester by members of the Exponential Ensemble —a chamber music collective made up of some of the most in-demand musicians in the New York City region.

“We’re working with professional musicians,” said Daniel Ott, D.M.A., associate professor of music theory and composition and chair of the art history and music department, who teaches the class. “It’s a really rare opportunity to get that hands-on experience when you’re a student.”

The format of the class is both lecture and workshop, as Ott spends half of the class time outlining classical composition principles and techniques. The other half allows students to engage directly with the instrumentalists, who offer insights and critiques on everything from the sonic impact of a key change to the proper way to notate specialty sounds like a flute growl.

“It’s not like any other regular class,” said Elena Smith, a senior music major at Fordham College at Rose Hill. “The structure of it is really different. It’s more interactive.”

Opening New Possibilities

The first Composers Workshop class was held in 2013. Since then, the small performances in the 50-seat Veronica Lally Kehoe Studio Theatre have grown to become an integral and vital part of artistic life on campus. In 2018, the final concert had its largest attendance to date when the student composers’ pieces were inspired by artworks from Fordham visual arts students. In 2020, during the pandemic, student works were still performed by the musicians despite their having to do so online —a monumental task that involved separate recordings of each part for every piece.

The class continues to be a highlight for students who relish the opportunity to combine academic rigor with personal expression.

“You just have complete creative freedom to create whatever you want with your music,” said Henry Domenici, a senior music major. “I really have enjoyed the opportunity to get to do that for a class.” 

“With the pandemic, the possibility of a physical conference collapsed, and so we decided that we would look for something more timely, something that would be useful, both intellectually but also pedagogically,” said W. David Myers, Ph.D., professor of history at Fordham and a member of the Board of Directors of the  Renaissance Society, which relocated to the Rose Hill campus last year.

As historians, they did what they are trained to do: They brought the past into the present.

The new symposium, titled “Plagues, Pandemics, and Outbreaks of Disease in History” will take place virtually on Friday, Nov. 13, beginning at 10 a.m. The symposium is free but participants need to register in advance.

Myers said the goal of the symposium is to show how history helps us see the current moment, as well as how the current moment can help us understand the past.

“What can we bring to the study of the modern pandemic, from our historical experience, but just as much, what can we bring to the study of past plagues?” he said. “ How will this experience–as human beings in this sad world at the moment–alter or affect the way we study?”

The morning session will feature a round table on the intellectual and scholarly significance of the present moment in historical terms. The participants–Hannah Marcus, Ph.D. (Harvard), Colin Rose, Ph.D. (Brock University, Ontario), and Lisa Sousa, Ph.D. (Occidental College)–are experts in the global consequences of plagues from the Black Death in Europe to smallpox in the conquest of the Americas.

Central to the planning of the symposium, Myers said, has been Christina Bruno, associate director of the Center for Medieval Studies and a Fordham Ph.D. in medieval history who has also published in Renaissance Quarterly.

Myers said the event, which is co-sponsored by the society as well as Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies and the Departments of Art History and Music, Classics, and History, will also allow graduate students at Fordham to present and discuss their work in front of an international audience.

Rachel Podd, a Ph.D. student in history; Camila Marcone, an M.A. student in medieval studies; Mark Host, an M.A. student in medieval studies; and Katherina Fostana, the visual resources curator in art history will participate in the session called “Developing Pedagogy: Roundtable and Discussion.”

Some of these students will talk about how they’ve taught materials on the plague and other historic pandemics to their classrooms in the New York City area. A few of their examples will be presented at the symposium, including how Podd gave a lecture for high school students in the spring on the Black Death plague and Marcone put together a project on the plague for a high school in New Jersey.

“We’re showing that our students really are reaching out to the community and recognizing that education at the university and college level is only the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

“[Our scholars] are trying to incorporate a whole world of study, from archeology to medical study to our history, in order to help students today understand the historical experience and place themselves in history somehow,” Myers said. The partnership between Fordham and the Renaissance Society of America helps bring together scholars from across the world and helps to elevate the work of Fordham graduate students, he said.

“[Renaissance Society of America] gets to tap a population of scholars and the population of students and workers who are vibrant and energetic and interesting,” Myers said. “It brings an internationally important and significant organization in the humanities into the world of Fordham and allows us to tap that experience.”

The shift to remote learning last month necessitated by the COVID-19 outbreak has presented unique challenges to students and professors in the performing arts. They’ve been forced to temporarily leave behind concert halls, dance studios, and theaters, and in some cases, to reconsider the very nature and purpose of what they do.

In Theater, Special Attention to the Medium

“It’s a huge challenge to adjust to this, and like any kind of trauma, it plays itself out very differently in different personality types. To be aware of that and sensitive to that is an education,” said George Drance, S.J., artist-in-residence at Fordham University Lincoln Center and a member of the Fordham Theatre faculty.

For Drance, who is teaching the courses Acting IV and Theatre, Creativity, and Values this semester, the shift has involved helping students learn and rehearse plays such as The Centaur Battle of San Jacinto while separated by both space and—for students not on the East Coast—time. Scenes would be impractical to rehearse on Zoom, so students have been working on monologues instead. Drance also split his Acting IV class into an East Coast group and a West Coast Group, and when they meet in person, it’s primarily to review monologues the students have recorded of themselves earlier.

“We decided to really use the platform to focus on individual on-camera technique, because they’re dealing with a camera instead of an audience,” he said.

“So rather than force a Zoom conference to be anything other than it is, we took it as a way to demonstrate how the principles of working with a partner and doing on-camera work are really the same principles but executed with subtle differences.”

Drance said he has also challenged his students to ask themselves what it’s like to be attentive to themselves now that their regular routines have been stripped away.

“How can you be patient with yourself, rigorous with yourself, and generous with yourself according to what is appropriate for each moment? In that way, it’s very Ignatian,” he said, noting that Saint Ignatius, the founder of the Society of Jesus, often spoke of focusing on whatever is more conducive to a person’s place and circumstance.

Clint Ramos, head of design and production in the theater program, said when it comes to set design, students who would have been expected to turn in the second of the semester’s two projects are instead receiving in-depth tutorials. Even if students can’t build models of theater sets from home, they can still dissect the texts of plays and discuss emotional responses that might then be translated into physical forms.

“When we’re looking at a text, instead of immediately jumping to a design, we spend a lot more time talking about the piece, its social implications, what could be a potential design for it. We’ll research materials that could lead to a design rather than concentrate on the practical methods of designing the piece itself,” he said.

Stage Directing a Zoom “Play”

For Lillian Rider, a Fordham College at Lincoln Center junior who will graduate in December with a degree in theater design and production, the pandemic ended her chance to stage manage To The Bone, the final production of the department’s mainstage season.

Instead, the cast came together via Zoom for a reading of the play on April 18, the day that would have been the final performance of a two-week run. Roughly 90 people attended, and Rider supervised from her parents’ home in Hartford. Although it was never meant to replace a real performance, she and director Lou Moreno took small steps to make it more than a regular Zoom meetup, such as making sure the backgrounds behind actors were similar.

At the conclusion, audience members were allowed to turn their cameras on, and the cast could see them applaud. It was a far cry from the real thing, but Rider said she was satisfied that it did what she most wanted it to do, which was reunite the cast and introduce new people to the material.

“We had a few sound problems, which were bound to happen, but we just didn’t stop, and they worked themselves out. I was texting actors throughout, helping with technological things, but nothing that held up the run,” she said.

“I didn’t think I’d actually end up getting to manage a mainstage show this year, but it did end up being a lot of management, a lot of emails and scheduling, and then I got a hand in the running of the show.”

For Music Class, Professionals Record Students’ Arrangements

Nathan Lincoln-DeCusatis, an assistant professor of music, was fortunate that the two classes he is teaching this semester, Music Theory II and Jazz Arranging, are more amenable to online instruction, thanks to music-writing sites like Noteflight. After some trial and error, he settled on a system where he makes a prerecorded lecture of himself playing chords and working with notation software. Live meetings are reserved for questions about the lecture and demonstrations of exercises students can practice.

“It’s like a flipped classroom, because you do the lecture for homework, and then you do the homework together in class. As I’ve gotten better, I’ve been able to do more in real time over Zoom, because I’ve figured out tricks like how to play the music from my computer,” he said.

Lincoln-DeCusatis did lose a live performance element of his music theory class, as he had arranged for professional musicians to visit class and perform pieces that students had arranged. Rather than scrap it, he emailed the students’ works to the musicians, who then recorded them in their home studios and returned tracks to him. He then synced the tracks—one each for a trombone, tenor saxophone, alto saxophone and bass—with a piano track of his own, and uploaded the finished result to SoundCloud.

“It actually sounded better than anything we’ve done before, because that’s how you record in a recording studio,” he said.

“Every instrument is isolated, and you can mix it and add effects to it. It sounded really great; it’s the best-sounding outcome we’ve had so far. That was probably my greatest pandemic teaching triumph.”

Antonio Rivoli, a sophomore at Fordham College at Rose Hill majoring in music and urban studies, and one of Lincoln-DeCusatis’ music theory class students, is also enrolled in the Afro-Latin Music Ensemble course. The course was significantly hampered by the suspension of in-person instruction, but he said that ensemble director Peter “Jud” Wellington shifted the focus of the class to sampling, a change Rivoli has embraced wholeheartedly.

“We’ve really challenged ourselves to make the best out of a really difficult time. No one expected that this could have happened, and to be putting together other kinds of projects that the courses aren’t designed for has been really cool,” he said.

Rivoli said he’s also tried to make the most of his time at home in Battery Park City.

“I have a microphone, and I took music production last fall, so I’ve been doing some mini-recordings to try to be productive. I’ve been practicing more guitar, which I never do on campus. So there have been certain perks,” he said.

A Barre in Brooklyn

Meagan King is, in her words, “trying to find the light in everything.” By now, King, a senior in the Ailey/Fordham BFA program, would have normally auditioned for one of Ailey’s two dance companies, where she hopes to dance upon graduation. Instead, King is studying at her parents’ home in Mill Basin, Brooklyn.

“I’ve been trying to stay ready,” she said.

“I’ve been telling myself, ‘If I put in the work now, I won’t have to feel like I’m unprepared when it comes to the audition.’ I know that I can be naturally nervous in auditions as most people are, but I want to take out all the extra factors that can take away from me just shining.”

In addition to working with instructors, King has been using the time to explore online presentations from other dancers. She’s been working on the custom-made barre her father built for her and her younger brother, who is also a dancer, and she’s dampening her ballet slippers to give her more grip on the floor.

Like her fellow seniors, she has had virtual conversations with dance professionals from around the city that were arranged by the Ailey Company, to address any concerns related to the field. The talks have spurred her to think deeply about why she started dancing in the first place, as a student at LaGuardia High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, just a few blocks from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

“I realized, that kind of free spirit is the same person I want to connect to now when I get to go out and do my audition whenever this is over. It’s easy, once you have the knowledge, to become critical of yourself,” she said.

“Not to say I should just be reckless and audition, but I feel like I’m taking off layers in this quarantine so I can just dance. I have the knowledge; I have the foundation I’ve been working on.”

Melanie Person, co-director of the Ailey School, said the school has had to rely more on video and written instruction in lieu of in-person instruction, and instructors are particularly sensitive to the fact that students’ living rooms and bedrooms are no substitute for a spacious, well-lit studio.

Person also noted that self-discipline has always been paramount for world-class dancers.

“At Ailey, they’re taking two to three dance classes a day, even via Zoom,” she said.

“This requires self-motivation and self-discipline that you really need anyway for dance, but now you really have to draw more from your own reserves for this. You’re a dancer, this is what you do, you have to have to keep your own schedule with it.”

There is a culpable sense of loss born from the fact that the community is separated from each other, she said. But perhaps counterintuitively, Person said, it can be empowering for a dancer to assume complete responsibility for themselves and their art.

“It’s a different model. It’s time to be reflective. And really, you can sit back and think about, ‘Why do I dance?’ Once you have distance from something, perhaps you come back to it with a different appreciation and from a different perspective. I believe that is what is to be gained from this.”

“Irma was a towering figure in the life, history, and ministry of the University, a loving mentor to generations of Fordham students, a cherished colleague, and a wise counselor to deans, vice presidents, and presidents,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “She endowed the University with her great energy, vision, and zest for life.”

Jaffe’s prolific work helped advance the University’s shift from regional commuter college to a world-class research institution, said Linda LoSchiavo, director of Fordham Libraries.

“She was a real library lover,” said LoSchiavo.

LoSchiavo recalled that on the day that Walsh Library was dedicated, Jaffe was invited to join the festivities held outdoors, where everyone had gathered. Instead, “she was inside with her research spread out on a table,” recalled LoSchiavo. “She was at work, she was doing her research.”

LoSchiavo said that Jaffe made extensive use of the library staff and resources, turning up original research from its own collections—namely the John Trumbull drawings—on whom she later published a book. One of her findings included the discovery that a few of the signers of the Declaration of Independence from Trumbull’s iconic painting had been misidentified.

“Irma was one of the first people to actually exploit the resources at Fordham for scholarly purposes,” concurred Loschiavo’s husband, Joseph LoSchiavo, FCRH ’72. The couple were both students of Jaffe, and later went on to become her colleagues and friends.

In addition to her Trumbull book, she also published books on artists Giambattista Zelotti, Leonard Baskin, and Joseph Stella. She also wrote on literature, namely Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune: The Lives and Loves of Italian Renaissance Women Poets (Fordham University Press, 2002).

“I think she put herself in the place of these women and thought it might be exciting to be a person in those times,” said her daughter, Yvonne Korshak, Ph.D. “She just loved Italy.”

Korshak said that her mother first visited Italy in the 1950s, where she fell in love with “the Italian mood.” The LoSchiavos recalled that Jaffe lived life with a European flair, inviting guests for dinner at her home only to shift the venue across the street to the park to eat al fresco. The guests at her many parties included a mix of ambassadors, art critics, conductors, poets, and the occasional accordion player.

“How many 85-year-old women give costume parties?” asked LoSchiavo.

But it was the work that sustained her said her daughter.

“She was really grateful for, rooted in, and identified with Fordham,” she said. “It was such a fine academic home for her.”

Jaffe organized two noted symposia on “Baroque Art: The Jesuit Contribution” and “The Italian Presence in American Art” that led to published books. Among other distinctions, she was designated as Cavalieri in the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy for contributions to Italian art and culture.

But above all she was a very serious mentor and teacher, those that knew her said. Joseph LoSchiavo recalled a class in the late 1960s when the buzzword of the time was “relevant.”

“We were still dealing with the war and everybody was questioning everything,” said LoSchiavo. “It was the last day of class and someone asked if Ottonian art would be on the exam, to which she replied, ‘Yes,’ and somebody in the back of the class said, ‘Oh yeah, like it’s relevant.’”

“Irma pulled herself up to her full height and said, ‘Everything produced by the hand of man is relevant.’”

Jaffe was predeceased by her first husband, Donald Korshak, and her second husband, Samuel Jaffe. In addition to Yvonne Korshak, she is also survived by her granddaughter, Karin and son-in-law, Robert.