Music Transcends Differences
In 2023, aspiring songwriter and producer Aniya Russell ‘23 (Studio Production) found herself sitting in a restaurant in Tokyo pouring soy sauce over a bowl of white rice.
“I guess being in America, I like my seasonings. I like my sauce and everything,” she recalls over an early afternoon Zoom call from her home in upstate New York.
The move, which is not out of place in the United States, was met with concerned looks from the Japanese students she was dining with. The rice was meant to be eaten plain with that specific dish. It was just another cultural difference, like the way she was told to tuck her sneakers away at the restaurant door before walking inside.
Russell had always dreamed of a trip abroad but was, in her words, “humbled” by the price of plane tickets—especially to a country as far away as Japan. Her far-flung dream only became a reality when she was approached by Anne Kern, Dean for Global Strategy and International Programs at Purchase College, who suggested she apply to the Technos Art Program (TAP).
During the program, a group of hand-selected Purchase students spend a week in Japan showcasing their art alongside Technos College students in Tokyo. The final project—which typically has a heavy focus on music performance, studio recording, and songwriting—comes full circle when Technos College students visit the Purchase campus to finish the collaboration and have their own cultural experience.
For the last few years, the program has been curated by Assistant Professor of Music and Technology Rebecca Haviland ’04, MA ’22 (Studio Composition, Entrepreneurship in the Arts), an accomplished singer and multi-instrumentalist.
"Rebecca is an amazing professor, department co-chair, and musician—she has her own band with a new album coming out soon, and she has been touring with Zayn Malik this summer. She’s a powerhouse on every level and an alumna of Purchase as well,” says Kern. "She has been absolutely critical to the success of the TAP program over the past several years.”
For many students, TAP serves as their first opportunity to work internationally, something typically only attainable to musicians like Haviland, who are years into their professional careers.
“I think it's cool that Purchase offers you those real-world scenarios while still having that kind of support that you get through school,” says Sebastian Dean ‘22 (Film).
The former film student directed the music video at the heart of the TAP project in 2023, and his connection to the program later sent him to Tokyo, where he currently lives and works as a Teaching Assistant at Technos College.
“In the one year I spent post-grad before coming to Japan, working on sets, I was naturally meeting people from every corner of the earth, and everybody does things differently,” he says.
Getting Really Creative
The Technos Art Program was born from a long-standing partnership with Technos College and the Tanaka Ikueikai Educational Foundation. What began in 2018 as an opportunity for Purchase music students to perform at a fall festival held on the Tokyo campus evolved into an immersive cultural experience.
“This is undoubtedly among the most important international partnerships that the college has,” says Kern, adding, “[The Tanaka family] have been incredible and consistent supporters of our efforts at internationalization.”
About a year after TAP’s launch, COVID lockdowns shuttered international travel. What could have made the program crumble ultimately shaped the trajectory for the better. “We had to get really creative,” Kern says. At the time, she was slowly shifting the curriculum of Purchase’s short-term study abroad programs towards a collaborative project-based model, allowing Conservatory students the experience of studying abroad without missing the benchmarks of their intensive curriculum.
“While [project-based learning] is very time and labor intensive for everyone involved, it also creates the opportunity for much greater impact for students and a greater depth of intercultural engagement,” she says.
An earlier collaborative program, the Transnational Filmmaking Project (TFP), began in 2017 and served as the proof of concept. In the TFP, students also worked in a hybrid format, and collaborated virtually prior to their trip abroad.
But for TAP, how could you make that work with a program centered around live performance? The answer: anime.
The short film, titled You Too Are Needed, became a rare instance where students from a range of disciplines could collaborate with international students and those outside of their own Conservatories. Purchase acting students provided the voiceovers and music students penned and performed an original score; Technos students created the animation.
For Kiana Hindi ‘24 (Theatre and Performance), who lent her voice to the English voice over, TAP became a bright spot in an otherwise isolating period. The pandemic left her sequestered in her Arizona hometown far away from campus life in New York. “I feel like our bubbles were very limiting, so it was nice to just have that connection aspect and to be able to talk altogether about what's been going on in our different areas,” she says.
Lost in Translation
In 2023, with international travel creeping back towards pre-pandemic levels, students in the Technos Art Program boarded a plane back to Japan. For this new iteration, they set out to record an original song in Tokyo, with Technos students flying to Purchase to shoot the music video. This meant students who engineer the sessions had to navigate unfamiliar recording technology in a foreign language. As it turns out, the language barrier was barely a barrier at all.
“We all don't speak the same language, and we had very different upbringings, but it all made sense in the studio,” says Matthew Castello ‘23 (Studio Composition), who helped engineer the session. “Music was the universal language there.”
Russell, who served as a vocalist and lyricist and starred in the video, shares a similar sentiment. “Everyone speaks through music,” she says. For her, the project was eye-opening, not just because of soy sauce-related hiccups and discovering her ability to work her way through translation apps. Witnessing another culture with a millenniums-long history made her reflect on her own heritage as a Black woman in America, a group whose historical records are sometimes limited..
“Yes, America is a huge melting pot of different cultures, but just to see and hear the history of [Japanese] culture and the fact that they can trace their history all the way back to who knows when is such an amazing thing to see,” she says.
She plans to take this experience with her throughout her professional life, as she continues to work with people outside of the U.S.
“Not everyone has the same mindset as you or the same background as you, the same knowledge as you,” she says. “Because of your cultural background, you think one way and I think another way. That's where we might clash—but help me understand you.”
Music is a powerful bridge to shared understanding and the Office for Global Education plans to continue their partnership with Technos College. A new edition of TAP will launch in the upcoming academic year with Haviland at the helm.
