When the pandemic was at its peak, listening to music became a great escape for me. But it got me thinking: how do music students confront the challenges of digital learning? This seemed like a particularly intriguing (and difficult) task to manage, and so I turned to Michelle Hromin. In conversation with the talented clarinetist, we take a deep dive into the challenges and rewards of digital education while learning about music. We explore the methods in which she preserved the spirit that comes along with playing music live, and how she went on to maintain making music with a sense of togetherness.
—Chloe Colvard (Editor-in-Chief 2020-21)
12TH STREET: Can you tell me a little bit about how you started getting into music, how you started playing instruments, and what that’s been like for you?
MICHELLE HROMIN: Well, growing up, my family wasn’t very musical, but we always had music on. My family’s from Croatia, so I was listening to a lot of folk music and a lot of popular songs from there when I was a kid. At my school, we were able to pick an instrument at the end of third grade. I remember my band teacher at the time was going through all the instruments, and once he got to the clarinet I kind of just tuned everything else out.
And I remember to this day, they won’t let me live this down, I was so worried that I wouldn’t get it—because you had to put a first choice and a second choice. So I put my first choice as clarinet, and the second choice as viola. I really didn’t want to play the viola, but I kept begging them every week, saying “did I get it? Did I get it?” And I did, thankfully. So I started in fourth grade. I was just really infatuated from the start. After a couple months of learning, I started to play with the upper band at our school.
I’m from Long Island, and so afterward, my teacher said, “Hey, we’re starting up this new program called the Nassau-Suffolk Band which was for elementary school kids. You should try out.” And I did, and I got into that. And ever since then, it kind of just spiraled into joining ensembles and stuff like that.
I feel extremely lucky and privileged that my public school had such a good music program. It’s such a supportive music program. My band director was the director of that first band I did outside of school, and that led to me being part of that organization for about 10 years, and through that, I was doing band rehearsals every Saturday and Sunday. From the beginning, I knew that it was just going to be this part of my life. I kind of felt like I had a calling to do it and that feeling really intensified. When I got to high school, I was taking lessons with a local teacher, but I went to this program called USDAN. It’s a really wonderful summer camp near me. The clarinet teacher was a really well-known freelancer. Through learning from him, as well, I’d thought I knew everything… (laughs). But I found that it was an entirely new world of clarinet. I started seeing him weekly for lessons after a while and traveling by myself into Manhattan, and I was like, wow, I really want to be in New York City. So then after studying with him, he led me to my current teacher [Jon Manasse]. And it’s kind of history from there. I knew I wanted to play, and I always felt this passion while performing and while making music with other people, and both he and Jon both really helped me with my audition process for schools. Here I am now, applying for grad school. It’s really crazy.
STREET: I agree, and from the time I’ve spent in Long Island, I can totally see how it’s a different world even though it’s only 45 minutes away.
Is anyone else in your family musical?
HROMIN: So my brother played saxophone; he’s a couple years older than me, and I always thought that was really cool. In my first year of high school, we played in a jazz band together, which was cool as he was about to graduate. So that was really fun. But no, not really anyone plays instruments in my family.
STREET: I think it’s awesome that you could tell that that’s what you wanted to pursue from the beginning and that here you are now here doing it. When did you know you wanted your focus in college to be musical? It sounds like as soon as soon as you picked up the clarinet, you kind of knew.
HROMIN: Pretty much instantly. It wasn’t extremely clear at first that I was going to concentrate on performance, but I kind of knew from the beginning.
STREET: As a writing student I knew I had a general idea of what I wanted to do, but I think it’s so important, if you feel like that’s your calling to go through with it.
So, transitioning into your college life studying music, I have some questions about remote learning, and I’m hoping you could walk me through what that looks like for you.
HROMIN: It’s definitely not the same. I feel like you can probably speak to that experience, as well. On a typical day, a lot of my academic classes are in this sort of Zoom format, and are on the smaller side, maybe 20 and 25 kids max—quite small. Compared to last semester, it’s been a bit more organized. But I can walk you through my school day for tomorrow: I have my class at 8 a.m., a Techniques of Music Pedagogy class, where we learn about how to teach music theory, ear training, and dictation. We get different assignments during the week. Later on, I have a psych lecture as part of the university lecture requirements.
And then later on, in the afternoon, I have a class called Beep Lab Ensemble. We meet on Zoom, and it’s also a little interesting to call it an “ensemble”. It’s an electronic-music-based class – so we’ve been working with coding and creating circuits to build sounds and musical phrases. It meets twice a week, but we’ll send recordings throughout the week—or for this past week, we actually transcribed Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music.” If you’re not familiar with the piece, it’s really cool: it’s two lines that are clapping synchronously, and then the second, bottom part gets off by a beat each time you keep going. So I had to code that for both parts to play at the same time. Then, I have German class. Again, learning language over Zoom is pretty weird. But academically, I’d say [learning online] is pretty similar, in terms of just in a normal Zoom class, where you’re taking notes or you’re working on something.
In terms of music ensemble stuff, right now I’m working with the International Contemporary Ensemble, and we’re doing individual projects—meaning that we picked a piece that we didn’t know, or that’s by a living composer, and we’re creating an online concert or performance of it, which I think is a little bit more beneficial to us. And for lessons, I’ve been doing them over Zoom or over FaceTime. Having good audio quality can be a little bit tricky. I’m not sure if it’s happened while I’ve been talking, but when we play our instruments over Zoom, even with the newer settings that have been put in, sometimes things will just cut out or, or sometimes they’ll just start speeding up, so it can be a little bit difficult at times to identify really specific things in ones playing that you could from the in-person experience. For the rest of our ensemble playing, it’s just been a lot of remote recording. We’re meeting on camera to talk about things, but we’ve been using a platform called Soundtrap to record and layer over to simulate in-person chamber music as much as possible.
STREET: That sounds somewhat similar to some of my discussions and some of my workshops with writing: people will cut out, people will freeze, things will slow down, and then all of a sudden speed up. And I thought it would be interesting, and definitely an added layer of challenge to be able to hear correctly what’s being played, or the tempo of things.
HROMIN: You’re absolutely right. I was warming up with my teacher the other day—he would play one thing, and I would kind of play it back. That’s just kind of how we started out our lessons. And there was a point where we both started to sound like we were a little bit off. We weren’t playing at the same time, but it was just very funny. But it does happen, unfortunately. I mean, a partial solution to that is sometimes I’ll send him a recording of something beforehand, just because the audio quality is better. Or because I’ve been applying to school, I have recordings of things ready.
STREET: Do you feel that your quality of education has changed or improved? And what does that look like?
HORMIN: That’s a good question. I think it’s a compromise, in some ways. I think that there’s a lot of benefit to being in-person. and we should only be in person if it’s safe. But then I really do commend the school in a lot of ways, because the experiences that I’ve had through online learning so far have actually been really good. But there’s a big difference between how my life and how music students’ lives looked when we were in person. Back in March [2020] however long ago that was—I was playing in one or two chamber ensembles per week, so that was several hours of in-person working on music a lot and various orchestra rotations, and with the way the curriculum is set up now, we have what is like a five-week performance module. So in my first five weeks, I was working with the Mannes Sounds Festival, recording some pieces that are going into a concert. For this chunk of five weeks, I’m doing the project with the International Contemporary Ensemble, and in the last five weeks, I am doing an orchestra layering project. But if I were in person, I would be having those experiences differently. I would be playing in a two-week orchestra rotation, and I was principal clarinet of the New York Youth Symphony, so I would have rehearsals every Sunday—things like that.
I really do think that everyone is trying really hard, and the school is really understanding of how things are just really weird right now, but I don’t think it’s entirely compromised. I think everyone’s just trying to find a new way of doing this. I was in a meeting the other day, and someone said that we shouldn’t try to duplicate performing now to a live in-person concert,and that we need to accept where we are, both mentally and geographically, right now I think there are also some perks to us being online, in the sense that we can reach more people, and that’s a much more accessible feat of it all. And yes, it’s been difficult. When trying to see new projects through while at home for school the whole day and you’re not seeing people in person, the energy definitely can feel different from time to time. But yeah, it’s a complicated question. I think my feeling changes on it a lot, depending on how much schoolwork I have. And sometimes I have those feelings of like, you know, I really wish I could walk to Murray’s and go get a bagel, or go get coffee with my friends, but I think that this is the best that it can be right now. I definitely try to keep that positive outlook, but it definitely can be very frustrating.
STREET: Being able to reach more people by being digital, does music help you feel connected in a world that’s more quarantined and socially distant?
HROMIN: Yeah, I’ve done a variety of recording projects online since the pandemic started, and I think that putting those things together has made me feel more like myself—because it’s something that I just love doing. And I think now I’ve been more open about talking to people and asking for feedback. I’ll message a friend and say, “Hey, can you listen to this?I really want to know what you think, even though we’re not in the same room.” I think that I’ve definitely also been listening to a wider variety of music since being at home, not that I’ve never been one of those people who listens to one genre of music, but I’ve definitely been looking for different things and looking for inspiration from an array of artists.
STREET: It’s so intriguing to find out about the creative process of somebody in quarantine, because it seemed that quarantine either really blocked that creative process or really opened it up. Especially near the beginning, when everything was really locked down, you had so much time to just explore different sections of whatever creative outlet you use, or to find new and unusual ways to connect with people. And I feel like music is such a universal way of connecting with people.
So what’s been the best for your creative juices to flow during quarantine, and what’s been the worst for them?
HROMIN: I think there’s a perk to getting to wake up and not have to immediately rush in the morning. I don’t have a [super long] commute, but because of how the trains are scheduled here, I definitely have to be like, okay, you have to be up by this time and then get ready. That’s a perk, but it also has a little bit of a downside, because that sort of structure is something that also gets me going. But, I don’t have to fight for practice space like I did in school. I have a big setup in my room. And I think from a health standpoint, I’m able to like, go for a run or a bike ride during the day, which is not something I would normally do—because once I was in Manhattan, I would not leave until I was done for the day. I can’t go home in between classes, so I think having that and really having more time has been good. I’m home with my brother most of the time—he is also a masters student. so it’s definitely weird that we’re actually roommates now, but it’s quiet, and I have time to sit and think about all these things. I think it’s been really good. And for me, I think that if this had happened at any other point in my education, I would have felt totally different. Because I’m a senior, and I had it in my mind applying for grad school. That’s been the focus, and having that has definitely pushed me forward a little bit: “Okay, these are the requirements that are showing up for schools, but how can I put my own spin on these?” I think the downside is that I’m from a suburban area and, you know, I try to go for walks as much as I can. But it can be frustrating being here with my friends super far away.
I mean, we’re also so lucky that all of us can FaceTime and can check in with each other. But I think the aspect of being with people, it’s really special even just to be in the same room with my teacher. That was my reasoning for coming to Mannes, to study with Jon, and he has been such a helpful human being during this whole time. He’s been so positive. We’ve talked a lot about mindfulness and having a good mindset from the very beginning of my studies with him, and it’s been really helpful to have him, but I would drop so many things just to have an in-person lesson, where we don’t have those extra couple of seconds of audio lag and stuff like that.
STREET: What drew you to The New School? What’s next for you and your New School career?
HROMIN: Yeah, I mean, for me, I love that Mannes is really close knit. I really love the area that it’s in, in Greenwich Village. I really came to study with Jon and Judy Mendenhall, who’s the head of winds at Mannes. That was my big selling point, and that was the biggest reason I applied.. In terms of what’s next for me, I’m working on applying to grad school. I’m a fellow with the Bespoken mentorship program that mentors women in classical, contemporary, and jazz music. I’ve been working on some development, building a website, and currently have a new project I’m working on and applying for some grants for that. I’m just trying to take it one day at a time. Grad school applications are tedious, and I’ve had to travel quite a bit to record those things in the studio because I don’t have access to the school right now. But yeah, just trying to take it one day at a time.
STREET: It sounds like you’re kind of in a transitional phase of your life, where you’re transitioning into the master’s program and into this remote life. For anyone who’s just getting started with their transition, whether they’re coming into The New School or they’re transitioning out of The New School as they graduate, do you have any words of wisdom for those transitions?
HROMIN: I think it’s important to openly talk about how you’re feeling and what you think is making you feel the way that you are. I’ve definitely spent a lot of time journaling, meditating, and diving into different sorts of self-care practices. I think everyone should know that their feelings are really valid. Starting something new to begin with already has these sorts of discomforts to them. With this on top of it, sometimes you could wake up and feel insurmountable pressure as you start your day. I guess the biggest words of wisdom would be that every day is different, and it’s important to find points of gratitude through this entire process. I think daily gratitude and taking your time. It’s not easy to be a musician or student, or it’s not easy to live through this no matter what position you’re in. So having that self-understanding and talking to people about it is really important.
STREET: Right now, and for a while even, you see so much in the media about “how to stay the most productive” or “how to get your quarantine schedule” in check—this pressure to use this time to be extra productive, extra busy, and extra organized. You could almost forget that you’ve been in a global pandemic, and that there’s so much going on in the world. You don’t want to pressure yourself. That’s a really important reminder for anyone.
HROMIN: I think that from my perspective, as a musician, sometimes it can feel like a pressurized thing—like “having” to practice—but I’ve been trying to remind myself that I “get” to practice. And that’s been a really big thing. And I feel like, because each month has changed in the pandemic, I feel like we’ve kind of gone back into that workaholic sickness, the emphasis on productivity, and I just don’t think it’s very healthy. It’s very frustrating. And I’m sure anyone agrees, you know, that this is still something that’s happening and in our faces right now. And sometimes that’s a lot to take on.
Michelle Hromin is a New York based Croatian-American clarinetist specializing in contemporary and new music. She is passionate about performance, teaching, and commissioning new works. To promote her Croatian heritage, Michelle recently launched Kalendar: 12 Miniatures for Solo Clarinet, a year-long project that aims to bring attention to the South Slavic region of Europe. Through her collaboration with Macedonian-Canadian composer Michael Spiroff, Michelle will premiere 12 new miniatures based on the 12 months of the Slavic Calendar over the course of 2021. She released her EP Kalendar: 12 Miniatures for Solo Clarinet, Volume I on April 2, 2021. Michelle also has a debut article appearing in NewMusicBox on her first live concert experience since the beginning of the pandemic. She is moving to London this fall to pursue her Masters in Clarinet Performance at the Royal College of Music.