When “The Tonight Show” was at the height of its popularity in the early 1980s, Johnny Carson was very defensive about charges that it was devoid of cultural content. His counterstrategy was to mention during every interview that Itzhak Perlman was a regular guest on the program. I was reminded of this when reading the press releases announcing the celebration of the Juilliard School’s 100th season as an educational institution. These releases all tout the matriculation of Mr. Perlman (Robin Williams is the best they can do on the theater side).

In truth, a great number of fine musicians have graduated from Juilliard and its two sister schools, the Manhattan School of Music – which somewhat confusingly occupies the old Juilliard building on 122nd Street – and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, but I don’t know how much they have to celebrate. Those of us who hear concerts for a living have long detected a trend toward the bland in the classical music world, and there’s good reason to lay the blame on conservatories.

The musicians who apply to the Juilliard School for their pre-college program at the ages of 12 or 13 are already used to many hours a day of mindless practice; they’re the modern equivalent of Dickensian factory children – with keyboards and bows instead of bobbins and spindles. Most are automatons bred only for the championship – a desperate attempt to be as type-A as their mothers and fathers. Throughout their conservatory careers, they will be pushed to excel, to be better than their peers, to place first in competitions, and to earn first chairs in the orchestras. The practice room becomes the weight room, the music teacher the football coach, the parent a refugee from a Little League nightmare (I have actually witnessed incidents of corporal punishment meted out for wrong notes). Art is ignored; success is all.

The conservatory’s emphasis is on one overriding subject: How to survive and succeed at an audition. Much time is devoted to teaching a student to stress the tried and true and to value unchanging metrical lines above expressiveness and rubato. The best performer is the one who can play a cliche in the most reliable manner. As a result, students pursue a gingerly course. This is now so entrenched in the nation’s top schools that many of the soloists below the age of 35 I hear in concert are guilty of plodding and ciphering; they trudge through the music unscathed but without communicating its substantive meaning.

I’m not suggesting that the practical side of the classical music curriculum be ignored, but the conventional conservatory wisdom is so antithetical to artistic excellence as to be positively frightening. The message from administrators and those teachers who follow the party line is that, in order to be successful, the aspirant must stand out as more technically proficient than his peers, but should never be perceived as outside of the main stream. If Joshua Bell had gone to Juilliard instead of Indiana University, he would never have developed his signature portamento.

Let us examine for a moment the state of contemporary performance of one particular piece: Brahms’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini. Written for solo piano, these masterful variations were designed to present a variety of shapes and colors, all generated from the same core theme. The genius of the piece, in addition to its almost superhuman melodic inventiveness, is that no two variations have the same style; the resulting totality is a survey of musical thought from the Baroque to the Modern, from the concert hall to the salon, from the palace to the whorehouse (where Brahms himself spent his early years at the piano bench).

Hearing these pieces in performance today, I am mostly struck by how little clue most modern pianists, educated in the conservatory system, have about musical styles and periods. Their “variants” sound like so many repetitions of similar thematic material. The performances are tedious and bland. Just compare the Tzimon Barto or Paul Bisaccia versions to those of, say, Claudio Arrau or Egon Petri.

Some 70% of students in Juilliard’s pre-college program are East Asian, and critics – and therefore the public at large – have settled on the stereotype that artists of Pacific origins are unemotional. It is consummately ironic that it is their training at the hands of white Europeans that has often fostered this mechanical method.

Recently, I discussed these trends with a successful young jazz musician, a graduate of Juilliard who also spent two years at Manhattan, and who gave up a good classical orchestral job a few years ago. He pointed out that true expressivity in the classical repertoire is extremely difficult to achieve and requires a great deal of time learning the subtleties of individual technique. As a result, it should come as no surprise when highly skilled conservatory graduates drift toward jazz and pop.

Those who pursue careers in classical music and do not succeed as soloists must deal with the reality that finding a position with a solvent symphony orchestra these days is almost impossible. In 2002, for example, when the hard-working but hardly world-class Albany Symphony was seeking an oboist, the orchestra was

overwhelmed by the quality and quantity of the aspirants for this relatively low-paying position. Considering that a successful candidate for that one position must have about as many rigorous years of study under his belt as a physician, the competition is geared towards acceptance.

Of course, no one ever went to Juilliard to become an oboist in the Albany Symphony – or, for that matter, the 15th second violin player of the New York Philharmonic. Virtually all hope to be soloists when they enter the conservatory, and as a result many are disaffected in their orchestral jobs later in life. In fact, conductors have to spend a lot of valuable rehearsal time instructing their members about what they should have learned in school.

The best musicians graduating from these institutions today are those lucky enough to study with the few private teachers who are still risk-takers, or those rare students, such as Midori and Yo-Yo Ma, who were educated in stylistic matters by their parents. But be wary when attending a concert at one of these conservatories. That clapping you hear at the conclusion may simply be the sound of self-congratulatory pats on the back.