Editor’s Note: As we gear up to celebrate 61 years of this tradition with you, let’s take a moment to remember some of the best of our previous Distinguished Alumni with Hall of Fame: Rewind. We hope you’ll enjoy reading about our outstanding alumni honorees from the past who shape the ranks of honorees of the future. Daniel Sternberg, named the 1990 Retired Faculty, shaped generations of Baylor musicians through decades of teaching, conducting, and creative leadership. Click here to watch interviews and speeches from previous Hall of Fame events, or click here to learn more about this year’s event and honorees.
This article was first published in the September 1977 issue of The Baylor Line.
“I have never allowed myself to become a paper shuffler,” says Daniel Sternberg, dean of the School of Music.
Instead Sternberg has continued to inspire an appreciation of music through his teaching and performing, and he has been named the 1977 recipient of the Outstanding Baylor Creative Artist award.
“I’d be abysmally unhappy if all I did was sign papers,” says Sternberg. “I have never stopped teaching.” Sternberg says he has never spent a semester when he didn’t work with a class or performing group — no small accomplishment since his tenure as dean encompasses thirty-four years.
As a man who divides his time between administration, teaching and performing, Sternberg says, “I find the most stimulating, gratifying balance to be between my own study and performance on one hand and teaching on the other. A conductor, almost by definition, is a teacher. He makes music through other human beings — he has to teach, inspire and lead.”
Conducting is Sternberg’s main area of performance. “Although I write music, I am not primarily a composer. I am inclined to think in its narrowest sense the term ‘creative artist’ applies to a person who composes, who creates,” he says, displaying his love of exactness in language. “On the other hand,” he notes with generosity and pride in his vocation, “to bring music to life can be designated as creative artistry in a broader sense.”
As a musician who chose the academic field, Sternberg has seen changes in how universities deal with performance.
“There is now a great deal of performing in a university climate. Much is being done under the auspices of universities that used to take place only in the so-called outside world,” he says.
Sternberg thinks this trend will continue so that universities will no longer be “the proverbial ivory towers where scholars breathe library dust and don’t produce living, breathing work.”
“There is a great deal of study to be done, of course,” he adds, not belittling the need for musical research, “but the ultimate purpose is to make music a living, sounding language. Beethoven said, ‘from the heart, to the heart.’ That kind of application of music in a university is exciting.”
Sternberg is also enthusiastic as he speaks of the talented students he has known during his teaching career. “In a university there is always the added aspect of dealing with young minds and fledgling talents — people who are willing to be stimulated and excited. I have done some very important works repeatedly over the years — like Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew, which we have presented six times.
‘It is not possible to function as a performing musician in this time and place without a missionary attitude.’
Each time I encounter students who have never seen or heard the work. And I have a chance to present it new to a new generation of students. It is most gratifying to see and feel the response.”
Students, too, have changed since Sternberg came to Baylor in 1942. “The intelligence and general preparation levels of students have increased, partly through raised entrance requirements, but the very strong, special, brilliant student comes and goes with no predictable regularity,” he says, recalling the most promising students with whom he has worked.
Sternberg’s students have the benefit of his rich and varied background in music and culture. Sternberg was born in Poland and reared in Austria. He began studying music at the age of five and graduated summa cum laude from the National Academy of Music in Vienna in 1935. He also received piano and composition diplomas, the equivalent of a doctorate in musical arts.
Other education included the study of law. “At one time I wavered between the study of medicine and music, but never too seriously. 1 did study law — my father was a lawyer. As it turned out that would have been the surest way to perdition — what would I do with Austrian law in America?”
Sternberg left Europe shortly before World War II. How did he come to join the faculty of Baylor University? He explains that his coming to Baylor was not as complicated as one might imagine.
“The chairman of the School of Music and Fine Arts at that time was Roxy Grove. She had been a pupil of Artur Schnabel, who was the outstanding pianist of his age. I happened to have a letter of introduction from Schnabel. I had encountered him in Russia and Paris and what I did not know at the time was that he was not in the habit of writing such letters. I wrote to Baylor and enclosed a copy — that’s all Roxy Grove needed.
“She was nearing retirement as chairman of the School of Music and Fine Arts and after one year, I was offered the deanship.”
One of the first things Sternberg did as dean was to separate the fine arts division from the School of Music. “We set up two undergraduate degrees — the bachelor of music and bachelor of music education. And we established a graduate degree in music.” Fine arts continues to be a division within the College of Arts and Sciences.
Through the years, Sternberg has developed his philosophy on the functions of a school of music. “The school has a variety of functions such as training prospective musicians, teachers, and performers and providing training and experience to people for whom music is an avocation. I consider this every bit as important as the first. We have many non-majors in the school who are taking voice or piano lessons and to whom this experience is an important part of their college time and their lives.
“Beyond that, I think we have a function in providing listening experience for the campus and community,” says Sternberg, who also conducts the Waco Symphony Orchestra. “Any given performance becomes actually a rather complex thing with a variety of components: an opportunity for students to learn, to participate actively and an opportunity for the rest of the community to participate passively by listening. It is not possible to function as a performing musician in this time and place unless you have a missionary attitude.”
“I am a lucky man to have the best of two worlds (Europe and America). If I had remained where I grew up, I would have missed what is special and worthwhile of Baylor. And if I had grown up here, I would have missed the pervasive influence a place like Vienna has to give. I couldn’t have done any better. I have nothing but gratitude for Baylor and the many opportunities to do many things. I have been able to find response and support here — not to say I couldn’t have found it elsewhere — but I did find it here.
“When our teachers or students compose a piece, I try to arrange for it to be played. Active performers are continually encouraged to perform. Part of my role is to create a challenge, give opportunities and provide recognition. This is what the Creative Artist award does and what I am trying to do.
“It does a great deal for the person to perform because it does a great deal for his ego. But it does much more because it helps produce a climate that stimulates and encourages creativity. Creativity is not reserved to arts or science, but it is an essential dimension of man, who really partakes of the nature of his Creator by virtue of his own creativity.
“This creativity manifests itself in the arts,” Sternberg says, “but it can and should and does manifest itself in countless other aspects of living.
