The Road Less Traveled

On the day the Rodney King riots broke out in Los Angeles, John A. Capello '96 was one of the only white students at Southern University, a historically black college in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was standing outside the music building when a group of students approached him and yelled "Kill him!" The group laughed it off, but for Capello the incident sparked a concern with social identity that took him on an interesting detour from his goal of becoming a professional musician.

Capello arrived at Harvard from Louisiana by anything but a traditional route. Originally from just outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he developed a love and talent for jazz early in life, leaving high school after his junior year to pursue music as a career. At the bidding of a professor of music he had met at a summer jazz program at the Eastman School of Music, he was granted--without a high school diploma--a full scholarship to study for a performance degree in double-bass at Louisiana State University (LSU). His plan was to study music professionally and to teach jazz at the university level.

But Capello felt that LSU's program was too heavily centered around Western art music, to the exclusion of his main interest in jazz. In the second semester of his sophomore year, he enrolled part-time at Southern University, where he played double-bass and studied jazz in a predominantly African-American environment. His experiences there-- playing in all-black ensembles, feeling sometimes that problems of race inhibited the formation of elementary social relationships, and developing technically as a musician--posed more intellectual questions for him than they answered. He had long harbored a more general interest in social theory, in different culturally-induced cognitive perceptions of music, in aesthetics, in physics and in philosophy.

Deciding to leave the narrow study of music, Capello applied as a transfer student to Oberlin, Swarthmore, Harvard and Yale in the summer after his sophomore year. He was admitted only to Oberlin's conservatory. Asking the other schools for suggestions about improving his chances for admission, he received terse written replies from Swarthmore and Yale. But from Harvard, he received an hour-long telephone call from Rosemary Green, director of transfer admissions. Green encouraged Capello to broaden his transcript with more liberal arts courses, and spoke with him at length about admissions procedures. "I felt encouraged after that phone call," Capello recalls. "Harvard really took the time to explain what they looked at, and they did it on a personal level."

That summer, Capello left LSU and Southern and moved in with his sister, who was then a senior at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In Washington, Capello held down three jobs: as a bass teacher in a music store, as a waiter in a local restaurant, and as a free-lance bassist playing two to three gigs a week. Simultaneously, he enrolled in Georgetown and George Washington Universities, where he took college courses in Italian, physics, aesthetics, philosophy and psychoanalysis. And he earned straight A's.

In the next round of transfer applications, Capello gained admission to every school to which he applied (with the exception of Yale, where he was wait-listed--adding to the long list of Yale's recent mistakes). He applied to major in several academic disciplines: cognitive science, philosophy, English, and music. "The choice wasn't a hard one," Capello remembers. "Harvard was my first choice."

Capello arrived at the College in September 1993 as a second-term sophomore and a Music concentrator. Three weeks after his arrival he was elected manager of the Jazz Band, joined the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and gained a reputation for being Harvard's best bassist and one of its nicest guys. But all this was not enough. "There was so much to do here, and I became frustrated with just a music degree," he recalls, "I had never experienced such a diversity of opinion and character."

Capello became interested in the meanings that different cultures invest in music. Sociological, political and anthropological theories of how we define different cultural and ethnic traditions--and the study of ethnomusicology, in particular--interested him. Questions about why and how a piece of music was performed in different cultures (a difference he noticed first-hand in jazz was performances at LSU and Southern), and about the perceptions and forms of different musical traditions, drove him farther from a narrowly-defined study of music.

After briefly exploring the notion of pursuing a joint degree in Music and Economics, Capello returned in his junior year to concentrate in the "Culture and Personality" Social Studies track. "It was the best choice of my undergraduate career," he now says.

Capello's senior honors thesis, "Defining Jazz as America's Classical Music: The Implications for a New American Identity," was based on his work last summer with the Jazz at Lincoln Center program. The thesis posited that Lincoln Center's adoption of jazz as a full constituent in its program represented the first legitimation of a uniquely American musical achievement as classical, high art. Capello believes that jazz, in borrowing from many different musical traditions, reflects a new source for a multicultural American identity.

I have known John now for three years. More than being awed by his remarkable intelligence, people who meet him immediately like him. He is one of those rare people who are unconditionally nice. I once took a standardized grad school test with him. In the middle of the test, his question booklet fell apart and he discovered that it was missing several pages. Due to the incompetence of the proctor, John lost some time and a lot of nerves. Anyone else would have cursed and reported the trouble to the testing agency; but after the test, John helped the proctor move furniture to another room and followed up the mishap by enjoying a calming beer with me.

John's specialty is fostering community in quiet ways. A few weeks ago he performed in the Cabot House musical, Gershwin's "Crazy for You." He had agreed to play in the orchestra--as he has for the past three years--but he had been badgered into taking a speaking role. Dressed and drawling like a cowboy, he walked on stage in his characteristically shy way, and delivered his lines blushing on center stage. A double-bass was put into his hands, and as the orchestra started up and John played the number "Slap That Bass," his shyness fell away--he closed his eyes and his wrists snapped the strings, to a roar of applause and laughter from his friends in the audience.

Instead of confrontation, John engages people in rigorous discussions--ones that are highly articulate and passionate, ones guided by an abiding sense of fairness and understanding. In the end, he says that the most meaningful thing he will take away from Harvard will be the friendships he has formed. "I've met some extraordinary people at Harvard," he says. "Extraordinary because even after years, they've been able to maintain both a genuine curiosity about the world and a vision of how it could be improved. Those friends have made such a remarkable difference in my life and they continue to be a source of inspiration."

At the same time, however, Capello cautions against what he sees as the worst thing about Harvard: "This school spends no time trying to develop an ethic of learning from others-- especially from those who didn't go to an Ivy League school." Although Harvard's intellectual elitism might be seen by some to be a form of meritocracy, for Capello it isn't enough to justify the feeling of an elite: socio-economic status makes opportunities like attending Harvard available to some more than to others. Although he finds the College diverse, he says he is troubled to find among Harvard students a disconcerting dismissal of others from entirely different experiences. For Capello, "Educated people try to learn from everyone they meet." Those who have met him can't help but learn that lesson as well.