Friday, November 7, 2025
When composer, conductor, pianist, vocalist, educator, researcher, and global collaborator Erica Glenn came back to Longy to speak with current students, she walked into the library to get a guest WiFi code. Before she could even ask, a student looked up at her and said, “You are Erica Glenn. I was looking at your website last night. I rescheduled work so that I could come to your lecture.”
That moment captures something real about Longy students. They are not passive. They are engaged. They are curious. They show up for one another. They recognize the people who came before them and want to learn from their paths.
Erica graduated from Longy in 2012 and since then has lived many (many!) creative lives. She earned a doctorate in choral conducting and is currently the Director of Choral Activities at BYU-Hawaii, working with students from over 70 countries. She received a degree in education from Harvard. She taught music across the globe—in Boston, Utah, New York, Arizona, Ukraine, Poland, Russia, and Hawaii. She had an original musical produced at the New York Musical Festival. She wrote and premiered her Worldwide Requiem for choir and orchestra at Carnegie Hall with student collaborators from dozens of countries. She helped recover and bring to recognition the lost work of Ukraine’s first female composer. She became a Fulbright scholar and led therapeutic music sessions with Ukrainian refugees in Poland. She collaborated with musicians connected to the Estonian Singing Revolution.
At every turn she has said yes to ideas that spark curiosity. She has taken risks. She has emailed strangers who then became mentors. She has followed leads other people might not have pursued. And she is the first to say that Longy’s approach to education made that possible.
Longy was the first place that treated her interests as a composer for musical theater as valid composition work. It was the first place that encouraged her to pursue cross genre interests. It was the first place that paired pedagogical tools such as Dalcroze eurhythmics with big, human questions. It was the first place that gave her a community placement where she was able to build a music and theater program for under resourced youth. That single experience instilled within her a sense of self-efficacy and the belief that she could make things happen in the world. It showed her that she could create a program from scratch. It showed her that she could serve a community while she was still a student. It showed her that theory and practice do not live in separate rooms.
There is also strength and purpose in not all Longy students being the same. During her recent visit back to Longy, she spoke with students from Ukraine and from Africa. She saw how deeply international the Longy student experience remains. For her and her work among the students at BYU-Hawaii, diversity is not just a nice thing to report in a brochure—it is the definite engine of artistic growth. In a choral classroom where students bring music from Tonga, Samoa, China, the Philippines, or Japan, every rehearsal becomes an intercultural collaboration. Students become culture bearers. They teach one another. Their learning flows in every direction.
When prospective students ask whether Longy prepares people to be “real working musicians,” Erica responds that the most successful creative careers in 2025 will not look like one job title. She says that most conservatories will train students toward two or three narrow outcomes; that if you do not win that one prize, you are considered a failure. Longy teaches something different: Longy begins with the individual. It teaches students to notice what they can uniquely contribute. It invites them to create opportunities that do not yet exist. It honors the idea that musicians are change makers in communities. It builds entrepreneurial thinking into daily practice. It encourages students to say yes to the world.
Her advice to current Longy students was simple: open as many doors as you can but trust your instincts about which doors have momentum and real support behind them. You do not have to push every idea uphill. You cannot do it alone. If people are willing to join you, that is a sign. Collaboration is core to impact.
And when asked whether she would be doing any of this if she had chosen another school, she did not hesitate. Probably not. Longy prepared her to serve in many different spaces. It gave her permission to follow an unconventional path. It gave her a framework to think about music as social change, not simply performance for performance’s sake. It planted seeds that keep bearing fruit in unexpected ways.
At Longy, the seeds of your future career are planted in real community, real practice, and real curiosity. The world needs musicians who do not fit in boxes. It needs musicians who grow the field itself. Erica is proof that this is not an abstract tagline. It is the Longy way.
