John Cice (BM ’74, Piano, Music Education) had been at the Peabody Conservatory all of two days when he called his mother collect after dinner. “I told her that I just saw the girl I was going to marry,” says Cice, describing the young woman he had seen walking through the dining hall connecting the East and West Towers of the Peabody Residence Hall.
A day later, while practicing piano in Room 308, he heard singing. He walked down the hall and knocked on Room 301. The door opened, and it was her. “What a beautiful voice! Do you need an accompanist?” he asked. Gale Fuller Cice (BM ’75, Music/Voice) smiled at him and said yes. They’ve been married since 1979, supporting each other’s musical careers. Cice founded the John Cice Singers and the Lawrence Choral Arts Society and orchestra, serving as director, and is a retired high-school symphonic and jazz band teacher. Fuller Cice enjoyed a 40-year-plus international career in concert and opera and as a faculty member of Brandeis University, Gordon College, and Wellesley College.
The Residence Hall, built in 1968, has inspired nearly 60 years of connections—it’s been a place where friendships formed, romance blossomed, and nascent musical careers took root.
This fall, when the new Peabody Residential Commons opens in the renovated Waterloo apartment complex at 690 N. Calvert Street, the Residence Hall will begin its second act. As part of Peabody’s campus transformation, the former dormitory towers will be repurposed into contemporary spaces for performance, teaching/ instruction, and collaboration, along with a reimagined campus dining experience.
As the curtain falls on the Residence Hall’s first act, we decided to pay homage to its rich history by asking alumni for their memories. Their stories did not disappoint.
In September 1969, when a taxi driver dropped Maribeth Hartwig Knaub (MM ’71, Voice) at the foot of the South Terrace steps off Centre Street, she was fresh from Appleton, WI. And she knew there was a problem. She had no idea how she was going to get her six pieces of luggage to the dorm, all by herself, without leaving half of it unattended at the bottom of the 50 steps. Just then, a “young hippie-looking man approached [me] singing and reading music as he walked, arm-in-arm with two other young ladies,” she recalls.
“I bravely asked if he was also a music student at Peabody, and if he could help me take some of my luggage up all the steps,” she says. The four of them carried everything to the dorm and had dinner together that night. “The most amazing thing is that I married that student four years later, and we’re still married after 52 years,” says Knaub of her husband, Michael Knaub (BM ’73, Music Education). The Peabody family tradition continued with daughter Marissa Knaub Avon (MM ’06, Harp).
For Knaub, living among artists who “weren’t afraid of being creative in any part of their life,” was a new and lasting experience. “As an undergrad at Lawrence University, I was in a dorm with non-music majors, so Peabody gave me a greater understanding of the commitment in life that artists must make.”
During her Peabody years, the Residence Hall was coed, but the floors were not. She has fond memories of sitting in the hall with the women on her floor, wearing bathrobes and curlers in their hair, talking about their day. “It was very healthy sharing of where we were going as musicians,” says Knaub, who teaches classical voice and directs operas at Slippery Rock University and is an internationally recognized expert in the Alexander Technique.
Karen Kalivoda (MM ’87, Flute Performance) lived on a graduate student floor for two years in the mid-1980s. “I liked meeting people from all over the world, bouncing off different ideas, and getting help with homework,” she says.
And she loved their solution for stress relief: “After practicing and studying, we would gather in the common space on our floor to make up original skits.” Many of those skits revolved around Italian restaurants, Kalivoda recalls. The late Diane Zubrycki (MM ’87, Conducting) played Italian music on the accordion, which blended with the sound of a Whoopee cushion and the frequent spit take.
“We laughed until we cried,” says Kalivoda, who spent her career teaching elementary school music in the Howard County Public School System and as a private flute instructor.
Jeff Cooper (BM ’73, Double Bass) had a built-in set of friends when he moved into the West Tower in fall 1969, thanks to roommate Glenn Pearson, Cooper’s friend and bandmate from Washington, D.C. who was already a sophomore at Peabody. Their go-to hang-out spot was the communal lounge area on their hall where they’d watch Star Trek reruns with hallmates. “Then we’d all go and eat, and after dinner people would practice,” Cooper says.
“It was interesting to see this sort of mass exit of people carrying their instruments to the practice rooms of the Conservatory,” Cooper recalls. As a double bass player, schlepping his instrument across the courtyard was less than ideal, so he practiced in his room. With the Residence Hall abutting the courtyard and Leakin Hall’s practice rooms, his arpeggios mixed with the singing and playing across the quad, and the rock-and-roll coming from dorm stereos. Cooper had a career playing shows in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and on Broadway, as well as with regional orchestras, and led a successful band. Now semi-retired in Delaware, he plays gigs with his current band, Notes on the Beach and 5th Avenue, and plays with sodelo (Southern Delaware Orchestra).
The dining hall, the only dining facility on campus, was a gathering place for students and faculty, recalls John Cice. “I remember having dinner with students while Leon Fleisher and Berl Senofsky had a very passionate discussion about how to phrase music,” he says. “We sat there with our mouths open listening to these two world-famous people. That education was second to none.”
Aaron Porter (BM ’78, MM ’79, French Horn) remembers Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and University of Maryland Law School students living in Peabody student housing. “It made for some interesting friendships,” explains Porter. “The law students were a completely different type than the rest of us artists who were kind of wild and crazy and a little bit off the deep end.”
The MICA students would do art projects in the hallways and in the common space. “There was a party going on while they were doing projects and, somehow, they were able to manage that,” he says. “But as a musician you can’t practice while 10 people around you are having a high old time. It was a completely different approach to art.”
He found practicing his French horn in his room a humbling experience. “The whole ceiling was acoustic tile, and the walls were cinder block, so the sound would just go out of my horn about a foot and stop dead,” Porter recalls. Before he retired in 2016, his career included a stint as a stage manager at Peabody and 30 years with the U.S. Navy Band.
Porter’s favorite memory: Watching Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera in the dining hall. “Someone got a copy of the old silent movie, they wheeled in an upright piano, and a piano student created the soundtrack on the spot,” he says. Whenever Cheney’s Phantom character was on screen, the pianist played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, incorporating it into the musical score. “Of course, the whole thing was very original and imaginative—just the kind of thing that musical minds come up with,” Porter adds.
Porter recalls another education of sorts: late nights at the nearby, now-defunct Buttery. “It was a 24-hour greasy spoon, but it was the place to hang out,” Porter says. “When the strip joints on the Block would shut down, some of the performers and customers would show up at the Buttery. It was quite an education for a young kid watching this slice of humanity.”
For the generations of Peabody students who called the Residence Hall home, the mix of musicians they encountered was foundational. “You’re listening to other people and picking up musical ideas by osmosis almost,” Porter muses. “When you study at a place like Peabody, you realize music is not something that you approach with sort of a mechanical accuracy. The accuracy is important, but music lives like a breathing animal, always in the process of coming from somewhere and going somewhere.”
The memories of life in the Residence Hall, like the notes that filled its rooms and hallways, anchor the past and fuel the future as Peabody student life looks ahead to its next chapter.
