22-05-2025
This Utah school is producing world-class musicians — but that's not the main goal
During his senior year of high school, Josh Whisenant was completely overwhelmed.
In addition to staying on top of schoolwork, he was deep in the college application process, dealing with his first breakup and swimming 15 hours a week as a competitive swimmer.
His responsibilities didn't let up at the end of the school week, either.
On Saturday mornings, rather than sleep in and take advantage of some free time, Whisenant would wake up early to attend rehearsals and classes for several hours at the Gifted Music School in Salt Lake City, honing his piano skills.
By the time he was a senior, he'd been taking part in the nonprofit program for roughly two years and had (mostly) made peace with the fact that, for him, there was no more skiing on Saturdays.
It wasn't a terrible tradeoff: At the school, he discovered a camaraderie he hadn't found anywhere else. It was a place where people shared his sense of focus, where he felt free to share his view of the world.
He could open up about his passion for Bach — something he imagined wouldn't be as well received in his BC Calculus class, though he never tested it out.
On the Saturday morning after his first breakup, Whisenant showed up to the Gifted Music School just as he did every Saturday morning. Weighed down by heartbreak and the avalanche of stressors that came with his senior year, it was the first time in a while he felt like himself.
'It was like, please don't let this day end, because I'm gonna have to go back to the world and back to real life,' he recalled. 'But here is a place where I am safe. I can be myself.'
Now, 10 years later, Whisenant still doesn't ski on Saturdays.
After studying engineering at Stanford, Whisenant, 28, returned to Utah and to the Gifted Music School, where he sits on the board of directors and is a piano ensemble teaching assistant.
Alumni often seem to make their way back to the school.
On Thursday, around 20 former students — many of whom have gone on to become professional musicians — are returning to perform with current students for a gala at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
The sense of community and connection that fuels an event like Thursday's isn't a side effect of the pursuit for musical excellence — it's the goal, the school's founders say.
It's what drove Vera Oussetskaia Watanabe and Eugene Watanabe to create the Gifted Music School 16 years ago and what continues to drive the husband and wife co-founders as they fight every day to keep the school alive.
Vera Watanabe came to Utah by way of Yekaterinburg, Russia. She was shocked to learn music education wasn't an established part of the public school system in the United States.
'Every kid in Russia has to go through a music education, even if they don't end up going into a music conservatory,' the pianist said, noting how even Russian cities that may have holes in the ground for a bathroom still have a music school.
Knowing firsthand the benefits of having an accessible music school that could provide everything from affordable lessons to training at the highest levels, Watanabe wrote the first check for what would become the Gifted Music School — and her husband went to the library and learned how to fill out a 501c3 form.
Currently, about 800 students are involved with the school, which sits a few blocks from the Salt Lake Regional Medical Center.
At the school's top level, there's a conservatory that 38 musicians currently attend on full scholarship. Over the years, this pre-college program — which has managed to attract kids from outside of Utah — has sent students to prestigious institutions like The Juilliard School, Berklee College of Music, Columbia University and Indiana University.
This year, several members of the graduating class are headed to Brigham Young University. A couple have been accepted to The Colburn School in Los Angeles, and another two have been chosen for the highly selective McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University in Georgia.
The school's preparatory program, meanwhile, offers hundreds of students classes and lessons from a faculty that includes Utah Symphony members and university professors.
Project Grit, an outreach program, brings music to students at three Title 1 elementary schools.
At this point, funding from private donors and Salt Lake County's Zoo, Arts & Parks program largely keep the nonprofit afloat, helping to cover what would otherwise be an expensive education for young musicians.
The Watanabes recently received notice of the termination of additional grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, which typically provided the school with $20,000-$30,000 annually.
Perhaps more meaningful than the dollar amount, the couple said, was the confidence the support from the NEA gave other donors to contribute.
'It's always financially challenging,' Eugene Watanabe said. 'I mean, it took nothing short of heroics on our staff's part to keep alive during COVID. But we survived.'
'We constantly fight for funding,' Vera Watanabe added.
The reality of it all can be bleak, but it is regularly brightened, the Watanabes said, by the kids who walk into their doors and find a sense of purpose and belonging — a gift so powerful that many former students end up coming back to pay it forward.
Adrian Wu's time at the Gifted Music School was short — a little over a year — but the violinist, who is currently pursuing a doctorate degree at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, didn't hesitate to come back and take part in Thursday's gala.
The 25-year-old musician began playing the violin when he was 6, but he considered it more of a hobby. It wasn't until he was around 16 that he started to realize music could potentially be more than a side gig.
He began studying with Eugene Watanabe and auditioned for the Gifted Music School conservatory. He spent Saturdays during his senior year of high school performing college repertoire in front of other students, studying music theory and taking part in rehearsals. Through it all, he was surrounded by kids his age who pushed him to be better, and made him want to improve.
'Having this new environment and kind of diving into this completely new world and new niche … I found myself looking forward to GMS every single week," he said.
'I finally had something in common with other students.'
Erika Hubbard's time at the school was significantly longer — from age 10 to 17, the violinist commuted 90 minutes from her home in Logan to Salt Lake City on a weekly basis to attend the Gifted Music School.
Although she had begged her parents for violin lessons when she was 3, and had been taking lessons since she was 4, Hubbard wasn't convinced she wanted to pursue it professionally. But near the end of her time at the Gifted Music School, her teacher, Eugene Watanabe, encouraged her to give it some consideration.
She ended up completing a five-year joint program at Columbia University (where she studied neuroscience) and The Juilliard School (where she completed her master's degree in violin performance).
After completing her master's in 2022, Hubbard was on track to attend medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. But she felt a little burnt out and ended up deferring. She returned to Salt Lake City and landed at the place that had given her a solid foundation and set her up for success.
Today, Hubbard, who is taking part in Thursday's gala, teaches 20 private students at the Gifted Music School. She also goes to Mountain View Elementary, a Title 1 school, twice a week to teach group lessons.
That outreach program, more than anything, has expanded her view of the value of music education.
'It's not just about music. That's what I didn't realize as a kid,' she said. 'Music has so much more to offer these kids than just creating the next Hilary Hahn — there is some of that, and that's great, if that's what students want.
'But here you have all these students from so many different communities that might never interact, that are making music together,' she continued. 'They're listening to each other. They're all working hard in their own ways to prepare to make something collaborative. And I just feel like it makes them more sensitive, well-rounded people.'
That concept is the Watanabes' guiding principle — and it's what attracted Whisenant, who would become a Stanford-bound engineering student, to the school to begin with.
'I would not have been going to Stanford without the Gifted Music School. Full stop,' Whisenant said emphatically.
The Stanford grad didn't study music professionally — he doesn't even own a piano now — but the community he received from the Gifted Music School lifted him up, informed his decisions and gave him the confidence to pursue his career path.
'When kids have arts and music education, they become more successful in their personal lives and their financial lives,' Eugene Watanabe said. 'From a purely civic standpoint ... I think every dollar that's put into these kids, they will go out and earn a living. Some of them will become entrepreneurs, and they'll become great taxpayers. So the money that it brings back to the community, just in sheer terms of dollars, is enormous.
'Raising great musicians that go and become concert artists is a side benefit,' he continued. 'But our purpose is to raise good citizens that come back and serve the community.'
That former students like Whisenant, Hubbard and Wu return to the school to share their time and talents with a younger generation is 'the biggest gift,' Vera Watanabe said.
But for the students, it's just a small token of their gratitude.
'I think that there are probably thousands of kids on the Wasatch Front that we don't reach that we should,' Whisenant said. 'It changed everything for me, and I wish that we could just give that to more kids.'
