SC Connecticut News

Max Hammond, a mathematics major from Los Angeles, dedicated an unusual amount of time to the piano over the winter — about eight hours a day, up from his long-term average of about five. This was due to his application process for conservatories, where he aimed to impress.

"I can’t function without eight or nine hours," Hammond said, ensuring that he also had sufficient rest each night. His extra effort at the keyboard paid off as he was accepted at six top music conservatories. Following his tenure at Yale, Hammond will enroll at Julliard as a master’s degree candidate in solo piano performance. This aligns with his aspiration of becoming a recitalist who is well-versed but not restricted to the classical music canon.

“I want to figure out what’s next in classical music,” said Hammond, who previously won Yale’s Sharp Prize for “most outstanding performer in the junior class.”

Hammond's musical preferences are wide-ranging: He appreciates composers like Robert Schumann, a 19th-century Romantic, and contemporary classical talents such as György Ligeti, Unsuk Chin, and Alex Paxton. For him, Paxton’s work “ilolli-pop” is "the absolute embodiment of joy — pure exuberance." Demonstrating his love for contemporary music, Hammond started all his conservatory auditions with Ligeti’s “Etude No. 6: Autumn in Warsaw,” a technically challenging piece.

Ligeti’s work sometimes "verges on the unplayable," according to Hammond — just how he likes it. “I find the idea of brushing up against impossibility very exciting at the keyboard,” he added.

The opportunity to push boundaries also attracts him to mathematics: “How do you make your mind do something you didn’t think it could do earlier in the day?” To this end, he took courses such as “Intermediate Complex Analysis,” “Fields and Galois Theory,” and served as a peer tutor for four years.

Hammond also explored Yale’s other academic offerings, including nearly a second major’s worth of courses in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Despite his evident excitement about Julliard, Hammond said Yale was the right place for his undergraduate experience.

“I want to have a lot of things to play about,” he said. “Yale has given me the space to think about what voice I have and what I want to use it to say in classical music.”

At Yale, Hammond was able to enjoy the best of two worlds since it is home to the renowned Yale School of Music. As a senior, he was one of six students — and the only undergraduate — in a graduate-level music seminar focused on the study and performance of “Pierrot lunaire,” the Albert Schoenberg melodrama. The course culminated in a live performance by the class at the Schoenberg Center — in Vienna — as part of the composer’s 150th birthday celebration.

“I’ve gotten this insane conservatory education at Yale,” said Hammond, who uses various pianos around campus but especially prizes the occasional chance to play on various Steinway D’s, 9-foot grand pianos.

Hammond's years at Yale also provided him with professional opportunities. At the end of his sophomore year, when New York-based vocal Mirror Visions Ensemble found itself without a pianist for a major recording project, one of Hammond’s Yale mentors, Richard Lalli, recommended him.

“‘He’s a kid but I think he can do it,’” Hammond recalls Lalli saying. Over two months, Hammond mastered an hour’s worth of music in time to record a video album with the group. That album, “Midnight Magic,” led to live performances in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Scotland’s Isle of Arran, and elsewhere.

When asked how he manages to fit everything in, Hammond said, “I eat all my meals in 15 minutes.” His interest in circus acrobatics, however, is a story for another day.