Maddie Sides/The Stanford Daily
Cardinal Calypso, Stanford’s student steelpan group, has commandeered many spots on campus as their rehearsal space over the years — some of them more makeshift than others. They’ve used dorms like Roble Hall. They’ve practiced outside. They’ve used “Toyonito,” a space behind Toyon Hall once used by arts groups that is no longer there. Right now, the group holds its rehearsals in Manzanita Dining Hall.
Complicating the issue of rehearsal space is the fact that Cardinal Calypso has no permanent place to store their hefty equipment: a drum kit and 14 pans made from 55-gallon industrial drums originally built to hold chemicals. The group keeps their instruments in cages on a stage in Manzanita. This situation is not ideal, said group member Tucker Leavitt ’17, who admitted that Cardinal Calypso’s pans make it a tricky group to accommodate.
However, when the group approached Music Department Chair Stephen Sano, hoping to enlist the department’s help in finding a more official home for their practices and pans, they found sympathy but not a solution.
“They said they’re just kind of completely booked up,” Leavitt said. Sano told the group that he wished he could do more, but that the department simply lacks the space and resources.
Like many other performing arts groups at Stanford, Cardinal Calypso has had a hard time finding practice and performance space on campus, a situation exacerbated by the music department’s lack of funding – and a feeling among music students that, despite development of a much-vaunted “arts district,” the University’s experience for undergraduates in the arts can still be lacking.
“I think Stanford’s efforts to support arts and humanities feel surface-level sometimes,” said Hannah Pho ’18, a music and computer science double major. “Being deep in the music department, I feel like there’s a lot of funding that’s just not there. It’s the tech side of Stanford that gets all of that funding; they’ve got all the shiny new buildings.”
While it’s hardly unusual for undergraduates and professors to wish their department or general interest area were better funded, the frustration many music students feels begs the question: is Stanford doing enough to support them?
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