NOTE: The Senior Close-Up is an occasional feature on the Bard Athletics web site, with the focus being the life of a student-athlete at Bard. Here, every student must complete a Senior Project to graduate. The Senior Project is an original, individual, focused project growing out of the student’s cumulative academic experiences. Preparation begins in the junior year, and one course each semester in the senior year is devoted entirely to the Senior Project. The student submits the completed project to a committee of three professors and participates with them in a Senior Project Review.By Jim Sheahan
Director of Athletic Communications & Marketing
It would be hard to find a college environment that embraces the unique more than Bard College. Artists, poets, authors, musicians, scientists, doctors, economists, activists … they’re all born at Bard, where their creativity, individuality, intellect and global awareness can be nurtured and honed.
Everybody impresses. To stand out here, you’d have to be the rarest of rare birds.
Josh Hodge stands out. To anyone over at the Performing Arts Center, he’s one of two bassoonists in the Bard College Conservatory of Music Orchestra. To anyone in the Stevenson Athletic Center, he’s the tall, smiling blonde guy who often looks like he just got out of bed.
To the rest of you, he’s a young man who has accomplished the impossible at Bard. He has successfully navigated the rigorous five-year, dual degree program the Conservatory requires, and he has been a varsity athlete.
Perhaps he’s made ‘impossible’ too strong a word in this context. Unlikely is the word, then, because there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day. Unlikely, also, because he has led a program from club to varsity status, and he’s done it as the charming, affable captain of the men’s swimming team.
In Hodge’s 23 years on Earth, it’s just another passion fulfilled in a life so far brimming with gratitude, humility … and music.
“I’m the only musician in my family,” Hodge says. “I knew in fifth grade I wanted to be a musician, but I lied to my parents and told them I wanted to be a dentist.”
His parents and his grandparents weren’t fooled. Josh was a musician and they helped him pursue it. A turning point came when he attended the Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan, a six-week summer experience that allowed him to embrace what he loved. It also got him out of his hometown, Tucson, Ariz.
“Growing up in Tucson, I felt like a music nerd,” Hodge says. “At Interlochen … I just had never been in a place where everyone was so driven by music. My secret passion was out in the open. It changed everything for me in terms of knowing who I was and what I wanted to do. I was allowed to embrace it.”
Rehearsals, performances and practice drove competitive swimming out of Josh’s middle school calendar. By the time he was in high school, he was in the youth orchestra, two jazz bands, flute choir, wind ensemble and the marching band.
He didn’t feel challenged academically, however, so in his junior year and with the help of his parents and grandparents, he became a student at Interlochen – where they also offer a boarding school.
“For me, it was like going to Hogwarts for musicians,” Hodge says. “When I got the letter I’d been accepted it was like getting a letter telling me I was going to be a wizard. It’s beautiful there and I was immersed in music and arts and loved it.”
Academically, for the first time, he was worried.
ABOVE: Josh Hodge, foreground, has been spending at least part of every summer since his junior year of high school working at Goranson Farm in Dresden, Maine.“That first semester was scary,” he says. “Not feeling challenged in the classroom had made me lazy. I was doing work all the time and still had room to improve, so that was really satisfying.”
Between his junior and senior years at Interlochen, he met Patricia Rogers, who has been the principal bassoonist for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra since 1976. At the time, Rogers was on the faculty at the Juilliard School, Mannes College the New School of Music, and Manhattan School of Music – the three heavy hitters in New York City.
Hodge auditioned for all three schools and eventually chose Mannes. He forgot his black shoes back at Interlochen and auditioned for Juilliard with just socks on. He didn’t get in. He chose Timberland boots for the Mannes audition and they accepted him.
Professors at Interlochen apparently tell the sad saga of Josh and his socks as a cautionary tale for music students there.
He wasn’t happy at Mannes, and only part of it was getting used to living in New York City after living in the Michigan woods. It was about academics, and it wasn’t working for him. He sought advice from Rogers, who told him that she was now teaching at Bard, too.
Bard, he thought. Apparently the world of bassoonists is quite small, and he knew some people here.
“The idea of Conservatory students being
required to get a dual degree just blew my mind,” Hodge says. “It was just so perfect for me. I came up and auditioned and saw an opera at the Fisher Center and just couldn’t stop thinking about it after that.”
Josh had been spending summers working on a friend’s family farm in Maine – something he still does – but spent those summer nights researching Bard and preparing himself for a new phase in his life. He also made a phone call to the Department of Athletics and Recreation to find out if Bard had a swim team.
Bard had a club team at the time, but there were rumblings, he says, soon after he arrived at Bard that the program might move to varsity status. It did, and the principal bassoonist was named captain of the men’s team.
“I really missed swimming,” Hodge says. “I was definitely going to have conflicts between rehearsals and practice. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday the practices were later, and I could make those. On Tuesday and Thursday I couldn’t make the practices, so I told the coaches I would come to the pool during the day to practice, and that’s what I did. I needed to get in real swimming shape again.”
Being on the swim team opened another door for Hodge, and in typical fashion, he burst through it with a big smile on his face.
“It was a huge stress release for me to be able to swim,” Hodge says, “and a nice social pace. It was incredibly empowering to do that whole thing again of preparing myself to compete, then competing.”
Being a new varsity program with a thin roster, Hodge and his teammates were often overwhelmed by the opposition, especially in the powerful Liberty League.
“I remember walking into one of the league meets and looking at the other teams warming up and saying to myself, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be so slow compared to these guys,’ ” he says. “Then I said to myself, ‘But I’m the best bassoonist in the room.’ Then I’d relax and just go out and enjoy myself.”
Initially he thought his dual degree would be Literature, and he definitely loves reading and writing, but he’s an Asian Studies major. As a toddler a Chinese family lived in the same house, and now all these years later, his stepmother is Chinese.
“Even though I’m an Asian Studies major, I’ve taken a lot of literature and writing courses,” Hodge says. “I call myself a closeted Written Arts major.”
Hodge return to Mannes to pursue his Masters in Music, beginning this fall. The goal is to become a professional musician or a music teacher, professions he says he would truly enjoy.
A couple of years ago, Hodge toured China with the Bard Conservatory Orchestra; this summer it’s Eastern Europe. They’ll perform in Krakow, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, Prague, St. Petersburg, Moscow and Budapest. Then, as has been the tradition since high school, he’ll work at Goranson Farm in Maine. He calls the Goransons as close as it comes to family for him on the East Coast. When he’s done, he'll be attending the Bowdoin International Music Festival as a bassoon fellow, and he’ll start grad school at Mannes in the fall.
After working under the guidance of Rogers for his first three years at Bard, he's been with Marc Goldberg for the last two. Goldberg, who is the bassoonist in the New York Woodwind Quartet, is on the faculty at Bard and also at Mannes. So Hodge will continue his studies with Goldberg in the city.
Hodge says his experience being a varsity athlete at Bard - he's on the track team this spring, too - has had a tremendous impact on his life.
“Being on a varsity team has been one of the most meaningful of all my experiences at Bard,” Hodge says. “When you’re training with people and going through the daily pain of preparation, with a common goal in mind … you can’t replicate that experience, and it’s not like music at all. People think it is, but it’s not.
“The unspoken connection that I had with the other swimmers was something I’d never experienced before,” he continued. “It opened me up.”
Hodge has also been an active, vocal supporter of all of the varsity programs at Bard, often running out at the end of rehearsals to get over to the Stevenson Athletic Center or the Ferrari Soccer & Lacrosse Complex for contests.
“I know how meaningful it is for me to have friends in the audience, or to have friends come watch a swim meet,” he says. “That’s not something I can ignore. It’s not always easy to express support for your peers. If I’m capable of going to support someone by seeing their artwork at a show, or watching a performance, or attending a sporting event, I’m going to go. The power of that support you really can’t shake off.”
