Gratitude to the The Juilliard School faculty.

Thank you for bringing a dancer's discipline and imagination to the leadership of Juilliard, and for insisting that young artists leave prepared to serve their communities as fully as their art.

Thank you for carrying your teacher Dorothy DeLay's studio forward with warmth and wit, and for showing every violinist that greatness and generosity can live in the same pair of hands.

Thank you for decades of Brahms, Haydn and Beethoven made with friends like Yo-Yo Ma, and for bringing that same spirit of listening and partnership into the piano studio since 1990.

Thank you for Blood on the Fields and a lifetime of insisting that swing and the blues are American classical music, and for teaching Juilliard's jazz musicians to honor the tradition by extending it.

Thank you for a podium career that championed living composers from St. Louis to Sydney, and for training young conductors to lead orchestras with curiosity instead of ego.

Thank you for the Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion that earned the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, and for mentoring young composers with the same craft and care you bring to every score.

Thank you for Symphony No. 1, The Red Violin and more than one hundred works that prove new music can be both fearless and deeply loved, and for the students you have shaped along the way.

Thank you for The Study of Orchestration, the book that taught the world's composers how an orchestra breathes, and for still giving your students your full attention in your tenth decade.

Thank you for more than three decades of leadership that transformed Juilliard's campus and its conscience, and for teaching generations that the artist is, above all, a citizen.