Growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1950s and ’60s, John Sebastian, ’62, knew he was in the midst of something special. “It did begin to dawn on me by the time I was maybe eight that my parents had more fun than a lot of people,” the founder of The Lovin’ Spoonful recalls. Despite growing up in a musical household, Sebastian says, “I never knew that I was going to be a musician. I backed into it. I just thought I was going to be a bad student my whole life.”

Sebastian’s father was a classical harmonica player, and his mother wrote radio plays. The Sebastian home would host visiting folk musicians like Burl Ives and Woody Guthrie. “This was a fairly pink diaper, raucous part of the Village,” Sebastian says. When he enrolled in Friends Seminary in first grade, he was pleased to find that the school’s ethos—“An open-minded attitude about everything from race to gender to aptitude,” in Sebastian’s words—neatly fit his parents’ values.

By age 16, Sebastian was working for the legendary country blues singer Lightnin’ Hopkins, carrying his guitar when he played gigs in New York City. It was around this time that he started to realize how lucky he was to attend a school with such an inclusionary spirit. “I think it was a tremendous advantage to have an open mind about people who didn’t look like you,” he says.

Sebastian dove headfirst into the city’s burgeoning folk revival scene. “While I was at Friends, that’s really where I encountered the first instruments that I felt I could handle,” he says. At 12, a friend’s sister lent him her guitar, which he took home for a weekend. “By the time the weekend was over, I thought I had invented D minor.”

He can still remember the first time he was introduced to jug band music, an early form of the blues that made a comeback in New York City in the late 1950s. After a summer spent as a camp counselor, Sebastian came back to the city. “I had a call waiting for me from Stefan Grossman, who lived right nearby Friends, who said, ‘You’re going to come over to this place on 14th Street, we’re starting a jug band and you’re in it.’ And I said, ‘What’s jug band music?’” Sebastian learned quickly. As a teenager, he cut his teeth playing alongside Judy Collins, Mississippi John Hurt, and even Bob Dylan, who introduced him to the town he would eventually call home. In 1962, he spent a couple weeks in Woodstock with Dylan, who was looking to put a band together. Soon after, Sebastian decided to start his own group—The Lovin’ Spoonful, which took its name from the lyrics of a John Hurt song called “Coffee Blues.” The Spoonful hit its peak with a string of hits—like “Daydream,” “Do You Believe in Magic,” and “Summer in the City”—in the mid-1960s. By the late 1960s, the group had disbanded and Sebastian was playing coffeehouses on his own. His solo career took off after an unplanned set at a concert that would soon take its place in rock n’ roll history: Woodstock.

Sebastian arrived at Woodstock in 1969 as a mere spectator, but the organizers needed an acoustic performer to step in and fill time. He borrowed a guitar and obliged with a five-song set. “I think I had one thumb pick,” he recalls. “If that thumb pick had fallen into the audience, that would have been the end of my set!”

The surprise set garnered Sebastian invitations to play more outdoor festivals, including the Isle of Wight festival in 1970. He began to do more session work, sitting in with Crosby, Stills, & Nash, The Doors, and Keith Moon. Throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, he also wrote music for television and film, including Woody Allen’s first feature, "What’s Up, Tiger Lily"—for which The Lovin’ Spoonful wrote the soundtrack—and the theme song to the popular 1970s sitcom "Welcome Back, Kotter."

Today, Sebastian lives in the Woodstock house he bought in 1976, and continues to tour and play live. He turned down the opportunity to reunite with The Lovin’ Spoonful in the 1990s; he was ready to move on. Still, when he thinks back on the bustling music scene in which he grew up, he doesn’t dismiss it as a nostalgia trap. “It was that good,” he says. “Yeah. It was that good.”

On first glance, Anthony Antolini’s first big musical break came when he was just 8 years old. Antolini ’59 and his classmates from Mrs. Jessie B. Winterbottom’s class performed at Carnegie Hall—all of them on recorders and accompanied by the New York Philharmonic—as part of the Saturday Morning Young People’s Concerts series.

“I remember exactly where I was standing—front row, stage left,” Antolini recalled. “We played a piece that we memorized by Handel, and there were probably 50 or 60 of us, and it was quite something to see and hear. And it gave me the opportunity to say that I made my Carnegie Hall stage debut ... and play on the stage where Tchaikovsky had conducted. I felt pretty important.”

Antolini, a leading authority on Russian choral music and professor at Bowdoin College, said that his language teachers during his time at Friends were just as influential as his musical mentors.

Antolini was hooked on both music and languages when he started at Friends in 1947, long before he knew that he would need a strong command of both in his career. His grandmother was an accomplished concert pianist who accompanied Metropolitan Opera stars; his grandfather instructed Antolini to write him thank you letters in Italian, and would mail back Antolini’s copy with errors marked in red ink. From the German ancestry on his mother’s side, he was exposed to that country’s rich history of music and opera.

“And, growing up in New York City I heard a lot of languages and decided that foreign languages were a great fascination for me,” Antolini said.

Antolini recalls Mrs. Winterbottom, his first music teacher at Friends who got him on to Carnegie Hall’s stage, as a “saint” who would attempt to make music with his entire class, many of whom were not “born singers,” and many of whom were reluctant to try. She was a classical-oriented pianist whose teaching method, Antolini later realized, was based on English choir training. Her successor, Isaac Van Grove, couldn’t have been more different, Antolini said, staging the Gilbert and Sullivan opera “Trial by Jury” in the Meetinghouse.

“This seemed absurd to me, I had been exposed to grand operas at the Met, and now I was doing something in English,” said Antolini, who was cast in one of the leading roles. “I was kind of a snob until Mr. Van Grove got me started on how much fun [singing and acting] was.”

During his high school years at Friends, Antolini wasn’t devoted to a particular genre of music, but recalls spending time at the symphony and jazz clubs in Greenwich Village. A performance of the musical “Black Nativity”—which featured an all-black cast singing traditional Christmas carols gospel-style—at Lincoln Center “turned my life upside down” in high school, Antolini said.

“I grew up with European music, and I had never given the music of African American performers a deep listen. It was like lightning,” Antolini said. Years later, he organized an adaptation of the production, written with poetry by Langston Hughes, with a colleague in Maine.

After graduating from Friends in 1959, Antolini went to Bowdoin College, where he majored in music and toured with the glee club. Antolini earned master’s degrees in Russian and music, and a Ph.D. in Slavic Studies, from Stanford University.

“I really didn’t see, until I was teaching college in California, that I had a future combining the Russian with the music,” Antolini said. “Then I had an enormous professional break finding a masterpiece of Sergei Rachmaninoff ’s that had never been published in the West. If I hadn’t known Russian, and I hadn’t known music, I wouldn’t have been able to make the first American bilingual publication of the piece, which basically put me on the map.”

The piece was the “Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom,” an obscure piece that was only conducted by the composer a single time in Russia in 1910. Church officials deemed the piece too modern, and the Liturgy was left behind when Rachmaninoff fled his native country during the Russian Revolution. In the 80s, Antolini started piecing together the forgotten work, and a specially formed choir performed his new edition for the first time in California in 1986.

That spring, Voice of America broadcast “Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom” in the Soviet Union.

“There had been a lot of bad news about the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, and that had been on the radio for weeks,” Antolini said. “And around the time of Russian Easter they broadcast, instead of more news about the nuclear meltdown, our choir performing Rachmaninoff ’s Liturgy. And it created a sensation, that an American choir was performing a piece that belongs to the Russians.”

In 1988, Antolini and his chorus toured the Soviet Union with the piece. Antolini received a “distinguished alumni” medal from Moscow State University, and an American Public Television documentary called “Rediscovering Rachmaninoff ” was later released about the performances.

Antolini said the experience was the most memorable of his career. After that, Antolini was hired at his undergraduate alma mater in 1992, and hasn’t left.

These days, Antolini is semi-retired. He no longer teaches classes at Bowdoin, but continues to conduct the Bowdoin College Chorus. He directs the Lincoln Festival Chorus, the Rachmaninoff Choir and Down East Singers, all of which are in Maine.

“Something that is very important to me is mentoring young people. It’s the most important thing I’m doing now at my age: passing all this exciting music on to very young people, because that’s what was done for me at Friends.”

Antolini is currently working on a new arrangement of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, a multimedia piece for dancers and singers depicting a country wedding that was originally scored for five pianos and percussion. Antolini is pairing it down to a four-hand piano accompaniment in an effort to make the piece more performable.

And, he has another professional goal he’d still like to accomplish: conducting a performance in the Meetinghouse.

“It’s always been a dream of mine,” Antolini said.

If Christopher Gibbs ’76 never took Latin or Greek, he might be better known today for his photography than his expertise on Franz Schubert and classical music.

“After class, I’d be talking to Donald Wilson about some rock group I liked, and he said, maybe you’d like this, and gave me a set of Beethoven symphonies to listen to,” Gibbs recalled of his 9th grade teacher.

An accomplished photographer by his early teens, Gibbs spent his summers shooting for The Chautauquan Daily newspaper in Western New York. He remembers at first doing anything he could as a child to skip summer concerts at the Chautauqua Institution, where his father served as chairman of the board of trustees. But as his interest in photography grew, he found the subjects he most enjoyed capturing were the opera, ballet, and orchestra.

“Photography merged with the musical passions that were becoming more and more consuming,” said Gibbs, who returned to Friends to teach for three years after he graduated from Haverford College. “Even when I was teaching photography here and spending a lot of time in the darkroom, I was playing Beethoven string quartets, probably boring my poor students, talking just as much about the music I was playing as how to use a stop bath.”

Gibbs left a photographic mark on Friends before he put down his camera for good. He snapped John Lennon’s photo when he came to an assembly in 1976; his portrait of Principal Earle Hunter hangs along the spiral staircase inside the 212 townhouse, and he was the first person to climb a ladder and shoot the whole schools’ photo.

He had many ties to Friends, where he was a lifer as was his sister Nancy. His mother, Janet, taught for more than two decades here and served as head of guidance. Eventually Gibbs was married in the Meeting House and still lives in the neighborhood, so passes by the school frequently.

Gibbs—who did not start reading music or playing the piano until he was in 11th grade—knew he wasn’t destined to be a performer. Early in his career, as he worked through his master’s and doctoral degree at Columbia University, he tried out three career paths: a music critic, arts administrator, and teacher.

“I believe in testing things in the area where you want to spend your life, exploring your passion,” Gibbs said. He recalls being “pretty shameless” about writing to the chief music critic of The New Yorker or going up to Leonard Bernstein after he conducted and asking questions about the score.

“You probably could not do that with Beyonce, but I wasn’t doing this to say I met a star, I wasn’t asking for a job, I was asking for advice. I was asking genuine questions to see what these people were like.”

Today, Gibbs has three careers rolled into one. He is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College, where he has taught students of varying musical backgrounds since 2002, and just wrapped up his 13th season as co-director of the Bard Music Festival. He has written the program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra for the last 15 years, and previously was program director for the last three years of the Schubertiade at the 92nd Street Y, and advised when Carnegie Hall held the Schubert bicentennial.

He remains as well a committed scholar and has written or edited books on Schubert and Franz Liszt. His most recent publication was the The Oxford History of Western Music: College Edition. Gibbs reworked multiple existing volumes by Richard Taruskin into one textbook. He hopes it becomes the textbook of reference for undergraduate music students.

“In all of this my goal has been to turn other people on to and give them more tools to listen and appreciate music, that really began here with Donald Wilson.”

When the composer Christian Wolff ’51, attended Friends Seminary, the school didn’t have a proper music program. But that didn’t stop him and his friend David Lewin ’50, from showing up every morning before classes began to play the upright piano that stood in the corner of the school’s small gymnasium. He calls their early-morning jam sessions his “first interactive musical activity.” It would hardly be his last.

By the age of 16, Wolff had already begun what would become a long and fruitful career as a composer of experimental music. It was then, in 1950, that Wolff met the avant-garde composer John Cage, who was impressed with the young man’s precocious ideas. That fateful meeting at Cage’s Lower East Side tenement would lead to Wolff ’s inclusion in the New York School of composers, a legendary group that was inextricably linked to—and influenced by—the innovative writers, painters, dancers, and poets that contributed to New York City’s flourishing midcentury art scene.

Wolff was a new arrival to the United States when he began his studies at Friends. His parents, Kurt and Helen Wolff, who founded the highly regarded Pantheon Books, published classic and modern literature in their native Germany. (Their clients included Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, Sinclair Lewis, and Günter Grass.) Foreseeing the danger of Hitler’s Germany, the couple left the country in 1933 and moved to Nice, France, where Christian was born the following year. Eventually, the family managed to secure passage to New York City in the spring of 1941, settling in an apartment on Washington Square.

Young Christian immersed himself into his adopted homeland’s cultural scene, attending plays and concerts with his parents, whose circle of friends included artists, musicians, and writers. By the age of 11 or 12, Wolff knew music would play a major role in his life. “I was surrounded by the stuff,” he says.

What he heard on the radio—Frank Sinatra, The Andrews Sisters—didn’t much interest him. “It seemed very schlocky to me,” he says. “I really didn’t connect to it.” By the time he was in high school, he and his school friends would make regular weekend visits to one of two bars in the East Village that hosted Dixieland jazz bands, where Wolff was impressed by the virtuosity of the players and the spontaneous energy of improvised music. “It was one or two dollars to get in,” he recalls, “and they didn’t mind serving you beer.”

When he graduated from Friends, Wolff considered enrolling in a music conservatory. But by then, he was already steeped in the world of avant- garde music, which bore little relation to what one might learn in a conventional music school. He ended up at Harvard, where he quickly ruled out the idea of studying music. “The music department at Harvard was terribly hopeless for me,” Wolff says. “They weren’t doing anything that had the slightest interest for me.”

On the recommendation of Lewin, who was also at Harvard, Wolff took a Latin class. He had already studied the language for four years at Friends, under the tutelage of Ms. Hermine Ehlers, who also taught German. Eventually he joined the classics department, earning a PhD and teaching at Harvard for a short time. In 1971, he joined the faculty at Dartmouth, where he taught in both the classics and the music departments until his retirement in 1999.

Although Wolff ’s musical education took place largely outside the halls of Friends Seminary, he credits the school’s small class sizes with his lifelong interest in chamber music— classical music composed for small groups of instruments. “Having been at school in a situation in which you were in classes of at most 23, 24 people, and you knew everybody—I think the sociability of that situation might have had some affect on my interest in chamber music.”

While Wolff continued to compose throughout his tenure as a professor, since his retirement, he has focused primarily on music. “Finally,” he says, “towards the end of my life, I got to be a full-time musician, which is what I wanted to do from the start.”

When Aimee Saiger Russell ’88 thinks of her years at Friends, one of the first things that comes to mind is riding the train, the Beastie Boys “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)” playing on her Walkman.

“There’s definitely a soundtrack to my life and it started when I was at Friends, when I started to develop a taste for music,” Saiger Russell said. “Music is everything to me.”

Saiger Russell, who lives in Atlanta, is Director of Singles, Analytics and Promotion at Hollywood Records/ The Disney Music Group. She joined the label nine years ago, and spends 10 weeks on the road a year, promoting artists in four states, making sure their songs are played on the radio and keeping the momentum going.

Though the industry has drastically changed over the past decade—to people streaming instead of buying music—Saiger Russell says radioplay is still the best way to introduce listeners to new music, and reaches 245 million people a week. Her career also includes an analytical component, looking at airplay, sales and data on the competition.

Saiger Russell started at Friends in third grade. Though she admits she “didn’t do anything musical,” she was always making mixtapes, and her friends knew she was destined for the music business in some capacity.

“Music was like my best friend. It was always there for me. If something good happened, I had a song. If something bad happened, I had a song. If nothing happened, I had a song—it was both a form of entertainment but was also a very personal thing for me. Music reminds me of certain teachers, classes, things I went through at Friends,” Saiger Russell said.

After Friends, Saiger Russell went to Colgate University, where she studied anthropology and sociology—which would come in handy later as she negotiated the different personalities that she encounters in the music business.

Saiger Russell was on the air on WRCU all four years at Colgate, playing modern rock during the 3-5 a.m. Monday morning shift (followed by a full day of class starting at 9 a.m.), and eventually served as program director. Nirvana broke during those years, and Saiger Russell remembers what an “exciting time” it was to be in college radio.

After graduating, Saiger Russell knew she wanted to stay in the radio field but not necessarily on air. She liked introducing people to new music, and found she could do that on the label side. In 1993, she started in the Top 40 department at Epic Records in New York. Since then, she’s moved up the ranks at several labels, and has worked with artists such as Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, Radiohead, Foo Fighters and The White Stripes.

“I love where I am now at Disney, because my department is like a second family, and at Friends you were going to school, but it was really like you were with a big family,” Saiger Russell said. “Growing up in New York City, which is humongous, and going to a small private school just gives you confidence, and a lot of nurturing. The music business is big; I’ve been at Hollywood Records for nine years now and I don’t really want to go anywhere else because it feels like that community Friends had.”

Saiger Russell has lived in Atlanta since 2003. Her husband, Toby Russell, is the vice president of Top 40 promotion at Republic Records. They have two daughters: Olivia, 10, and Lucy, 3.

“They both love music, and Olivia plays the violin,” Saiger Russell said. “We’ve definitely kept music in our family.”

“I think being grounded in the music industry is important, we’ve seen what happens to people when they’re not. I think that learning style that Friends taught you as a community just made you a very grounded person. The teachers were personal and taught you to be yourself. They gave me the knowledge and the confidence I needed to move on, to empower me to do what I wanted to do, to set goals and achieve them.”