Maura Tuffy might never have become the accomplished singer, pianist, composer and conductor she is today if her parents hadn’t enrolled her in a dance class when she was 7 years old.
Mother Jennifer Tuffy recalls a chance conversation she had with another parent, Nikki Cifelli, one day during a class. Cifelli said her daughter Briana was taking piano lessons, and she recommended the instructor, Deborah Tonner. Not long after, Jennifer took Maura to her first lesson.
“She spent an hour with Maura, and afterward she said to me, ‘Do you know your daughter is very talented?’” Jennifer said in a phone call last month. “We had no idea. My husband (Thomas) and I aren’t musical people.”
Since that fateful day, music has become central in Tuffy’s life. She still takes piano lessons, and has been singing in the choir at Trinity Church in Princeton since the age of 8. She has performed at Lincoln Center in New York and St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and in choirs consisting of the most promising high school students in the nation. And she has played piano several times on stage at Carnegie Hall.
Last month, her choral composition, “Ubi Caritas,” was published as part of a collection curated by Jo-Michael Scheibe, chair of the Choral and Sacred Music Department at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music.
Tuffy wrote original music to go with the Gregorian-era hymn traditionally sung on Holy Thursday. The Hopewell Valley Central High School Chamber Singers performed the work in concert last year.
Scheibe was instrumental in the composition process. Tuffy met him in Baltimore last winter, at the American Choral Directors Association Eastern Division Honor Conference, where he conducted the high school honor choir. Tuffy was attending her fifth ACDA conference, for which she had auditioned, and in which she was a soprano in the choir. (In February, she plans to attend ACDA for the sixth time, in Salt Lake City.)
Some three hundred singers attend ACDA, working seven or eight hours a day for four days. Intense rehearsals lead up to a conference-closing concert. Each choir usually works with a director from a major university or state college choral program. Before Tuffy auditioned for ACDA last year, she saw that Scheibe would be her director, and was intrigued by his biography.
“USC was already a place I wanted to apply to and I thought, ‘Wow, this would be a perfect opportunity to meet the conductor and maybe talk to him about the program at USC.”
One day during ACDA, she decided to show him her composition. He looked it over and told her to keep working on it, and to send it to him when she had a finished version.
Spurred on, she worked on the piece for several weeks, completing it in time for it to be performed in concert by the HVCHS Chamber Singers last year. In the summer, she sent Scheibe the finished music along with a recording from the concert.
In September, she got an email from Colla Voce, whose website says it is “dedicated to printing quality music literature from around the world since 1996.” They told her that Dr. Scheibe would like to add her composition to his choral collection. In December, after she signed a contract and made final edits, the piece became available for purchase on the Colla Voce site.
Tuffy has already had one inquiry, from a woman in Massachusetts who wanted to have her high school choir perform the piece in concert. If people do buy “Ubi Caritas” from Colla Voce, Tuffy could earn royalties.
She said being published has only made her more determined to write music.
“I now feel that I have some type of direction with composition, and I can go somewhere with it,” she said.
She began composing when she was a sophomore. She describes composition as a “hobby,” and has had no formal songwriting training. But even before “Ubi Caritas,” pieces of hers had been sung in concert. A composition she wrote sophomore year, “Alleluia,” was performed later by the Ragazze, the premier treble choral ensemble at CHS.
She said CHS choral director Matthew Erpelding has been very influential in her composing career. She heard one of his original works performed when she was a freshman, and says it inspired her to start writing.
“I thought, there’s more to music than performing. There’s another side I haven’t discovered,” she said.
When she sat down to write the piece that would be published, she did not know that she would eventually set it to “Ubi Caritas,” the hymn she knew so well from having performed or listened to it many times as a member of the choir at Trinity Church in Princeton.
But there was a point, she said, where it became clear to her that the music she had composed would go perfectly with the familiar lyrics.
“I’ve just connected with the words and the music so much,” she said. “I listened to different versions” — she cites those by Maurice Duruflé and Ola Gjeilo as some of the best that she’s heard — “and said, ‘Wow, I love the text so much, I want to write my own version.’”
When she’s composing, she likes to listen to different versions of a piece with the same text to get a feel for what each composer was thinking when he or she was writing, to try to understand how they were communicating the lyrics through the music.
“I finished it, then looked around for different poems that could go with it, and when I thought about (the words to) “Ubi Caritas,” I felt like this text would fit the music that I wrote just perfectly.”
She said after singing in a noted choir for 9 years, she understood innately the structure of that type of piece “I have the sound of it in my head. I know what to write,” she said.
But it could also be that songwriting comes a little more naturally to Tuffy than it does to others. After all, millions of people sing in choirs, but they do not all write their own compositions.
Jennifer Tuffy said when she first started taking Maura to Trinity Church for choir practice, the choir director echoed what Deborah Tonner had told her when Maura had started taking piano lessons.
“They said, ‘Do you know your child is very talented? But in a way that only a musical person would understand,’” Jennifer said. “They said, ‘Who is musical in the family?’ I said, ‘Nobody.’ I love music, love listening to it, but I never had an interest in it, and neither did my husband. So it’s been a really incredible ride, all the things Maura has exposed us to.”
In addition to participating in the Trinity Church choir, Tuffy takes singing lessons from a fellow Trinity choir member, Adam Phillips, as well as Westminster Choir College instructor Kathy Price.
But Tuffy is more than a singer. She is also a concert pianist, having taken lessons from Tonner, then Betty Stoloff, an instructor at Westminster Choir College. She still works with Stoloff today, and simultaneously takes jazz piano lessons with musician Peter Lauffer. Recently, she performed a jazz tune she had composed with a trio.
Tuffy thinks her foundation in piano has helped make her a better singer. She can accompany herself, for one thing. She also feels that knowing how to play the pieces connects her to what a pianist who is accompanying her might be thinking when she is singing solo.
She’s learning another way to connect the musical dots of her life as well. At CHS, where she’s been a member of the Chamber Singers and the jazz band, she is learning choral conducting through the independent study option.
While the school doesn’t offer conductor training, she was able to work with Erpelding to create a curriculum. On Dec. 9, she served as student conductor for the CHS women’s concert choir in the winter choral concert, held in the Hopewell Valley Performing Arts Center.
She said as a singer, conducting helps her understand better what the music is asking for. And as a composer, conducting helps her because now she has a better idea of how edits she can make to a song can better help the conductor understand her intent.
As for the future, Tuffy is planning to go to college for vocal performance and choral music. She said one day she would like to be a choral conductor at a university, as well as a composer.
But she has no plans to drop the piano either. “To become a choral director at a university, it’s really important that I have all these skills. It’s easier to teach students what they need to learn,” she said.
To think that Tuffy is forging a memorable career in a field she might never have considered if not for that dance class when she was 7.
“We are very, very proud, and really kind of in awe of what she’s been able to do,” Jennifer Tuffy said. “It’s funny to think it all kind of started by chance.”
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