NEW YORK, NY.- Delfin Demiray had packed too much. She was leaving her home in Ankara, Turkey, for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. An 18-year-old who had never been to the United States, she didn’t know what to expect.

As she prepared for her flight in August, loading her suitcases with clothes and books, she was still surprised at the turn her life had taken. Demiray had played piano since she was 8, and had a gift for reproducing music she heard on TV at the keyboard; she also liked to improvise with friends and write melodies of her own. But she didn’t think of herself as a composer until a year ago, when she applied to Curtis and, to her shock, was accepted.

Her move to the United States would make her parents empty-nesters, but she tried not to think too much about the sadness of saying goodbye. “It’s just how life is,” said Demiray, now 19. “I feel like they are living their dreams through me.”

Her story is not so rare at Curtis, an extremely selective, tuition-free school whose roughly 150 students come from around the world to study with almost monastic focus. Even among conservatories, it is exceptional, with a wide age range — from preadolescence to post-baccalaureate adulthood — and a personalized approach, of schedules and repertoire, for musicians who live almost entirely for their art.

“We know what it feels like to have to go to bed early on a Saturday night because you have to wake up Sunday morning for a lesson,” said Dillon Scott, a viola student, “and we all know what it feels like to have a performance that was objectively good, but still could’ve been better.”

Some of the students are already professionals who perform outside school, as well as on the campus of Curtis, which maintains a full orchestra, an opera program and chamber music groups. Many of the musicians form friendships that lead to collaborations that endure throughout their careers. The list of alumni reads like a musical hall of fame, with titans like Leonard Bernstein and current stars like Lang Lang and Hilary Hahn.

During the 2023-24 year, The New York Times followed five students as they settled into new lives, pushed their artistry and planned as much as they could for an uncertain future.

SCOTT, A 20-YEAR-OLD from Lansdale, Pennsylvania, about an hour away from Philadelphia, grew up determined to attend Curtis. He still feels a sense of awe as he walks into its main building, a historical mansion on Rittenhouse Square. “These four years are going to have the potential to be absolutely instrumental and life-changing,” he said. “But it’s not going to be dropped on my lap.”

Few students, even few professionals, behave like Scott. His mind is a fire hose of ambition and enterprising passion. He approaches music critically, wondering how he can use Curtis’ resources to unearth the works of overlooked, often Black, composers and bring it to audiences beyond the tired demographics of classical music.

Having already spent countless hours in the library assembling a list of about 25 composers, noting all their works and locating their scores, Scott programmed a series of on- and off-campus concerts for the fall, accompanied by talks, and brought 14 other students on board. At community performances, he smiled at the sight of security and staff from school who had come with their families, and at how visibly different the audience looked from a typical Curtis performance.

Busy with concerts, too, was a 25-year-old French soprano named Juliette Tacchino. She started the fall semester staring down her final year and auditions, but other singing opportunities quickly arose as other singers dropped out of performances. On one program, she sang the role of Sophie in a scene from “Der Rosenkavalier” under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who teaches at Curtis.

The experience was double-edged. Tacchino, a sensitive wellspring of calm, was also occupied with being a resident coordinator at Lenfest Hall, where she took care of younger students and organized events like a trip to an animal shelter and a screening of “Maestro.” But Tacchino missed the movie because she had the flu. She had already been feeling under the weather as the stress of her added work was taking its toll, and the flu made things worse. She lost her voice several times, and even when she did get a break, visiting her boyfriend in Montreal over Thanksgiving, she was preparing for auditions.

One of Nézet-Séguin’s students was Micah Gleason, 28, an easygoing yet fiercely skilled conductor and singer, also in her final year. She lived off-campus with her partner, in an apartment outfitted with a school-provided piano, a mirror for watching herself conduct and equipment for her side gig as a photographer.

Like Scott, Gleason thinks about how to push beyond the conventions of performance. For a fall concert in which she was both conducting and singing Berio’s “Folk Songs,” she brought in a lighting designer and tried to hire a movement director. (There, she was less successful.) In her free time, she started emailing people she knew to line up work after Curtis.

In the orchestra for that concert was 17-year-old flute student Julin Cheung. He had been at Curtis since he was middle-school age, and because he was a minor, he lived with his parents, originally from Hong Kong and Kazakhstan, on Rittenhouse Square. They had moved to Philadelphia for his education from Seattle, where they still traveled during school breaks to visit family.

Cheung, an only child with a mature sensibility and wry humor, is both independent and still very much a teenager. He has friends at Curtis but often eats dinner with his parents at their apartment. His mother helps with some of the logistics of his musical life, but otherwise he manages his own time, finding the space to work on his home-school education. During the school year, he also took German lessons because the language might come in handy when he finishes at Curtis in 2025; he would like to continue his studies in Europe.

In student housing, Demiray was quickly making new friends. She was closest with her roommate, a horn player. They would gather on staircases at Lenfest with other students to sing choral music for fun. After attending a party during her first week, she joined a group to organize one of her own, a masquerade for the holidays.

During the semester, she also finished a string quartet that she had started on the flight from Turkey. As she rehearsed it, she realized how open she was to her music changing in the hands of others; it was the kind of lesson that can’t really be taught in the classroom. “It reminded me,” she said, “that everything we have in music is a matter of perspective.”

FEW CURTIS STUDENTS truly take time off during the month between semesters. Demiray, back in Ankara, read Kant and watched movies, but also continued to compose. Gleason, getting an early start on spring work, took on a conducting project at Dallas Opera. Cheung, at least, made room for catching up with friends and family in Seattle, and skiing.

Scott had a difficult time winding down from the fall semester, which he found excitingly intense; life at home, he said, was like “a vacuum.” At first, he didn’t sleep well because he felt as if he should be doing something. After a few days, he felt himself relax as he took his dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback called Nandi, for long walks.

Tacchino went home to France, but as a resident coordinator, had to return early to prepare Lenfest for the spring semester. She had also picked up a tour in Florida, where she had never been. She saw more alligators than she would have liked, and it was unpleasantly hot, but she felt refreshed when she got back to school for more auditions and a starring role in Poulenc’s one-act opera “Les Mamelles de Tirésias.”

She had long been looking forward to that; her father, who had recently died, knew Poulenc. Tacchino grew up hearing about the composer, and listening to his music, including four-hands piano works that her parents would play. To her, the opera sounded like home.

IN THE NEW SEMESTER, Cheung went on tour with other Curtis musicians. He liked the independence of it, which felt like a taste of professional life, for better or worse: Not having to worry about school, he could focus on music, even with a hectic schedule. One concert in Florida ended around 10 p.m.; he and his fellow students got back to their hotel at 11, fell asleep around midnight, and were ready to board a shuttle at 4:50 a.m. to catch a flight to Dallas. But during downtime, they would go to a beach, or when the weather was bad, play cards in their hotel rooms.

After an entrepreneurial fall, Scott shifted his attention to technique. He had been gently directed to do so by his teachers, who include Curtis’ president, Roberto Díaz. Scott believed, he said, that “the better I can play the viola, the more credibility I’m going to have to advocate for the things I want to do.”

He also relaxed a little by reading at night, taking up the Ray Bradbury stories he had loved as a child. In practice rooms, though, he was hard at work on a Bach suite and George Walker’s Viola Sonata, from 1989. He reached out to Walker’s son, and tracked down the violist who had first recorded the piece and a scholar who had written about it. Scott repeatedly returned to the score to mark it up; he thought about what story Walker was trying to tell with the music. The school decided to record his performance, and asked Scott to bring it back for a new-music concert next year.

THE WEEK BEFORE “Les Mamelles de Tirésias” opened, Tacchino tested positive for COVID-19. After months of unreliable health, and audition after audition, she was feeling overwhelmed. She was frustrated by the mixed messages she seemed to be receiving: that she was so young, that she was starting to get old, that she sounded great, that she wasn’t quite right for something. A comment by tenor Matthew Polenzani, who gave a talk at the school, resonated with her: “He said, ‘There are days when you’re going to have the most incredible audition of your life, and you’re not going to get anything, and another day, you’re going to sing the crappiest audition of your life and get four gigs.”

Tacchino’s optimism held alongside her determination. She recovered in time for the Poulenc premiere, and decided to stay at Curtis an extra year, to perform in its centennial celebrations. In addition, she got into a young artist program in Paris, L’Atelier Lyrique, where she would work with conductor David Stern.

Gleason’s persistence paid off, too. Because of her emails, she spent part of the spring semester working at the Juilliard School in New York on a production of Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito.” She signed with a manager, Intermusica, and continued to apply for conducting jobs. She and her partner decided that after graduation, they wanted to move to Chicago, where they used to live.

At a concert to showcase the work of composing students, Demiray presented her first piece for orchestra. She was the youngest on the program, and the evening was such a blur, she didn’t remember most of what she saw on video later. In the moment, she said, it felt like something simply happened and was over, but with some distance, she started to recognize how much progress was reflected in those 15 minutes.

TACCHINO HAD ONE more starring role left: the title fox in the Curtis production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.” It was yet another gig she had picked up after someone else dropped it, and it required her learning the material within a month. “But,” she said, “I feel like so many careers started out like that. It’s exciting.”

She received enthusiastic applause at the first performance, but the relief barely registered because after the run she would still have to present her master’s project. (The night of her final bows, she stayed up until 2 a.m. working on it.) Then she was done with the semester, though she had to stick around, in her other role, as resident coordinator. Comfortable with the year she’d had, she left to see her boyfriend in Montreal.

On the eve of graduation, Gleason presented a workshop performance of a chamber opera she was developing with Joanne Evans, a former classmate from Bard College and her duo partner. With the move to Chicago, she wasn’t sure whether she would walk at the graduation ceremony, but she was able to make it. “You only go to Curtis once,” she said.

Cheung played in Gleason’s workshop, before leaving Philadelphia to spend time in Seattle and audition for a piccolo seat at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. As a 17-year-old with a year of Curtis left, he wasn’t expecting much, but after two days, he was offered the job. “It’s an amazing opportunity,” he said, “but there’s a lot to be considered.”

It will be complicated, for example, if the orchestra wants him to start immediately, while he still has school (not to mention high school) to finish. If he could wait, he would take the position for a gap year he already had planned. But as he looked forward to the rest of the summer, including a program at the idyllic Verbier Festival in Switzerland, he wasn’t sure what would happen.

Scott landed a place at Verbier as well, in a different program. At the end of the semester, he took account of the year and congratulated himself on tripling his social media followers, playing the pieces he wanted to play and even starting to compose music of his own. He was already thinking about ideas for the next year, and the year after that.

As Demiray packed up her room, she felt sad to be leaving her new friends. At times, she had spent 24 hours straight with these people, experiencing things for the first time together. Back in Turkey, she was happy to see her parents, to have time to swim and to compose without a schedule. But she was also, in a way that surprised her, excited for the return of fall.

“Now,” she said, “I feel like I have two families.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.