Jake Heggie's work has made him one of the most visible standard-bearers for opera in the 21st century, but like anyone else, he wouldn't be here without a lifetime of teachers.

"From the time I was a little kid, it was always my teachers who recognized something special in me, and then either offered guidance  or tried to open a door, so I have enormous respect for teachers," he says. "They shape us, they give to us, they mold us; to be invited to be a teacher here is a great honor."

While he did work as a teaching assistant in graduate school, Heggie says he didn't actually teach very much until he began having a full-time career as an artist in the late 1990s and early 2000s: "When I was a concert pianist playing for singers or when I had a production of one of my operas or pieces somewhere, I would do a short residency and work with students, but that was pretty much the extent of my teaching at that time." But he's been involved in mentorship programs at the Washington National Opera and the Chicago Opera Theater, among others, and the annual Song Fest, dedicated to supporting art song.

Teaching composition is its own challenge: Every instrument, including the voice, has physical concerns specific to it addressed by technical study, so by comparison, composition seems to exist in a more abstract realm. "You can't teach creativity, no," Heggie explains, "but you can encourage the spark. I think we all have a creative spark. With any instrument, you can teach them all the notes and all the techniques, but that's not what makes a creative artist. It starts from the same place, though, this desire in you that says: , 'This is what I need to do, this is my life.'"

"I knew I was a composer from the age of 10," Heggie says. "My father died, and I started writing piano pieces and songs with my own lyrics in response to that tragedy. I found enormous community, security, connection, and joy in the music world. My first piano teacher was enormously helpful to me, but I didn't have a composition teacher until I was 16 and moved to the Bay Area. His name was Ernst Bacon, and he'd set a lot of texts by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, while I wanted to write for Barbra Streisand. So he opened the  world of poetry and art song to me."

Bacon and his subsequent teachers, Heggie says, showed him what kind of teacher he wanted to be. "Don't impose things on students: Encourage what's already there to come out through perspective, experience, challenges, and opportunity, so that you aren't always in your comfort zone. Outside of your comfort zone is where you can learn new things about your talent and what you're hearing and how you're going to get that onto the page. And I always had teachers that challenged me, while I knew they believed in me."

To that end, Heggie says he's not at SFCM to tell students how their work should be written, but rather to tell him how it strikes him as a fellow composer. "I think I have a pretty good intuition and instinct for a composer's personality, what they're trying to accomplish, what the language they're working with is. So the question is, are they accomplishing what they set out to do? That's what interests me: Meeting people and seeing—based on a long career out in the professional world—what perspective I can offer them."

Going back to his initial goal of writing songs for Barbra Streisand, Heggie says that he's always looking for "a certain quality of melody" as well as "architecture, line, and breath" in composition works. "Is there a structure in mind," he says, "not just for the overall piece, but for the lines you're writing? That includes things like form and voice leading, but line and breath come back to what we're actually doing with our bodies, the very primal physicality of singing." He cites Mahler, who despite the length of his phrasing, "has a sense of line and breath" that can also be identified "even in the most jagged contemporary works or jazz or the pop world. There's this throughline of how your lines connect to breath."

Heggie worked a "day job" with the San Francisco Opera (SFO)  for years after dealing with focal dystonia when working on his master's degree in his late 20s. "My right hand would just curl into a fist when I'd play the piano. So after all those years of preparing to have this big career, I had to stop completely. I was lucky to find a good teacher, so within about five years, I could start to really play again, but because of that, I wound up in PR and marketing, writing about music." He continues, "When the playing came back, I was doing that work at SFO so I started writing songs for all the great singers there, and that led to Dead Man Walking."

Heggie also stresses, "Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved my 'day job.' I really did, because I was connected to everyone who had a role in a production, from the onstage musicians to wardrobe and makeup to lighting techs, administrative workers—even the critics!" Being part of the extended framework of production, he says, enforces the notion of being a good colleague to everyone an artist collaborates with: "Every room you go into is another network of yours and you never know where that's going to lead or who the next person who's going to open a doorway for you will be."

Heggie is also quite candid about the fact that every composer, no matter how high the level of their craft, "will have dogs," in their body of work, he jokes. "I think the best analogy would be a stand-up comedian, which requires enormous courage, right? They know they're going to bomb, a lot. And then suddenly you hit something and it just works for some reason. That's the way your composing or performing career is going to be. Some people are lucky right out of the gate, and for some people it takes a while; you can't control that. But what you can control is your creative fire, your curiosity, your determination, your perspective, your openness, and how good a colleague you are."

In his own body of work, Heggie says with a laugh, "I have roadkill, totally. I call it my 'trunk pile,' and I never show people the trunk pile. It's got stuff going back to when I was a teenager, but sometimes I go in there and rescue an idea or a tune from there. Even though Barbra Streisand never sang it, it still has life."

Learn more about studying composition at SFCM.