Keeley Brooks worried that she’d made a terrible mistake during her first few weeks at Yale.
A violinist since the age of five, she’d long dreamed of attending a music conservatory, and had been accepted at two. But after visiting Yale, she was won over, she said, by “how people appeared to have so many interests that they were excited to share with each other.” Shortly after she arrived on campus, she began the requisite auditions for various musical groups and programs. She especially wanted to play with an orchestra, something she hadn’t had the opportunity to do in the small town of Winthrop, Washington, where she grew up.
“I didn’t get into anything,” Brooks said. “And I thought, ‘What did I just do?’”
After the shock wore off, however, Brooks doubled down on her desire to play in an orchestra and began working harder toward that goal. She took lessons with a graduate student her first semester, and in her second semester she was accepted into the undergraduate violin studio run by Wendy Sharp, a member of the violin faculty at Yale School of Music. In her sophomore year, Brooks took a seat in the Yale Symphony Orchestra (YSO).
Keeley Brooks, second from left, performing Shostakovich’s Third String Quartet with classmates in the Chamber Music Course.
Since then, she’s served as YSO’s assistant librarian, social chair, head librarian, and just this past year, its president. A member of Morse College, Brooks has also participated in a variety of chamber ensembles and theater productions, all while maintaining a 3.92 GPA. A music major, she was the recipient last year of the Selden Memorial Award, which honors a member of the junior class who is especially notable for their contribution to the field of music.
But her time at Yale also took her down some unexpected paths.
“I’ve discovered so many things I didn’t even know existed before I came here,” she said.
Her first semester she took a class called “Climate Change” and learned about an emerging field called ecoacoustics — the investigation of the natural world through the study of sound. She found the concept so intriguing that she spent a summer working with a researcher for the U.S. Forest Service who was studying wildfire acoustics, or what sound waves can indicate about how fast fires are moving and what they’re burning.
This past semester she took a new course, “Nature, AI and Performance,” focused on translating natural phenomena into performative expressions, and composed a piece of music based on data charting streamflow melt from glaciers in the Cascades Range in Washington.
Delving into ecoacoustics “has really allowed me to go in so many different directions, and the music major has been a great place to pull those in together,” Brooks said.
She also discovered the work of a violin pedagogue named Dorothy Delay, who became the subject of Brooks’ senior thesis after she realized that, even though Delay had taught at Juilliard and elsewhere for 54 years, very little had been written about her since her death in 2002. Brooks reached out to dozens of Delay’s students — many of whom had gone on to have successful musical careers — and put together an oral history that will be housed at Sterling Memorial Library.
She found new opportunities outside of academics, as well. A three-sport athlete in high school, she was recruited to teach classes at Payne Whitney Gymnasium by a director who recognized her weightlifting prowess. She taught spin classes, TRX, and a strength cardio combo.
“It’s been a big confidence builder,” she said. “At the start, I had to spend a lot of time preparing for each class. Now that I’ve been teaching for a while, I’m able to adapt to what I’m seeing in the room, what people are needing on that day and the kind of energy that’s there.”
Throughout Brooks’ busy years at Yale, Morse College has given her a strong sense of community, she said, not unlike the small-town life she was used to, 3,000 miles away. It has remained a home away from home.
“Really quickly, like within the first two weeks, that was what Morse felt like,” she said. “It’s been a very close place and that’s been a really special part of my Yale experience.”
