Juilliard, it's just a music school...

And then I started conducting, and I ended up doing my master's degree at the Juilliard School.

It's Alice Tully Hall, and it's tucked under the Juilliard Building and descends several levels under the street.

Willie, look, when I get out of Juilliard, I'll put on some mileage but right now, I just...

Mister, I have to use it, because I have an audition at Juilliard next month and I have to practise.

Nathaniel dropped out of Juilliard, he suffered a complete breakdown, and 30 years later he was living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

But a year later, I met another musician who had also studied at Juilliard, one who profoundly helped me find my voice and shaped my identity as a musician.

And through playing music and talking about music, this man had transformed from the paranoid, disturbed man that had just come from walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles to the charming, erudite, brilliant, Juilliard trained musician.

We basically did a striptease, architectural striptease, where we're framing with this kind of canopy the underside of three levels of expansion of Juilliard, about 45,000 square feet cutting it to the angle of Broadway, and then exposing, using that canopy to frame Tully Hall.

Nathaniel Ayers was a double bassist at Juilliard, but he suffered a series of psychotic episodes in his early 20s, was treated with thorazine at Bellevue, and ended up living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles 30 years later.

And I'm telling a story that many of you know, because Steve's columns became the basis for a book, which was turned into a movie, with Robert Downey Jr. acting as Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the Juilliard trained double bassist whose promising career was cut short by a tragic affliction with paranoid schizophrenia.

I was lucky enough to have studied at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, and to have played my debut with Zubin Mehta and the Israeli philharmonic orchestra in Tel Aviv, and it turned out that Gottfried Schlaug had studied as an organist at the Vienna Conservatory, but had given up his love for music to pursue a career in medicine.