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In his very first week of college, as now-senior Owen Gavigan worked to make a home for himself at William Paterson University, his family home in Hillsborough was devastated by Hurricane Ida.
“I got a call from my mom that both she and my dad slept in the car that night. I was baffled,” Gavigan recalls, noting that the 2021 storm that hit the day before didn’t cause much damage on the WP campus. Meanwhile, his parents had to quickly pack what they could and evacuate as flood waters from the nearby Raritan River poured into their Somerset County home.
After the flood waters receded, the building was deemed uninhabitable.
“It really hit me that bad things can happen in life,” Gavigan says, noting that his grandfather had passed away not long before. The inability to help his family post-storm while he was just starting his classes made him feel worse yet. “It was a lot.”
His parents moved into his grandmother’s house, which already had six people living in it. When Gavigan would go “home” from WP, he’d sleep on an air mattress next to his grandmother’s dining room table with four other family members sharing the same room. It was stressful, Gavigan says.
A classical voice major at WP, Gavigan found refuge in music and threw himself wholeheartedly into his studies. “A lot of times, I felt as if I was at my lowest point. In that lowest point, classical music was there and it didn’t judge me. It just consistently gave me good melodies and kept me calm,” he explains.
He became a standout in the music department.
He was accepted, two summers in a row, to highly competitive summer opera studies programs in Europe – one in Prague (Czech Republic) in 2023 and one in Trentino (Italy) in 2024. Heading halfway across the world to perform where opera was born, at age 20, “felt so surreal,” Gavigan says.
One week before the Prague show opened, he was recast from a smaller role, which required little performance in Czech, to a much bigger one. “They gave me a duet where I was singing most of the time: a four-page aria fully in Czech, and I had never seen Czech before this in my life.”
Then, Gavigan learned that his grandmother died back at home. Again, he channeled his pain into performance. A full house of Czech audience members cheered for him, and a professional Czech opera singer told Gavigan he had great diction.
The following summer, in Italy, Gavigan was cast as Papageno in The Magic Flute, a crowd favorite who is on stage the entire show.
Back on U.S. shores, he continued to land leading roles in campus musicals and operas; he won first place in both the New York City and New Jersey National Association of Teachers of Singing competitions; and he was accepted to four prestigious graduate schools for vocal music performance.
Gavigan will go on to pursue a master’s degree at Eastman School of Music, with plans to “make it to the biggest stages I can,” he says. After building up a performance career, he’d like to teach voice and pursue a doctorate.
“We teachers have the immense privilege of working with a variety of students over the course of our careers. Every so often, a student comes along who you click with and who surpasses not only your expectations, but their expectations as well. Owen is one of these students,” says Dr. Christopher Herbert, associate professor of music at WP and voice program coordinator. “I feel very grateful to have been Owen's teacher, and I am so proud of the musician and the person he has become.”
More than three years after Hurricane Ida hit, in September 2024, Gavigan and his parents were able to move back into their home. Not long after, his uncle died.
“Sometimes when you’re given this good stuff, you have to take the bad with it, but it matters what you put that bad towards,” Gavigan adds. “I decided with what classical music gives me, I would put all of that into my performance in classical music.”
He credits William Paterson University for supporting him, providing opportunities, and developing his talents.
“There are so many good singers that have come out of here, and the faculty is just world-class,” Gavigan says of WP. “I met Dr. Herbert during my audition for William Paterson, and within seconds, I felt like I improved 10 times over.”
Most importantly, he says, the students are genuine and welcoming. “They make you feel human here; at WP, everyone asks what my name is first, not what my part is. This place let me put me forward.”
