Re-Imagining the Future of the Music School
21st Century Music School Design CREATIVITY IN MUSIC AWARDS Also new are Spark’s Creativity in Music Awards that support students pursuing inventive projects and encourage expanding boundaries with cash prizes. First place winners are Susan Zhang and Nick Luby who have been traveling the city in The Concert Truck, a mobile concert hall designed and equipped with a foldout stage, lights, backdrop, sound projection and grand piano. Their mission is to bring high quality live performances of classical music to unexpected audiences. Daniel Olszewski took second place with Guitars Sounding Out, an interactive performance outreach initiative for middle and high schools. The project commissions new works for guitar quartet with video introductions. Philip Snyder’s third place proposal is “around-pastaway,” an album-length field recording focused on creating the perception of progression through a natural, sonic environment permeated by flute sounds. Nusheen Farahani and Seán Heely’s runner up project, Celtic Fiddle Summer Extravaganza, teaches Celtic tunes to all ages, teaching by ear rather than by notes. Runner up Travis Baird is using online marketing to launch Immersive Music Series, a program offering interactive concerts for children and families.
With 230 attendees from 48 states, Canada, Europe and Australia, “21st Century Music School Design” was unlike the familiar academic conference. Sponsored by The College Music Society and hosted by USC, music educators shared ideas, learned from one another and collaborated, focusing on three questions: Why are we here? What should we teach? How do we make this change happen? The three-day summit in June considered solutions music schools can take to best prepare students for today’s realities – not through an inflexible formula – but by defining and designing distinct approaches relevant to each music program’s mission. Participants emerged with a concrete framework for advancing change within their home institutions. CMS Summit represents the kind of experiential “andThis collaborative engagement that our profession so badly
needs,” said Dean Tayloe Harding. “In the history of the music in higher education industry there has never been an event like this. We are so pleased to have been able to leverage the University of South Carolina’s School of Music and its national leadership role in progressive education for tomorrow’s music professionals. By partnering with the College Music Society to use its dynamic summit format, we gathered many leaders in music higher education to focus on the three topics — making the designs of our music schools more sensitive to and influencing of the future. Together and in teams we explored and discovered methods for pursuing change and evolution in musical instruction – both purely musical and not purely musical – that our students must experience and that society already demands of us.
”
Summit director David Cutler, associate professor of music entrepreneurship, and an impressive roster of 90 presenters representing the full range of disciplines and institution types helped shape the conversation. 7