A Thursday (3/20) post at WQXR’s Conducting Business blog reports that New York City’s Mannes College, The New School for Music is one of several institutions “trying to bring academic training closer to the realities of the job market…. It is aligning itself more closely with its parent institution, the New School, while scaling back traditional coursework in music theory and history. The idea: to broaden the range of skills music students have to compete in the real world…. The University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and Universal Music Classics, the world’s largest recording label, last month announced a partnership designed to ‘grow the next generation’ of classical music artists and audiences.… David Cutler, author of The Savvy Musician, and director of music entrepreneurship at the University of South Carolina, argues that there are ways to fold entrepreneurial training into an existing school curriculum…. ‘If it’s important for us to attract new audiences … perhaps part of the recital requirement might be: you need to get 200 people [as audience members] to get an A, or 150 people there to get a B.’ Students might also be graded on how they can rethink the presentation to include multimedia or other visual elements.”
Posted March 24, 2014
