Higher Education

File this one under the category of “fascinating music school history.” According to Vincent Lenti’s 2004 book, “For the Enrichment of Community Life: George Eastman and the Founding of the Eastman School of Music,” the famed Finnish composer Jean Sibelius very nearly became a faculty member of the Eastman School to teach music theory and […]

Every couple of years or so, someone in the mainstream media decides that Orchestral Auditions Are Interesting and does a story on them. This better-than-most iteration, written by Janelle Gelfand, appeared online at cincinnati.com, the website of  the Cincinnati Enquirer: “If a candidate has made it to the final round of our audition process, they […]

I recently heard a mordantly humorous new take on Benjamin Franklin’s most famous quote: "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes and the immutability of conservatoires."

What I Would Tell My Younger Self… As a university professor, I often tell my studio stories from my student days in order to make a point about something, usually practicing!  I have been thinking about this topic quite a bit this summer, as the new performing/academic year is fast approaching.  This is certainly not […]

This is the second post in our August Guest Blog Series!  Barbra Weidlein is co-founder and director of MajoringInMusic.com, a website for prospective music and current music majors, parents, and music educators. A little over a month ago, an article popped up on USA Today College Online, about a new ranking of the “top 10″ […]

Peter Renshaw calls for a new paradigm to address the key issues confronting learning and development in the arts.

One of the most creative and inventive films I’ve seen recently was Wes Anderson’s 2012 Moonrise Kingdom, with all the strange oddities of style, camera angles, and storyline that make this director’s work so compelling and so memorable.

Concert programmers, teaching artists , armies of program annotators, and museums with their rental headsets believe that audiences today lack experience and confidence in approaching an art work.

My top priority — of course — is to protect the young people who study here, our faculty and staff, and all the many thousands of concert visitors we have every year. But this mandate necessitates negotiating a way through a challenging Scylla and Charybdis of choices.

After digesting the many superb responses, both published here and private, to last week’s blog entry, I spent a lot of time pondering what is really bothering me about the arts entrepreneurship “movement.”  I realized that I have been hoping for …