Music departments, schools, and conservatories can easily become museums of the past. Students enter each day and study the masterpieces of composers from hundreds of years ago. The classes offered by schools today are nearly identical to those offered 50 years ago. Music students learn the techniques of teachers and singers developed over the last 400 years, largely taught by a faculty who made their careers 15–30 years ago or had very minor singing careers and were drawn to teaching instead. These teachers often teach in the same way their teachers did and with the same repertoire that their teachers used.
As a faculty member and administrator in music programs for nine years now, I can say that the factors listed above may actually be positive points about a school. At the same time, they can also restrict progressivism in the development of curriculum and lessen the relevance of graduating student training to the real world of classical music. While conservatories can be the temples of study and veneration of the great masters of the past, we must take those masters’ examples as a torch and run our own race. If we are going to elevate high art music in the eyes of the general public, it must be meaningful, urgent, and innovative—and universities should be leading the movement.
A little less than a year ago, a friend of mine posted on social media an interview with the dean of the Peabody Conservatory, Fred Bronstein. Bronstein made a clear case for the need to change how students are trained in music, and what he said resonated with me. I interviewed Dean Bronstein and the chair of the Peabody voice faculty, Ah Young Hong, to ask them how they are changing at the conservatory to produce graduates who are more prepared for careers in the music industry.
‘The World as It Currently Is’
The Peabody Institute has remained one of the most respected names in classical music training for 160 years. Its graduates include the likes of André Watts, Philip Glass, James Morris, and Hilary Hahn. It is interesting, then, to hear Bronstein relate the following.
“One of the things that was shocking to me when I came to Peabody was that the top music schools generally have not done a good job of thinking about how we are really preparing students for the world as it currently is. You would expect schools to be where the changes are really happening and that they would be innovative. But, in fact, I think the schools are behind. What is most important to me at Peabody is that we rethink and change and adapt to what the world that we’re turning people out into really looks like. This doesn’t mean we put less focus on traditional training as a musician.
“This is where people make the mistake,” he continues, “thinking that they’re mutually exclusive, and they’re not. Our job is to figure out how to do that. I think there are huge opportunities in the music world, but they are for people who have the flexibility and mindset to adapt, broaden their skill set, and understand that part of your job as a musician is to develop an audience. If we don’t think about it that way, then we’re missing the boat. That’s the perspective from which I come at this.”
Tools of the Modern Performer
We know that no matter what, a singer must have solid technique, musicianship, and artistry to enter the workforce. But Bronstein points out that these aren’t enough for the modern world. Graduates now also need communication and audience development skills, the ability to connect to their community, and a solid grasp of how to use technology.
“When I say communication skills,” says Bronstein, “I’m really saying, how do you talk to different audiences, to different constituencies, and in different venues and make it meaningful? People would get up and do their recitals [at Peabody], and one after another, they wouldn’t say anything. My thought was that it was so far behind the rest of the music world and we needed to change it. You need to know how to talk to an audience. If you are playing for an audience who has never heard the kind of music you are playing, how do you communicate with them about it? And that’s very different than talking to an experienced audience and making comments about what you’re playing.”
Hong agrees completely with Bronstein. “I ask all of my singers why they are here. The usual answer is because they love to sing. And my response to their answer is that it has to be more than that.
“We have all asked our singers to embrace communication and connect with their audience with honesty and vulnerability,” she continues. “I think that is key to connecting to a wider audience. We have to make the distance between the folks on the stage and the folks in the audience much closer because, in the end, that’s the most important thing.”
In terms of audience development, Bronstein points out that the traditional method of getting hired for a concert and playing for whoever comes into the hall is an outdated notion. He uses the example of pop music singer, Ben Folds. “He has done a fabulous job of defining, finding, and maintaining his audience. I think classical musicians need to take a page from that kind of thinking.”
Bronstein explains the third needed skill, “community connectivity, which is to work in different communities making music relevant and meaningful in people’s lives, to tie it to things happening in society. I think part of it certainly has to do with presentation; some of it is the music itself and how it’s programmed. Is there a relevance to the programming? Setting is an important factor. What’s the right presentation for the context and the venue?
“Opera is a great example for this,” he continues. “We have been talking about what the opera program should look like at Peabody, and what I keep coming back to is that it ought to be relevant to Baltimore and relevant to the direction opera is going. Peter Sellars and I had a discussion about this, and he believed the future of opera was not in the big opera houses. They will still exist—but the future of opera is probably in smaller, more alternative settings with programming that is relevant to that community.
“I’ll give you a great example of this: one of our students who is a singer and a composer wrote an opera,” Bronstein relates. “The subject matter was George Stinney, an African-American boy from South Carolina. In 1944, when Stinney was 14 years old, he became the youngest person in the U.S. [in the 20th century] to be executed, falsely convicted of raping [and murdering] two white girls. It’s a terrible story, and he was officially exonerated 70 years later.
“A Peabody student had written an opera called Stinney,” he continues, “and she had written it right after the uprisings here in Baltimore. She did it in an alternative space and it was remarkably powerful. Members of the Stinney family came up to Baltimore for the production. It was widely covered.
“My point,” Bronstein says, “is that here you have the intersection of music, opera, and community in a very relevant, immediate way. That is also why new music and contemporary composers are so important. We need to be infusing new music across the institute and the community. The art itself, the training of the artists, and the role they play in the community all need to intersect—and the place where they intersect is not necessarily like the places they intersected 50 years ago. The challenge is to navigate all of that.”
The final tool that Bronstein highlights is technology. Performers need to have a basic understanding of what technology does for us in the music world as a tool for communication, presentation, and interaction. This includes YouTube, social media, and any of the other tools that allow performers to build audiences and communicate about their work.
‘Breakthrough Curriculum’
Peabody has used multiple methods to move the needle to modernize their music training, including grants to encourage innovation from students and faculty and a Dean’s Symposium that highlights guest speakers and master clinicians from all kinds of music backgrounds. I asked Bronstein how Peabody is changing its curriculum or programming to help students develop tools for the modern world.
“The challenge we face as educators is that the means of becoming a great singer is no different than it has been in the past,” says Bronstein. “It takes every bit as much concentration and effort as before to reach that level that people are striving for. In fact, just like athletics, I would say that level keeps going up, but everything around it has changed. In schools, I think a lot of the changes to curriculum can be done through existing courses. If you have a chamber music program where students study for a semester and play their music in the performance hall, shouldn’t they have to present the same program out in the community in a different kind of venue and communicate about the music in a different way?
“One of the reasons I started the Dean’s Symposium was that I wanted people to start thinking about culture and what really is going on in the world,” he continues. “Is what we’re doing here [at Peabody] creating the right pathway for people? We have had a very broad task force of faculty and administrators looking at our ensembles and curriculum. Ensembles are a huge part of any music program, and so the approach is how do we create a more dynamic, more professional ensemble experience that will give people the skills they need and more?
“Traditionally, a student gets slotted into an orchestra for six or eight semesters and then they leave. What I am asking here is if it’s reasonable, for example, that a cellist goes to school for four years as an undergraduate without playing continuo? Is that reasonable to anybody? Does it make any sense for a brass player to go through and not play with a studio orchestra?”
Hong, who is herself a Peabody graduate, adds, “I have seen progress since I was a student in the mid-90s, especially since Dean Bronstein has joined us. Students can explore musical theatre, cabaret, jazz, early music, new music, etc. There are opportunities for singers to direct scenes and write libretti for chamber operas.
“We have an incredible new music scene at Peabody,” she adds, “and I have asked unlikely candidates to participate in these many opportunities. Some of the changes may have slowly started in our studios and classrooms, but Peabody is feeling the change altogether. This progress is going to allow for our students to explore thoroughly, hone their skills appropriately, and prepare efficiently for the 21st century music scene.”
The conservatory calls it their “Breakthrough Curriculum,” and the experience at Peabody has been redesigned so that all students learn excellence in their craft, musical flexibility, leadership as a citizen artist, and communication, marketing, and practical skills. This includes new music business courses and capstone projects that help prepare graduates for the performing world.
“There will always be some resistance because this is a very traditional field and this has been a very traditional school,” remarks Bronstein. “However, its founding was not as a traditional school. I understand that we’re actually going back to the premise upon which the school was founded, as a cultural center in Baltimore. It was an arts and music series long before it was a conservatory.
“We are also saying that this is the direction music and schools are eventually going to have to go, whether they see it now or not,” Bronstein concludes. “Let’s be on the front end of that. Because of the history of the conservatory, the affiliation with the university, and where we are geographically, I think we’re uniquely qualified to lead that effort.”
