Feature: The School of Music's Vision for the Future

MSU’s School of Music envisions a new, state-of-the-art building for its new generation of talented musicians.

• William David Brohn, ’55, is one of the world’s foremost orchestrators (see Fall 1993).  He won the 1998 Tony Award for Ragtime.  He orchestrated such hits as  Miss Saigon, Carousel, The Secret Garden, Crazy for You!, My Fair Lady, South Pacific, Oklahoma and Showboat, among many other Broadway hits.  His arrangement of the West Side Story Suite, performed by Joshua Bell, was featured on PBS’s Great Performances.
• Kathryn Brown, ’84, M.M. ’86, voice and piano educator at the Cleveland Institute of Music, performs internationally with prominent artists such as the Guarneri String Quartet and the Beaux Arts Trio, and has won numerous awards, including the recent Pro Piano Competition, the San Antonio International Keyboard Competition, and the National Young Artists Competition.  She was one of five Americans in the Eighth Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (see Winter 1986).
• Tage Larsen, ’92, a member of the Saint Louis and Annapolis Symphony Orchestras, became the first African American instrumentalist appointed to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (in 2002).  Prior to this, he was solo cornetist with the “President’s Own” U.S. Marine Band (see Fall 1996). 

            These are just three outstanding musicians who graduated from MSU’s School of Music, which for years has been educating, developing and producing thousands of such musical talents.  As students, they had great opportunities to perform.  Brown was MSU’s first Catherine Herrick Cobb Scholar in Music, while Larsen received the prestigious Sudler Award from the College of Arts and Letters his senior year. 

            To further these kind of successes, the MSU School of Music is planning an exciting, new music facility for the 21^st century.  The vision is for a state-of-the-art facility that will provide better services and resources to a growing number of music students, faculty and the community.  Architects, acousticians and theatre consultants are already in place, ready to advance this bold vision.

            The need for a new facility becomes clear when one realizes the huge growth of music education in recent years.  Enrollment in the School of Music has increased by more than 80 percent over the past 13 years, from some 340 students in 1991 to more than 600.  MSU currently has 70 faculty members, 65 graduate assistants, and 2,000 non-music majors participating in classes and ensembles.  Additionally, programmatic and scholarship endowments have grown from eight with a market value of $655,250 in 1991 to 50 with a market value of nearly $6.1 million in 2004.  The school also provides support to the 300-member MSU Spartan Marching Band and Spartan Brass. 

            The current building, constructed in 1940 for a much smaller Dept. of Music, is no longer sufficient for the vast program that has developed. The school’s faculty, students and large ensembles present more than 350 concerts each year, many of which are performed off campus due to limited performance space in the music building and the limited availability of Wharton Center.

            “A new building that meets our unique needs is essential to remaining competitive in attracting top-tier faculty and students, and in allowing us to realize our full potential,” explains James Forger, director of the MSU School of Music.  “The program has blossomed in dynamic and vibrant directions and has gained national recognition.”

            The growth of MSU’s music program has included new interdisciplinary programs, complete with research and outreach components.  An example is the MSU Jazz Studies Program (see pp. 26-29, Fall 2003), positioned to become one of the leading programs in the nation with a faculty of world-class artists, including former members of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.

THE NEW BUILDING

            MSU recognizes this need and, accordingly, has established that the new music building will be the first priority for a new academic building on campus. The School of Music needs to raise $15-$20 million in private funds toward the $80 million project, a key bricks-and-mortar priority for the $1.2 billionCampaign for MSU, which runs through 2007.  The state would be requested to provide the balance.

            A renowned team of architects and acousticians have been hired to plan and develop the building project.  BOORA, Inc., of Portland, OR, are the performance architects, Kirkegaard Associates of Chicago  are the acousticians, and Auerbach of Chicago and San Francisco are the theatre consultants.  They  started a programming study in 2002 and have created initial architectural concepts and renderings. 

            The new building could be strategically located just southeast of MSU’s Giltner Hall on Auditorium Road.  Here the school would anchor a campus “Fine Arts District” that would consolidate the university’s music, visual arts, and drama programs in one location.  Given their proximity, closer relationships between the school and MSU’s Dept. of Theatre, Kresge Art Museum, the University Auditorium and Fairchild Theatre could be envisioned. 

            At the heart of this new arts district will be a new Arts Mall that will unite all the arts facilities through improved landscape and pedestrian connections.  The university is also exploring the elimination or rerouting of the existing roadway that currently occupies this area. 

            The new proposed building, with approximately 200,000 square feet of space, will be open and transparent, inviting music majors and non-majors into the building to see and hear students and faculty engage in the creative process of making music.  Public spaces within the building will be designed to promote collaboration and interaction.  The entrance, for example, leads to a large, open lobby that will provide a lively common area for visitors, students, faculty and staff to congregate.  A “Music Café” at the main lobby will accommodate small informal performances. 

            The new building will also house the music collection currently housed in the Main Library, allowing much greater access to MSU’s outstanding collection of music books, publications, and recordings. 

            The new performance spaces within the building will be designed to showcase the School of Music’s rich variety of music programs from traditional classical and chamber music, opera, and Latin music to jazz.  The new 800-seat concert hall will be the signature performance space for the School of Music and will provide an acoustically outstanding venue for the school’s largest ensembles including major orchestral and choral works.  As a compliment to the University’s other major performance spaces such as the Wharton Center, the Auditorium, and Fairchild Theater, the new concert hall will allow the University to bring a greater range of touring musicians to the MSU campus to benefit both music students and the campus as a whole. 

            The building will also include new rehearsal and performance spaces to accommodate the school’s expanding jazz program.  Historically performed in intimate nightclub environments, jazz demands a specific scale and acoustical design within music facilities.  The new 250 seat recital hall will be a highly flexible performance space with variable acoustics and theatrical lighting that can be adapted for jazz performances, classical recitals, lectures, and a variety of other performance types. 

            “By increasing the number of classrooms, rehearsal spaces, and practice rooms to meet the needs of current programs and student population, the new building will provide music students with a much greater opportunity to study, practice, and perform within the new facility,” notes Thomas Pene, principal architect of BOORA, Inc.

            The new building will also include appropriate acoustical and sound isolation systems that will protect hearing; four large, soundproofed rehearsal and practice rooms; humidity and climate control to protect instruments; two large lecture halls for specialized rehearsal spaces for jazz, winds, orchestral, and choral ensembles; computer spaces designed to accommodate changing technology and audio and visual capabilities; and a music library that will bring together periodicals, journals, collected editions, scores and books.

            “This investment will maximize students’ abilities to learn, achieve and hone their skills at the highest levels, and will ensure the future of the arts for generations to come,” says Forger.  “The school’s talented, high-quality students and faculty deserve a facility that matches their skills.”

FUND RAISING

            Spearheaded by MSU Trustee Dolores Cook and her husband Byron Cook, who pledged $1 million last year, private donors, foundations, and music faculty have since committed nearly $750,000 in pledges and gifts toward the new building.

            Although buildings don’t create programs, they contribute to the overall effectiveness of an institution, nurturing scholarly research and creative activity, notes Forger. 

            “The need to plan for the future is here, and the school has embraced many constituencies in consideration for the new building,” he says.  “It is our goal to provide the next generation of Michigan residents and students with the facilities and resources to encourage creativity and scholarship in a positive learning environment and to stimulate performance and research in a quality setting.”

DIVERSE STUDENTS

           The proposed building will come at a time when the School of Music serves an increasingly diverse population.  Music students come not just from Michigan, but also from some 32 states and more than 35 countries.  

            This geographical diversity of students finds equally diverse opportunities on campus for participation in music ensembles and in the variety of classes. Ensembles include two athletic bands, nine choral ensembles, four university bands, six jazz ensembles, a new music ensemble, and four orchestras, in addition to one opera each semester with auditions open to all MSU students.  All ensembles are open to every MSU student by audition.  Ensembles are available for those who wish to participate as an avocation as well as those who wish to develop their skills in a much more directed and professional way.

OUTREACH AND SERVICE

            One final advantage of having a new building is that the School of Music can take its outreach activities to the next level.  The school currently provides a wide range of services through its concerts and recitals, Community Music School (CMS), Music Therapy Clinic, piano pedagogy, summer programs, continuing education for music teachers, outreach projects, and much more.  With improved facilities, this activity could be significantly increased.

            The Community Music School (CMS), the outreach division of the MSU School of Music, has been advancing knowledge and transforming lives since its inception in 1993.  Enrolment has leaped from 450 to more than 1,400 students attending weekly activities, and another 400 attending summer camps.

            In honor of MSU’s Sesquicentennial in 2005, the Wharton Center recently implemented the Sesquicentennial Musical Outreach Tour (see pp. 16-19, Winter 2003), in which ensembles perform at venues throughout Michigan from 2001-2005.

            In a new facility, more people from the community can attend the performances, master classes and lectures from guest artists.  It will provide more and better space where faculty can continue to conduct clinics, lectures, in-services, and master classes.

            Other outreach efforts include the Detroit Public School Music Partnership and MSU’s Early Childhood Music Program, one of the nation’s top five university programs.  Exciting research projects are ongoing in music therapy.  The Eisenhower Teacher Development Grant, a major federally funded initiative, brings Hispanic artists to Lansing-area schools to integrate the arts into the K-12 curriculum.The school’s former Lansing Computer Music Lab Grant, sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, taught teens to use computer technology to compose and record original music.  Currently, the school is part of an initial consortium to support the development of Internet II technology, which provides high quality, live video and audio over the Internet, encouraging distance-learning initiatives and further outreach.  

            These are but a sample of all the exciting projects and programs happening at the School of Music.  But the most exciting of all is the vision of its new home, a state-of-the-art facility that will sustain its excellence through the 21^st century.

author’s bio: Jill McMillanis the communications manager for MSU’s School of Music.

SIDEBAR

            Here are thumbnail sketches of just some of the MSU’s School of Music many outstanding students:

• Victor Uzur, a doctoral candidate in cello performance, performed upon invitation at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
• The Rasa Saxophone Quartet, a student ensemble, performed at the World Saxophone Congress XIII and won first prize at the Music Teachers Association National Chamber Music Competition.
• Paul Popiel, a doctoral candidate in wind conducting, received the Frank L. Battisti Conducting Fellowship from Boston University’s Tanglewood Institute.
• John Waytena, a doctoral candidate in clarinet performance, was a Fulbright Scholar at Hungary’s Franz Liszt Academy of Music and has performed in Berlin, Germany, and at the Aspen Music Festival.
• Lisa Koops, a doctoral candidate in music education, received a special fellowship to travel to The Gambia, West Africa, and investigate the uses of music games in elementary general music—research that became her master’s thesis and was presented at the Michigan Music Educator’s In-Service Conference in 2004.