Personally for me, because of the repertoire I perform in recitals (American living composers), I always use the music.
I do the same with concertos. The fact is that I don’t trust my memory at all. And with excitement, nervousness, it is way better to use the score than to risk a bad performance

I too think that the newer generation of faculty will often be savvier regarding the artistic and professional preparation needed by today’s graduates. But I don’t think that school’s are necessarily favoring new thinking in their hiring, nor do I find that change is happening fast enough.

Oddly, enrollments at music schools haven’t yet fallen off, even with the ongoing disconnect between traditional curricula and current music economies. Even so, I expect that it won’t be long before parents, legislators, and journalists will recognize that we’ve been in the midst of an arts education bubble, as I described in my earlier reply to Jeffrey Nytch.

Smart music schools/departments will update their programs before the bubble bursts. Those that don’t may cease to exist because funders won’t tolerate the poor outcomes of graduates.

A good summary of much of the evolution of thinking that has been occurring over the last 10 years or so.

I think you are spot on; however in most colleges of music governance is still centered in the “masters” that you refer to in your excellent piece. While there are lots of programs popping up since my original CMS presentation of an entrepreneurial music school curriculum in San Francisco in 2004, the great majority of these “masters” are only concerned about their own employment and not so concerned about the future employment of their students.

Hence, students are still required to perform juries featuring orchestral excerpts to pieces of repertoire that they will never get to perform. To make it worse, in many of these schools, half of their ensembles are concert bands, not orchestras, as the balance of wind to strings is usually skewed, making the acquisition of orchestra experience difficult for winds to acquire. Indeed, at my alma mater, the Eastman School of Music, there were two orchestras and two bands. As a student, I took the initiative to address that shortfall by starting the “Drapkin Reading Orchestra” which met each week to read large orchestral works, and by my senior year I got funding to rent music.

So even the training of the repertoire that are required by the “masters” is difficult for some instruments to acquire. Yet this imbalance is due to the need to keep the wind faculty dance cards filled with students, and the disproportionate need for clarinets, for example, to fill the concert bands – NOT the need to address the need for clarinet players in the marketplace. To what end? The only professional concert bands these days are some summer band gigs and mostly in the military.

Is it the role of our schools of music to produce wind players for the military? An absurd thought, to say the least.

The question is how to make entrepreneurship and business acumen a fundamental part of the curriculum, which has not significantly happened yet. Many faculty still fear these skills since they don’t understand them, plus many faculty oppose it because they don’t want their students doing anything in their free time that detracts from practicing. Practice for what? What jobs are they practicing for? I think we are down to maybe 11 full time full year orchestras in the U.S., and the notion that one has to teach privately in order to subsidize their insufficient jobs in either part-time or partial season orchestras would be laughable, if it wasn’t for the fact that the parents of these students are spending some of the highest tuition in the industry to prepare them for careers that are either unlikely or virtually non-existent.

This has been my dilemma for the last 13 years: How do we effect change in the music academy, especially when these “masters” are so resistant to change, and indeed fearful of change since it may lead to their obsolescence or redundancy?

In a way, one can look at the issue of gay marriage in our larger society for a possible answer. There was a time, only a few decades ago, that the concept of legalizing gay marriage was inconceivable, just as the notion of teaching business and/or entrepreneurship as a fundamental part of the NASM-approved curriculum was inconceivable (and is largely still not the case today). As the mainstreaming of the gay community in our larger society removed much of the fear factor with a shift towards perceiving gay couples as loving couples and parents, so to shall the notion of business and entrepreneurship in the core curriculum become the norm rather than the exception.

As my three college-aged daughters have reminded me, “Kids these days don’t understand or are even mystified why the issue of gay marriage is still such a big deal.” As orchestras continue to dry up, I believe that music school curricula will be forced to switch, as students and their tuition-paying parents will force them to change, or they will take their tuition elsewhere. Also, I believe that as faculty jobs turn over, the younger generation of “masters” will have much better understanding of the realities of the marketplace and more amenable to these kind of more realistic programs, as you suggest.

I’m pleased to be able to say that at the Peabody Conservatory, where I direct the Music Entrepreneurship & Career Center, curricular integration has been going on for a long time, in some areas, for decades prior to my arrival, and we’re working to achieve even more integration. The leadership, faculty, and staff embrace entrepreneurship, and, as a constituent of Johns Hopkins University, students have vast educational opportunities.

Among other things, students can enroll in courses about practical matters such as copyrights and contracts, orchestra management, website design, and the business of music. They can pursue all sorts of entrepreneurial endeavors. E.g., in the upcoming week, a start-up orchestra comprised of students called the Occasional Symphony will perform concerts celebrating Cinco de May and a local opera group of Peabody alumni and students will present a world premiere of an opera composed by a Peabody graduate student that commemorates the 5oth anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination – the piece is evocatively titled Camelot Requiem.

You point out that my article attacks the status quo – true enough. But when music schools promise in their mission statements that they prepare students for professional careers and then provide antiquated instruction such that graduates emerge unprepared to have sustainable careers, well, I believe that those programs deserve to be called out.

As for the risks involved in challenging the status quo, hefty government subsidies have, in my view, produced an arts education bubble that may soon deflate as budget contractions cause subsidies to decline and the price of enrollment to skyrocket. Institutions, especially state-owned ones, that fail to update their curricula and become more accountable to the outcomes of their graduates will then be the ones at risk of being axed by legislative budget cuts.

After my divorce in 2007, I purchase a cheap horn and began playing again (I didn’t sound good). Subsequently, I stuck with it and my tone came back, just last year I took my horn to show it off at a restaurant to some friends and ended up playing along side a lone singer.

According to the singer he loved how I sound and how it moved the people. This made me feel great inside that we exchanged contact information (always carry pen and paper or business card). Since that day we have met up and have been practicing some songs.

It turned out he needed a saxophone player to go along with his keyboard playing and singing.

So, in a nut shell smiling does help over come hopeless moments like the one I had.

I m still reading through the book looking and learning for some more helpful advise in my saxophone playing.

Thanks
Luis Rivera