Can a Music School Be Re-Invented?

There is a powerful consensus that music schools and conservatories have to rethink the education of 21st century musicians, but no one, so far as I know, has implemented a new template. This is what Mark McCoy is up to at the DePauw University School of Music. He calls it the “21st-Century Musician Initiative” and it isn’t window dressing.

My own harangues on this topic have long focused on two necessary educational opportunities:

1.It is high time that Music History be reconfigured to include the history of musical institutions and of music in performance (as in my own Classical Music in America: A History, which I shamelessly recommend as a state-of-the-art textbook). That way, the basic questions are front and center: What is a concert for? What is music for? Why be a musician?

2.Conservatories and schools of music should regularly self-present cross-disciplinary festivals with resonant themes. That way, some more basic questions are pushed into play: What is a concert? What does it have to do with anything outside music?

DePauw’s two-week “Dvorak and America” festival, which concluded last weekend, incorporated four concerts, each of which found its own idiosyncratic format. All were hosted by students who created their own commentary. Three included visual elements. One was fully scripted. The DePauw orchestra, wind ensemble, chorus, chamber musicians, and pianists all took part. So did a members of the English and Athletic Departments. The topics included “Dvorak and the Indianists Movement,” “Dvorak and ‘Negro Melodies,’” and the New World Symphony. The composers, additional to Dvorak, included Gottschalk, Joplin, Harry Burleigh, Arthur Farwell (his amazing eight-part a cappella Indianist choruses), Charles Wakefield Cadman, and Art Tatum.

Meanwhile, in the classroom and concert hall, there were related master classes, coachings, workshops, lecture-performances, and visitors. Because McCoy has the entire student body (totaling 160) meet en masse every Wednesday morning, I was able to inflict myself on everyone at once (week one), and to partner Kevin Deas (a peerless exponent of spirituals) in a “Harry Burleigh show” (week two) exploring how Dvorak’s African-American assistant took plantation songs into the concert hall. Many students (including every member of the orchestra) read The Song of Hiawatha (because it inspired Dvorak). Quite a few read Classical Music in America.

The festival worked because DePauw is small enough to implement a consolidated learning/teaching experience, and because Mark McCoy is strong enough to inspire and cajole maximum participation. The inspirational lessons Dvorak once taught us seemed powerfully absorbed. Dvorak’s three-year American sojourn, during which he pursued a mandate to help Americans find their own voice in the concert hall, illuminates what music is about. Even more important, it illuminates what music is for: how it can help people and nations perceive and understand themselves.

About three-quarters of the way through, Mark began to wonder out loud what might have happened had Dvorak not returned to Prague in 1895. This departure was not preordained. It resulted from the Panic of 1893, which decimated the resources of Jeannette Thurber. She was the educational visionary who had enticed Dvorak to preside over her National Conservatory of Music in New York. Dvorak died at 62 in Prague in 1904. He had talked of retiring to Spillville, Iowa, where he had composed his American Quartet, American Quintet, and Violin Sonatina in the wake of composing the New World Symphony in Manhattan. His prodigious American output also included the Cello Concerto, the G-flat Humoresque (the one we all know), and American Suite (the topic of my most recent Wall Street Journal article).

That the American Suite sounds “American” is something I regularly demonstrate as part of my standard rant about the history of classical music in America, how it ran off the rails, and what to do about it. Dvorak would doubtless have continued to explore his American style had he remained in America. Also, he was keen to compose a Hiawatha opera or cantata. So that, too, would have happened but for the 1893 Wall Street collapse. Even his short stay fundamentally influenced Burleigh, Amy Beach, and George Chadwick (whose Jubilee is prime Americana – every American orchestra should perform it).

Here are three more what-ifs:
1.What if Mahler hadn’t died in 1911 at the age of 50 and had instead remained at the helm of the New York Philharmonic? It is said he had taken an interest in Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 3.
2.What if Charles Griffes hadn’t died at the age of 35 in 1919 – just after composing his scorching and original Piano Sonata?
3.What if Gershwin hadn’t died at the age of 38 in 1936? What might have been the progeny of Porgy and Bess?

The way things transpired instead, a too-heavy burden was placed on the shoulders of Aaron Copland, a gifted second-tier composer who undertook in the twenties and thirties to jump-start an American classical music infused with a French modernist aesthetic. So far as Copland was concerned (and also Thomson, Bernstein, and many others), there was nothing much in place to work with. Gottschalk, Dvorak, Ives, Joplin, Chadwick, Griffes were all invisible to them. But these pre-1920 composers would have become unignorable if Dvorak had stuck around another half dozen years.

If this is a pipe-dream, Mark McCoy’s reinvention of the DePauw School of Music may be the real deal. Beginning next fall, “State of the Art” will become mandatory for all sophomores. This course – as I discovered – takes a hard and informed look at classical music in America and how it got that way (the instructor, the cellist Eric Edberg, has long espoused and taught Improvisation at DePauw). “Entrepreneurship” will become mandatory for all juniors. (Yes, I know that is now a music-education buzzword and in itself means nothing.) Every senior will have to invent a “project” — something less generic than a recital or thesis. The sequence will be supported by an agenda of composer and ensemble residencies crafted to push everyone beyond the traditional boundaries of classical music.

That this is a genuine experiment I have no doubt.

(To see a video summary of the festival, click here.)