I’ve taken my title from Tony Woodcock, the President of New England Conservatory, who used the phrase in his blog, and right at the start of something he wrote for a lively NEC student publication, The Penguin. (So named because the penguin — because of classical music’s white tie and tails — is NEC’s mascot.)
And in The Penguin he says the phrase is now his mantra. Remarkable, I think, for the head of a classical music school. He trusts the future of classical music to his students. He knows they’ll change the field. And he’s helping them do it.
But seeing it in action was something else. I’m not going to say it works miracles, or that the entire school is involved. There’s a long way to go, to get wide faculty and student buy-in. But there’s a lot of excitement. Students apply for grants to do entrepreneurial projects. The projects take flight.
I saw one of them, just out of the egg. A student wants to create a concert series, featuring many kinds of music. He found a fine, open space, a former armory (smaller than some former armories I’ve seen, but still spacious). In this space, he presented — from different spots — excerpts from Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool, songs from Hugo Wolf’s Italienische Liederbuch, a brass quintet playing Ingolf Dahl, and — quite wonderfully — an improvising group making up an accompaniment to a classic Harold Lloyd silent-film comedy. Piano and recorder played for the first half of the film. Great blend! Who’d have thought it would work?
And, again, I won’t claim wonders for this. The student who planned it knows it’s just a first step, and needs some tweaking. But it had its moments, including one I wouldn’t have expected — the magical first song of the Hugo Wolf collection, “Aus kleine Dinge,” emerging unexpectedly, with a soprano singing, from right in the middle of the space. There’s something so relaxed about the song, starting from the first gestures in the piano, which are almost like someone lazily stretching. To have this float into the darkened space, with only a quick spoken translation of the German text for preparation, was something special.
During my two days at NEC, I spoke to students, both informally and formally. I met with Rachel; with Eva Heinstein, the entrepreneurial musicianship’s savvy, fashion-forward Program Manager; with Tony; and with Tom Novak, NEC’s dean. I met one student, at the concert, who’s trying to make classical concerts work commercially, a concept dear to my own heart. (More on that in a later post.)
There’s more to say. And more will happen. NEC, it seems to me, has its eyes firmly on the future.
In another post, I’ll note Tony’s blog posts about the state of orchestras, which complement mine quite perfectly. Except that, as a former orchestra manager — he ran the Oregon Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra, and before that, orchestras in the UK — he knows more than I do. So when he’s bleak about the future, if orchestras don’t change…
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