The Crisis of Classical Music in America by Robert Freeman

Author:Robert Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

The reader can imagine how I felt when arriving in Austin on August 31, 1999, for my first interview for the UT deanship and was confronted at the Bergstrom Airport with the sign at the end of the jet ramp that Richard Florida mentions, welcoming me to the “live music capital of the world.” My first reaction resulted no doubt from my having come directly from “the Hub of the Universe,” where the NEC faculty felt uncomfortable about even preliminary conversations on collaboration with the president of the Berklee School, which teaches jazz and other contemporary (if commercial) repertories. My reaction to the Bergstrom sign was that the University of Texas’s School of Music—in the meantime generously endowed as the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music—could not afford to be thought of by our community as the moribund music section of the live music capital of the world, an implicit challenge for the future. With the election of our forty-fourth president, music lies near the center of the community’s ambition to create a home where all sorts of art can live productively together, where the diversity that is America can be supported by an artistic scene that reflects the enthusiasm, optimism, and energy of this wonderful place, a productive melting pot for the professional and avocational communities of music, a turning point for the arts in America for many years to come.

I have always thought it a triumph of the Eastman School that its graduates include not only many fine composers, orchestral players, operatic singers, university professors, K–12 teachers, and maintainers of private music studios but many others who went on to undertake successful careers not directly related to classical music. Goddard Lieberson (a composer who became president of Columbia Records, where he introduced the long-playing record), Paul Ouncley (a church organist who during the work week was vice president of Boeing Aircraft, responsible for noise reduction!), Richard Ziter (a fine pianist who became a distinguished ophthalmologic surgeon), Leatrice Gochberg (a singer who became an important real estate developer in New York City), Mitch Miller (a legendary oboist who became a vice president of Columbia Records, the director of a popular nationally televised series called Sing Along with Mitch, and a successor to Arthur Fiedler as a superlative Pops conductor), Theodore Szulc (a bassoonist who became one of the country’s leading experts in room acoustics), Max Conner (a public school music teacher who became head of physical security for the FBI), and Mary Ann Krupsak (a singer who became lieutenant governor of New York) were all among them. Clearly, these people have all had satisfying careers. It is up to you as a conscientious faculty member to produce not simply outstanding players and singers but successful and happy human beings.

Joanne Lipman’s article in the New York Times of October 13, 2013, “Is Music the Key to Success?” should give each of us a lot to think about in this context. Ms. Lipman, having interviewed such nonmusical celebrities as Condoleezza

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