“Big plans are afoot at a small music school,” writes Jeremy Eichler in Monday’s (9/12) Boston Globe. “In June, the Longy School of Music officially merged with Bard College. … As a kind of symbolic opening to the new chapter, the school’s annual fall concert series, SeptemberFest, began on Friday night with Karen Zorn and Leon Botstein, the presidents of Longy and Bard respectively, on the stage of Pickman Concert Hall, speaking with the Boston Phoenix’s classical music editor Lloyd Schwartz about joint institutional ambitions, and about the future of music education more broadly. With Bard’s main campus located in the New York’s Hudson Valley, this will be a long-distance relationship between the two schools, but probably more important than geographic closeness is the proximity of approach. Both schools seem to have an enlarged vision for what training musicians of the future might look like, Bard with its conservatory that emphasizes music’s connection to the other liberal arts, and Longy, with its focus on connecting musicians with the communities in which they live. … The most hopeful elements of the panel discussion in fact centered on redefining the role of the music teacher.”
Posted September 13, 2011
