As musicians, what we do at the Lawrence University Conservatory is difficult.  Thousands of hours of intense practice,  endless self-analysis, endless external criticism and guidance, endless rehearsals, intensive study of music theory, music history, composition and improvisation, a full slate of non-music classes in which to explore the liberal arts, and  nuanced interaction with fellow musicians to create a communal representation of that thing about which we are most passionate: music.

If we weren’t passionate about our art, there is no way on earth we would go through what it takes to become a real live musician. I won’t go so far as to characterize it as monastic devotion, but four hours a day, alone in those tiny cells we call practice rooms, does have certain similarities.

So with all that on our young music students’ plates, why, oh why, am I suggesting that they need to add to this seemingly endless banquet just one more morsel called “entrepreneurship,” or more accurately, the development of an “entrepreneurial mindset?”  Aren’t our students busy enough?

Yes, our students are busy, but in an age where the chances of a conservatory graduate  leaving school and going directly into a professional orchestra, band, or choir are vanishingly small—and to be honest , the odds of this particular career path coming to fruition have ALWAYS been vanishingly small—we need to think more creatively and proactively about creating our own musical life.

Instead of sitting in a practice room waiting to be “discovered,” we need to proactively guide our own musical destinies.  We need to ask deceptively difficult questions like: what am I most passionate about? What are my unique skills? How can I best leverage my liberal arts education to create a musical life that incorporates my deepest passions?

These are the first questions my students will tackle if they enroll in The Entrepreneurial Musician, a class focused on nurturing an entrepreneurial mindset specifically designed for musicians and performing artists. The course will be offered next Winter term. Over the past three years, I have had the privilege of co-teaching courses with on Entrepreneurship in the Arts with Adam Galambos and Gary Vaughn from our Economics Department, but the demand has been so great that we felt we needed an offering specifically for our musicians.

Nearly every week we will have musicians visit class that have followed an entrepreneurial career path.  They will share their wisdom and work directly with our students.  Since this is a project-based, hands-on, course, students will flex their creative, problem-solving, entrepreneurial muscles to launch their own brain child. 

This year, one project group is launching ILUminate, a music booking agency website for the Conservatory.  With the launch of this student initiative, the Appleton Community can find the perfect Lawrence musicians for their every musical need.  It is fantastic to watch eight students work together to conceive, create, and launch such an ambitious project.

This course will show students that the world of business, marketing, and yes, revenue flow, are not things to be feared.  The same creativity, passion, and joy that we experience as musical performers can be found a musical entrepreneurs.  Now is the time the unleash the musical entrepreneur in all of us!

Lawrence is thrilled to host the national conference of SEAMUS, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States.  Over the next three days our conservatory will host thirteen recitals, multiple paper sessions, and numerous sound installations. With over 200 hundred passionate musicians participating in this musical celebration, I am eagerly looking forward to hearing and seeing works that will challenge the mind, inspire the soul, and explore musical soundscapes in innovative new ways.

Events like SEAMUS are important in the life of this 140 year old conservatory.  With so much of our time and energy spent celebrating our rich musical heritage and honing our classical technique, we need also need to submerge ourselves in our living music culture.  It is always good to remember that ALL music was once new music. I have a hunch that Mozart was too busy worrying about a successful first performance of a new work to ponder what folks 200 years down the road would be thinking about it.  What will we hear at SEAMUS that might stand the test of time and join the canon of our musical heritage? I am excited to dive in and find out.

Gamelan and computer driven sound modulations? Wind ensemble with electronic sounds? An innovation facial recognition software called AUMI that lets severely disabled children make music though facial movement?  Yes, these are all at SEAMUS plus over 110 other exciting performances and presentations. If you are anywhere near Appleton from February 9^th-11^th 2012, you really must check out this amazing event.  We look forward to seeing you at SEAMUS!

I would like to extend a special thanks to Asha Srinivasan, Assistant Professor of Composition at Lawrence University, and Ed Martin, Assistant Professor of Composition at UW Oshkosh, who co-chaired this year’s event.  Their dedicated vision, thoughtful planning, and countless hours of hard work are what brought SEAMUS 2012 to fruition.  They deserve a standing ovation and a well-deserved “Bravo” for their efforts.  Your tireless efforts made all of this possible—the vibrant music, artistic collaborations, and stimulating new idea.

I am very excited to announce our new forward-looking internship program, Conservatory Squared: Grow Your Music Career Exponentially. This is a wonderful addition to our four year effort to expand the scope of a conservatory education well beyond the confines of the practice room, performance hall, and class room. Here is how it works: We have eight internship/mentorship opportunities for this coming summer. Each is much more than a summer job, for the internship providers will take a hands-on role in mentoring our students and providing valuable insights and feedback in their areas of expertise. Lawrence, through a generous $25,000 gift from the Olga Herberg Administrative Trust, will fund each internship. Conservatory Squared is the musical partner to the successful LU-R1 internship program in the sciences. We hope this will be a win, win, win situation, for the student, for Lawrence, and for the internship providers. No wonder we are so excited about this program!

At the Lawrence Conservatory, we are committed to challenge our students to think deeply about the musical life they might lead after their Lawrence education ends. I firmly believe that strong conservatory training, coupled with a broad and deep liberal arts education is absolutely the best preparation for the 21st century musician. I have previously addressed this in two blogs, one on the 21st Century Conservatory, and one on how a Lawrence Conservatory education can be a perfect preparation for the world of business.

We have also added courses on entrepreneurship in music and the arts, where musicians can flex their innovative brain power to accomplish entrepreneurial music-oriented projects. Furthermore, we have started Lawrence Scholars in Arts and Entertainment, a robust program that brings successful alumni back to campus to work with, inspire, and motivate current students. These alumni help our students see the many possible musical lives that exist beyond our hallowed halls.

Now Conservatory2 will provide a hands-on laboratory to put theory into practice. The program just launched three days ago and we are already seeing strong student interest. One look at the roster of internships, and the excitement should be of little surprise. Here is a list of our Conservatory2 internships for 2012, but please go to the website to find out more about each one.

New York Jazz Academy, Javier Arau ‘98
Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute
Carnegie Hall, Musical Connections Program, Beth Snodgrass ‘93
Deep Listening Institute, Pauline Oliveros
Oberlin in Italy, Opera institute in Italy (2 positions)
Beit Yehuda Guest House, Main Stage Manager , Jerusalem
Olivera Music Entertainment, Washington DC, Connie Trok Olivera ‘82

This a spectacular list of opportunities! What makes this even more exciting is that we already know how well this concept can work. Three years ago, Lawton Hall ’11, a composition major, expressed a strong interest in working with world-renowned composer, Pauline Oliveros at her Deep Listening Institute. Through mutual friends, I was able to contact Pauline, who was eager to take Lawton on as an intern, but had reservations because her institute did not have the ability to fund the position. Working closely with the Office of the Provost, we were able to provide the funds for this opportunity–and what an opportunity it turned out to be. Not only was Lawton able to work closely with Pauline, he became the editor of her new book of collected writings! No one imagined when Lawton was heading off for his internship he would become the editor of a major music publication—and as an undergraduate, no less!

We knew from that moment that the Conservatory Squared model could yield fantastic results for everyone involved. We are already seeking more funding to expand the program for next year. It will be a great pleasure to see this program take off and mature.
The creation of the program wouldn’t have been possible without the tireless efforts and vision of Senior Katelin Richter, who is serving this year as an intern to President Beck. Katelin worked closely with our administration, career services, and alumni relations to create the program’s structure and secure the internship opportunities. She also came up with the name and the logo! As a double degree student in Oboe Performance, and German, with a minor in Economics. Katelin’s stellar work is the perfect example of how top-notch conservatory training coupled with a superb liberal arts education can open up career opportunities in the 21st century that most incoming Freshman have never even dreamed of. Through Lawrence Scholars, classes in entrepreneurship, and now Conservatory Squared, we hope to get all of our musicians excited about their career potential from the moment they step through our doors.

I am thrilled to announce that through a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Conservatory has been able to add a two year visiting professorship in dance. With music and dance so closely linked, it has always struck me as odd that a conservatory as old, distinguished, and multi-faceted as ours has never had any offerings in dance. The Lawrence Theater Department has offered dance to their actors through theater movement courses, but our conservatory, throughout its long history, has never had a dedicated dance professor.

In many cultures around the world the bond between music and dance is so strong, there aren’t even separate words for the two art forms. Our Western traditions have managed to break this bond and segregate dance and music into their own separate boxes. So at many schools there are music departments and dance departments that more often than not, have little to do with one another. If you stop to think about it, this whole scenario is just a little bit crazy. Dance is music in motion; literally the embodiment of music. Dance and music are two sides of the same coin.
So our vision is to eliminate the artificial boundaries between music and dance. We want to embrace dance and integrate it into the music culture of Lawrence. I personally would love to see a time where every single musician at Lawrence could experience the wonderers of music in motion; literally adding a spatial dimension to their art. I know that the experience would deepen the musicality of our young artists. The possibilities of integrating dance are as exciting as they are vast: choreographers working with composers; improvising musicians working with improvising dancers; improvising musicians becoming improvising dancers; music educators exploring movement and music; choreographers collaborating on opera staging; young conductors incorporating dance theory; dancers and musicians and videographers collaborating on creating new forms of art; and who know what other adventures in movement and music await.
With that introduction, you can imagine how pleased I am to welcome Professor Rebecca Salzer to our Conservatory. Professor Salzer is an acclaimed choreographer, dancer, producer, and intellect. Her interests are broad-ranging, and it is clear from her previous projects that collaborations across varied disciplines are something she greatly values. Her latest “screendance” combines videography, dance, and hard science to explore “the limits and possibilities inherent in the act of seeing.” In short, she is the perfect fit for Lawrence and our Conservatory. Check out her web page to get a better idea of this young artist’s many accomplishments.

Her first offerings this fall will be a studio class in choreography and another in modern dance. I can’t wait to see the impact that her arrival on campus will have. I trust it will open new worlds of ideas, collaborations, and beauty to the students in our Conservatory and across the entire campus.
Welcome Rebecca! We can’t wait for dance to sweep us off our feet.

We are musicians. We have spent countless hours in practice rooms refining our technique and nurturing our musicianship. But for so many of us, improvisation, the art of spontaneous musical creation, is not a part of our artistic essence. We all too often equate improvisation only with jazz, and usually instrumental jazz at that. But musical improvisation transcends both genre and instrument. So why is improvisation such a foreign concept in our classical music training? It seems as if this would be the epitome of musical self expression. Yet, the vast majority of classically trained musicians are inextricably tied to the notes on a page, unable to express their musical ideas beyond the confines of the musical staff.

Think about that for a moment. What if we compared this to our mastery of language. What if the only way we could convey our thoughts and feelings were to read passages from someone else’s book? Would we praise a person for their sublime mastery of language if he were only a really good reader? Of course not. The notion is laughable for language, but sadly, not for classical music.

When it comes to language, we are all master improvisers. We can say what we want, how we want, using a myriad of subtly nuanced word choices, sentence structures, and vocal inflections. Every day each of us creates sentences that we have never spoken before, spontaneously, instantaneously, and seamlessly. With language we can converse, responding directly and instantly to others’ questions and comments. It is a marvelous example of our creative abilities at work. More importantly, we take it for granted. We expect everyone to reach this level of mastery, and it doesn’t take years in a practice room to make it happen. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could “music” as freely as we speak? There really isn’t any reason why this can’t be a reality.

Not so long ago, our own classical music tradition once revered improvisation. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Chopin, just to name a few iconic figures, were all masters of musical improvisation. Today, the once spontaneous musical outpourings of the past are petrified into preludes, fantasias, impromptus, and cadenzas. In less than one hundred years, the proud tradition of improvisation slowly vanished.

Once improvisation started disappearing from our musical training, its complete disappearance became almost inevitable. Teachers without improvisational fluency didn’t feel comfortable trying to teach it to their students, who then became improvisationally illiterate, and were unlikely to even try improvisation let alone try to teach it. So, as you can see, it really didn’t take all that long for it to disappear. Now, it is high time we reclaim our musical heritage and honor this once proud feature of our musical art.

We must reverse this trend and reintroduce improvisation into our musical repertoire. My goal is raise the importance of improvisation at the Lawrence Conservatory of Music. I want every student in our conservatory explore improvisation during their time at Lawrence. Luckily, we are well positioned to do just that. First, we have a world renowned jazz studies department, where improvisation is foundational and beginning improvisation courses are open to students no matter what their primary area of study. Second, we have Matthew Turner on our faculty.

Matthew is one of the world’s leading improvising cellist and teachers of improvisation. He goes into secondary schools across the country to introduce improvisation to students that have never improvised one note in their lives. There isn’t anyone better suited to reintroduce improvisation into the classical music conservatory. At Lawrence, he is currently the director or IGLU the Improvisation Group of Lawrence University. In this ensemble students can explore improvisation in genres other than jazz. Currently the ensemble has 30 members representing nearly every department in the conservatory. It is a wonderful thing to see students diving in to improvisation for the first time and embracing both its challenges and rewards.

At Lawrence, we are also focusing on introducing improvisation and improvisation pedagogy to our music education majors. This is key if we want our youngest music students to accept improvisation as a natural part of their musical development. Through our educators we have the best chance to reintroduce improvisation back into every students’ musical vocabulary. I will devote another blog to strategies for making this possible, but until then we can keep dreaming of a world where all musicians have the ability to leave the printed page behind and directly convey their musical thoughts and dreams through spontaneous improvisation.

APPLETON, WIS. — The music career of Lawrence University alumnus Mike Truesdell recently received a rocket boost after he earned second-place honors at the prestigious 2010 Tromp International Percussion Competition in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Held every two years, the Tromp competition features the world’s best percussionists. This year’s event was conducted Nov. 13-21.

A 2007 Lawrence graduate, Truesdell was one of only seven musicians from the United States invited to join the finalist field that included 30 percussionists from around the world. He received a second-place prize of 10,000 Euros (approximately $13,000). He also was invited to participate in a series of concerts following the competition at major venues throughout the Netherlands along with the 2010 first-place Tromp winner, Alexej Gerassimez of Germany.

“The Tromp competition is akin to the Cliburn piano competition for percussionists,” said Dane Richeson, director of percussion studies in the Lawrence Conservatory of Music and Truesdell’s former teacher. “This competition alone is going to set Mike on the road to great success.”

In addition to contemporary classical, Truesdell also performs non-Western music, especially that of Ghana, Brazil and Cuba. He has performed as a solo, orchestral and chamber musician throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. Following an October 2009 performance at New York City’s Alice Tulley Hall, The New York Times praised him for playing with “sensitivity and dexterity.” He is currently in his second year of graduate studies at Julliard School.

Truesdell is the second Lawrence graduate to shine in an international percussion competition. Greg Beyer, a 1995 graduate and current associate professor of music at Northern Illinois University, was the second-prize winner of the 2002 Geneva International Music Competition in Switzerland, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious music competitions.

“I can’t believe there are many, if any, universities, especially any our size, that can claim two of their percussionists placed second in two separate international competitions,” said Richeson. “This is truly remarkable.”

Last Sunday we were honored to welcome one of the world’s great listeners to campus, Gordon Hempton. Hempton, Grammy Award winning natural sound recordist, has circled the globe capturing the Earth’s most subtle and thrilling music in recordings of unsurpassed fidelity. Yes, I said the Earth’s music, because that is exactly how Hempton hears it—not mere sound, but music. Hempton regularly sits motionless for hours at a time as he listens to all that nature has to offer. As you can imagine, Hempton’s virtuoso listening skills make him a rare and invaluable guest at our Conservatory, where listening is at the heart of everything we do, yet is often taken for granted.

John Cage told Hempton that our ears are our musical instruments. To me, this powerful statement expresses the importance of the listener in creating musical performance. What we hear, how we hear, how we listen is different for each individual; partly because of the slight variations in ear shape, ear canal length, and even the placement of the ears on one’s head; and partly because of how we listen.

Hempton was inspired early in his listening life by the great naturalist John Muir, who Hempton considers one of the great recorders of nature’s music. The fact that Muir lived at a time when “recording” nature’s music meant crafting vivid musical descriptions in his notebooks, in no way diminishes the importance of his “recordings.” It is Muir who describes “snow melting into music.” What at first may just sound like a poetic turn of phrase took on new meaning during Hempton’s presentation. Gordon played a recording of melting snow that created a rhythmic groove that made the audience want to dance! Snow truly melting into pure music.

Part of the key to becoming a better listener is to embrace silence. Silence in nature, Hempton reminds us, is never truly silent, but rather contains worlds of music just waiting to emerge. To listen into such silence takes a quiet mind. Gordon mentioned that after spending time in the noise of a city it may take up to three days of silence to reach a state of mind and clarity of listening to begin to take in the true subtleties of nature’s music. Since it was somewhat impractical to take everyone in the conservatory to the remote Utah wilderness for three days, Gordon started us down the path of better listening by leading a series of sound walks around our campus and surrounding area.

The sound walk is really a type of sound meditation. Hempton’s instructions were simple:
1. There will be no talking.
2. Participants should listen without discrimination, as if they were a microphone.
3. If the mind starts focusing on a particular sound, let it go, and once again listen to everything.
4. Explore your sonic environment.

Then we were off, slowly following Hempton around campus. Exploring the very familiar landscape in a completely new way. Our group must have looked odd to curious onlookers. As one students rotated slowly on Main Hall Green, another had her ear firmly planted on a storm drain, and another had his ear ever-so-close to the craggy bark of an oak tree—listening. It was so easy, so natural to filter out the traffic while listening to a passing bird, but that was exactly what we were trying to avoid. “Be the microphone, be the microphone, be the microphone.” The task is difficult but wonderfully revealing.

I encourage all of you to try it. During the hour walk, there were brief moments of complete openness, lost seconds later as the mind celebrated its fleeting victory. But it did point to the fact that we can all become better listeners, deep listeners, with practice; and if there is one thing we musicians know how to do, it’s practice.

Thank you Gordon for sharing your passion with us. It was an ear-opening experience for us all!

Submitted 21st October 2010
By Brian Pertl, Dean, Lawrence Conservatory of Music

On August 4^th, 2010, Lawrence acquired the 21 renaissance and baroque instruments, 250 pieces of early wind music, and over a dozen books on early music that make up the James Smith Rudolph Collection of Early Winds. I want to express my deepest thanks to Mr. Rudolph for his decision to place the stewardship of his collection in our hands.  To say I am excited that Lawrence was chosen to be the home of this magnificent collection would be a gross understatement.  This collection of krumhorns, recorders, and flutes will fuel the passion for early music that has been growing on campus in the last few years. 

My plan is to install a beautiful display case to show off the instruments and raise excitement for renaissance and baroque instrumental music, but if the passion and excitement for these instruments is anywhere near what I anticipate, the display case should be completely EMPTY most of the year.  My goal is to get these inspirational winds directly into

James Rudolph with his First Recorder!

 the hands of our young musicians.  Instruments that are merely used for display are no longer musical instruments! Already LUCEM (Lawrence University Collective of Early Music) and the Lawrence Baroque Ensemble are planning on ways to best use these instruments.  I can hardly wait to see what sorts of music making this collection will inspire.

So how did Lawrence end up as the home for this collection?  Well, the tale is definitely worth recounting.  Sometime in the 1950s, James Smith Rudolph, WWII veteran, was living in Paris.  He didn’t have a lot of money, but once a year, he made his way to Lausanne, Switzerland to ski with a friend who lived there.  Since there wasn’t a whole lot of skiing in Paris, James left his skis at his friend’s place.

 This particular year, when James made his trek to Switzerland he was greeted with the sad news that a thief had stolen his skis! Ski-less and bored, James took to wandering the streets of Lausanne, where he spied a beautiful wooden instrument in a music store window.  He had never seen anything like it before.  He entered the store, found out the instrument was a recorder, and decided to buy it!  So instead of skiing for two weeks, James spent the time in the apartment falling in love with his new instrument. And this was the start of the life-long love affair with early instruments and early music that eventually led to the creation of his magnificent instrument collection.  So in a sense, Lawrence really has an unknown ski thief to thank for our great good fortune!

I first heard about the collection this spring when I, and around a dozen other conservatory deans around the country, received a letter from Mr. Rudolph describing his collection and expressing his desire to find a permanent home for it at a university.   The letter caught my interest right away, since I had seen the impact that high quality instruments can have on a conservatory; especially if those instruments get into the hands of our students.  Our Guarneri violin, our Brombaugh organ, our quartet of Cox strings, and our collection of early keyboard instruments show the transformative power of fine instruments every day.

This started a series of correspondences with Mr. Rudolph where I shared the vision I had for his cherished collection; a vision where his collection would continue to inspire countless generations of students and help them gain a deeper understanding of, and love for, early music.

I am happy to report that of the dozen institutions that were interested in the collection, Mr. Rudolph chose Lawrence as the new home for his collection, in a large part because of our strong commitment to get the instruments into the hands of our students.

My deepest thanks go to James Smith Rudolph.  May his outstanding collection inspire untold numbers of Lawrentians  both now and well into the future! Check out images of the collection on our Conservatory Facebook site.

Submitted the 19th of September, 2010 by Brian Pertl, Dean, Lawrence Conservatory of Music

OK, it’s the middle of July so you might be wondering why I am posting a summer reading list when summer is getting dangerously close to being half over. Here is my reasoning: no one wants to wrap up school and be instantly bombarded with yet another reading list. We all needed some time to chill out, reconnect with old friends, dive into summer work, give some time for a little boredom to set in, perhaps a little guilt about not practicing enough, and perhaps the creeping realization that we are actually missing some of the intellectual rigor of LU.

I figure that right about now, a lot of us are ready to pick up a good book and devour it! So I’ve put together a list of four wonderful books for musicians, lovers of music, and deep listeners. Personally, I would love for everybody in the Conservatory to read these books. Perhaps not all this summer, but you should definitely put them on your list of things to read before too long.

1. The Savvy Musician: Building a Career, Earning a Living and Making a Difference by David Cutler.
David Cutler is a conservatory trained musician and a darn good one at that. He was very successful as a student, but when he graduated and left the insulated world of the conservatory, he was faced with the perennial question: “Now what?” He realized that the traditional conservatory wasn’t providing the one thing that today’s musician needs to be a success: guidance in how to be entrepreneurial. This book is a hands-on guide to help us along the way. It is well-written, funny, easy to understand, and full of real-life examples of entrepreneurial musicians. Cutler has the knack of inspiring and empowering today’s musicians.

This is an area that we are actively trying to address at Lawrence. We offered our first class on the topic, Entrepreneurship in the Arts, this spring. David came and spoke on the topic of entrepreneurship and made a very positive impression. This is a book that every conservatory musician should own. . . and read! There is also a great companion website: www.savvymusician.com

2. The Musician’s Way: A Guide to Practice, Performance, and Wellness by Gerald Klickstein

There are many books out there that deal with proper practice habits, performance anxiety, and health and wellness for musicians, few of them, however, have been able to successfully combine these topics. What I like about the Klickstein book is its holistic, step by step approach to becoming a complete musician. He covers just about everything: deep practice habits, preparing for transcendent performances, working in small groups, improvisation, mental preparation, memorization, and health and wellness. Its thoroughness is remarkable and should resonate with everyone on the path to becoming a professional musician. I’m a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to the genre of practical guides to musicianship. I bore easily and I am quick to find fault with bone-headed proposals. But with this book, I found myself agreeing out loud to Klickstein’s suggestions. It is a great nuts and bolts guide to getting the most out of your practice, performance, musicality, and health while never forgetting the transcendent elements of our art. This is a great book for all Con students to own. There is also a nice website: www.themusiciansway.com

3. The Music Lesson: A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music by Victor Wooton

This book is not a nuts and bolts guide to musicianship, at least not in the pragmatic way the Klickstein book is. Instead it focuses on the spiritual journey between musician and Music. It is definitely more along the lines of Carlos Casteneda than Klickstein, but in spite of its overabundance of mysticism, I love this book. It features quirky musical mentors and unexplained happenings, as we follow the protagonist on his surreal, challenging, and humorous journey to becoming a complete musician. What I love about the music lesson is that it reintroduces the reader to the magic and mystery of music. Sometimes a year or two of scales, etudes and warm-up routines can slowly dampen the wonder that we musicians all have for music. Wooten’s book is a match to reignite musical wonder. I’ve read the book each summer as we get ready to go back to class and it helps remind me why I’ve devoted my life to this thing called music. Interestingly both the Klickstein and Wooten book both peel back the layers to reveal the magic of this thing we call music, but the approaches couldn’t be more different. I think they make great companions on you summer reading journey.

 
4. One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet by Gordon Hempton

Gordon Hempton is one of the world’s great natural sound recordists and one of the world’s best listeners. I have spoken of Gordon is a previous blog. He is on a quest to preserve natural quiet places—places that aren’t perpetually bombarded by man-made noise. A few years back he came up with the idea of getting the government to recognize and protect just one square inch of silence in the center of the Hoh Rainforest in Washington State. The beauty of his idea is that by keeping just that one square inch free of man-made noise, literally hundreds of miles silence need to be protected. This book is the story of that quest, but also the story of a deep listener, and this is exactly what we as musicians should all be striving to become. Hempton weaves an ear-opening adventure that is a pleasure to read. Gordon Hempton will be coming to Lawrence in mid-October to share his work and experiences with our students. I hope to see you all in the audience.
So there you have it, four books that will inspire, instruct, and give hours of reading pleasure. So pull up a hammock, grab a book and get reading. Your inner musician will be glad you did.

There is always something wonderful happening at the Conservatory, whether it’s a student recital, guest artist, master class, or ensemble performance; but every once in while the stars align to create a moment of surpassing musical wonder. In this particular instance the moment lasted the better part of the week.

David Maslanka, one of America’s greatest living composers arrived on Wednesday for a four day residency.  He gave two compelling presentations, one on meditation and composition, worked with Lawrence composition students, and rehearsed both the Symphonic Band and Wind Ensemble as they prepared for a concert on Saturday night featuring the composer’s works.

The rehearsals were exhilarating for everyone involved. Maslanka really pushed the students to new levels of musicianship as he guided them to capture his clearly defined musical vision for each piece. Oh, and did I mention that Maslanka’s music is hard? To say it is technically challenging is to understate the reality. It can be monstrously difficult.  Students left those rehearsals looking like they had just run a marathon. . . but instead of being tired and burned out, they were tired yet elated by the experience.

With Maslanka madness in full swing, Todd Baldwin, trombonist extraordinaire with the United States Army Band (Pershing’s Own), arrived on Thursday to work with our Lawrence trombonists and prepare a solo work for the same band concert on Saturday night.  Todd is a first class trombonist but also one of the nicest guys you will ever meet. He immediately connected with the trombone studio and began giving master classes and lessons during his spare time!

On Friday, with the bands gearing up for their big concert, the Chapel was being prepared for the last performance of this year’s Jazz Artist Series Concert. By Friday afternoon, Christian McBride, one of the greatest living jazz bassists, and his quintet of all-star musicians flew into town!  The Conservatory was literally buzzing with activity.  Late Friday afternoon, as the spring sun was slanting low through the stained glass windows of the Memorial Chapel,  Christian McBride was giving a jazz master class on the Chapel stage. Not more than 100 feet away in our main rehearsal room, David Maslanka was working with the Wind Ensemble to polish up his 8^th Symphony, while Todd Baldwin was giving private trombone lessons down the hall! It was remarkable, to say the least!

The Christian McBride concert was a jazz revelation.  I had one student come up to me afterwards and say, “that was so incredible, I’m not sure it actually happened!”  She was right! It was that amazing. Between his master class and the concert, McBride, along with his band, had inspired us all.

We barely had time to recover from the McBride concert before it was Saturday evening and time for the final Symphonic Band, Wind Ensemble Concert of the year.  With Maslanka and Baldwin sharing the stage, all the students were determined to give their very best, and they did not disappoint.  The Symphonic Band did a superb job playing Maslanka’s Golden Light and backing up Todd Baldwin on Goldstein’s Colloquy for Solo Trombone and Symphonic Band.  

By intermission the excitement was building for the Lawrence premiere of Maslanka’s 8^th Symphony, a piece which Lawrence helped to commission.   The Symphony is expansive, nearly 40 minutes long and filled with the most demanding passages in the Wind Ensemble repertoire.

Maslanka feels that music has a unique ability to penetrate and stir the human soul, thereby inspiring humanity at the deepest level.  From the first note of the 8^th Symphony, the soul stirring quality of his music could not be ignored. It seeped into the deepest recesses of every listener and illuminated us from within.   The musicians were clearly inspired too, for they played that piece with an intensity and purity that they had never done before.  By the end of the third movement when it the music had clearly reached its peak intensity, it continued to grow, and deepen.  Triple fortes increased to quadruple fortes, then quintuple.  When Professor Andrew Mast gave his final cut off and the final chord rolled out over the audience, there was an audible gasp.   Like me, the entire audience had been holding its collective breath for the final 30 seconds!

It was one of the most moving musical performances I have ever experienced. The standing ovation was well deserved and marked a perfect ending to a most remarkable musical weekend.