Today’s higher education music faculty and administrators are faced with extraordinary pressure to adapt, innovate, and change. But what change is most critical to pursue – and how can it be brought about effectively? This concise volume brings together four seasoned thought leaders with distinct voices, each providing a complementary glimpse into how music faculty and administrators can help lead changes that truly matter. Making the case for transformations to better align music training in higher education with our culturally diverse society and the actual marketplace facing graduates, the perspectives collected here provide essential change management leadership strategies for music departments in the 21st century. Covering topics such as diversity and inclusion, institutional transformation, and preparing students for contemporary music careers, each chapter includes an outline of specific steps that can be taken individually and collectively towards needed change. Illuminating issues and providing practical suggestions, this book will enable both music faculty and administrators to confidently navigate change together with their communities.

"Today's higher education music faculty and administrators are faced with extraordinary pressure to adapt, innovate, and change. But what change is most critical to pursue - and how can it be brought about effectively? This concise volume brings together four seasoned thought leaders with distinct voices, each providing a complementary glimpse into how music faculty and administrators can help lead changes that truly matter. Making the case for transformations to better align music training in higher education with our culturally diverse society and the actual marketplace facing graduates, the perspectives collected here provide essential change management leadership strategies for music departments in the 21st century. Covering topics such as diversity and inclusion, institutional transformation, and preparing students for contemporary music careers, each chapter includes an outline of specific steps that can be taken individually and collectively towards needed change. Illuminating issues and providing practical suggestions, this book will enable both music faculty and administrators to confidently navigate change together with their communities"--

Drawing on 30 years of teaching experience, author Timothy Cheek demonstrates how a university lyric diction class—traditionally specialized and Eurocentric—can become transformative, through engaging students with other languages and cultures, and promoting diversity, equity, inclusivity, and antiracism. Raising new possibilities for traditional lyric diction pedagogy, this book explores how to provide students with experiences that speed their growth, help them to see the big picture, spark their curiosity, clarify and expand their digital resources and skills, and set them on a path of international collaboration. Arguing against compartmentalization in voice curricula, and exploring opportunities for creativity, the author provides a guide to new approaches that will aid schools’ decisions about diction curricula in the challenging but promising era of 21st-century pedagogy. Voice faculty, diction instructors, curriculum committees, graduate students in related fields, and music school administrators should all find this book insightful and thought-provoking as it goes to the heart of issues critical to the long-term development of today’s voice students.

Inclusive Music Histories: Leading Change through Research and Pedagogy models effective practices for researchers and instructors striving either to reform music history curricula at large or update individual topics within their classes to be more inclusive. Confronting racial and other imbalances of Western music history, the author develops four core principles that enable a shift in thinking to create a truly intersectional music history narrative and provides case studies that can be directly applied in the classroom. The book addresses inclusivity issues in the discipline of musicology by outlining imbalances encoded into the canonic repertory, pedagogy, and historiography of the field. This book offers comprehensive teaching tools that instructors can use at all stages of course design, from syllabus writing and lecture planning to discussion techniques, with assignments for each of the subject matter case studies. Inclusive Music Histories enables instructors to go beyond token representation to a more nuanced music history pedagogy.

Caring for the Whole Musician brings together insights from two expert musicians and educators to consider the relationship between mental and physical health and artistic practice for musicians. Offering a holistic perspective that encompasses the whole being – body, mind, and heart – this book provides emerging musicians with tools, practices, and mindsets to address key challenges throughout their journey. The first part, Awareness, addresses wellness and embodiment in music, exploring how our bodies are constructed and how the use of our bodies as instruments affects function. Using approaches including Body Mapping and the Alexander Technique, this part helps readers discover adverse habits that interfere with natural movement, and nurture awareness of the body. The second part, Mindfulness, explores how meditative practice can be incorporated into every stage of concert preparation and embedded within the daily life of the musician. Offering mindfulness exercises related to each stage of the music-making process, these chapters provide strategies for readers to enhance their well-being and focus. Centered in the understanding of the musician as a whole being, this book provides an essential guide to how practices of awareness and mindfulness can allow musicians to better care for themselves and flourish in their artistic careers.

Radically Responsive Music Schools is a philosophical reimagining of music higher education culture from the ground up, arguing that holistic cultural change is the key factor needed for music schools to prepare 21st-century graduates for contemporary challenges. The author discusses how university and conservatory music programs can incorporate traits they seek to foster in their students – creativity, innovation, improvisation, and entrepreneurial thinking – into the institutions themselves. Through Deep Listening exercises, thought experiments, and other activities, Pertl provides detailed scaffolding for creating music school cultures of belonging and collaboration, wellbeing and intention, curiosity and wonder, creativity and improvisation, and playfulness and joy. Unpacking the complexities of transforming institutional culture, this book envisions the modern school of music as agile, collaborative, and socially aware and outlines pathways for leaders to realize this vision. Radically Responsive Music Schools is an essential resource for college-level music education administrators, professors, students, or staff members interested in how institutional culture can act as a catalyst for radical change in music programs.

This book provides an overview of professional musicians working within the healthcare system and explores programs that bring music into the environment of the hospital. Far from being onstage, musicians in the hospital provide musical engagement for patients and healthcare providers focused on life-and-death issues. Music in healthcare offers a new and growing area for musical careers, distinct from the field of music therapy in which music is engaged to advance defined clinical goals. Rather, this volume considers what happens when musicians interact with the clinical environment as artists, and how musical careers and artistic practices can develop through work in a hospital setting. It outlines the specialized skills and training required to navigate safely and effectively within the healthcare context. The contributors draw on their experiences with collaborations between the performing arts and medicine at Boston University/Boston Medical Center, University of Florida/UF Health Shands Hospital, and the Peabody Institute/Johns Hopkins Medicine. These experiences, as well as the experiences of artists spotlighted throughout the volume, offer stories of thriving artistic practices and collaborations that outline a new field for tomorrow's musical artists.