This interview with Richard Kessler, Dean of the Mannes College of Music, was originally published on December 1st, 2014:
It’s intriguing when you meet someone who thinks, works, operates differently than the “status quo.”
In the beginning of October, I was asked by administration at one of the leading colleges for music, located in NYC, to come interview their Dean about upcoming events and changes at their school.
This college is the Mannes College of Music, an institution that is part of the New School in New York City. The man I was asked to interview was Richard Kessler.
I expected a straightforward interview that would be a nice piece for this website you are on.
I expected to talk about how the school is moving from the Upper West Side to Greenwich Village next school year, about the brand new, state-of-the-art facilities Mannes has made for the students, and the like.
Don’t get me wrong, we did talk about all of that, and it was wonderful to hear about the new physical moves Mannes is making to strengthen its program.
But when I came to Mannes to speak with their Dean, Richard Kessler, I encountered a conversation I was not expecting, a conversation that was remarkably progressive and, dare I say, quite moving.
A conversation less about the physical moves Mannes is making and much, much more about a new emphasis on treating musicians as unique people, as individual artists who will be given the skills to seek truly individualistic careers with their talents.
A conversation on training musicians to bring their music, diverse skill-sets, and unique selves to a market, not just asking them to be well-behaved members of a music section.
For those of you who don’t know Richard Kessler, he is a musician and administrator with a known reputation for being progressive.
He emphasizes entrepreneurialism and initiative as a means of expressing human agency as well as artistic creativity.
He isn’t about maintaining the status quo.
This is a good thing.
When I came to Mannes, we immediately began discussing a new initiative they are planning out, how musicians should think like J.S. Bach and Leonard Bernstein in order to make money, the 100-year anniversary of Mannes, the skills a musician needs to succeed, and so much more.
We also talked about what Richard hopes his legacy will be in his role as Mannes’ Dean.
This is our conversation:
Part I: The Initiative Forward
Bill: There is a really big, significant initiative happening at Mannes. An initiative that not enough music schools embrace. But in our ever-changing 21st-century, every single music school must take on this kind of program. It is a plan called “Mannes In a New Key.” So let’s get this on the table – what is “Mannes In a New Key” and how is it going to help and prepare students for their musical futures?
Richard: Mannes In a New Key is an organizational and strategic plan for Mannes.
We looked at this seminal question: what do our graduates need to know and be able to do in order to succeed out of school?
So we created that list, a list of everything they need to know and be able to do.
Everything.
How big was that list?
It’s big.
Then what we did was we worked backwards, asking ourselves “What do we provide to our students? “What don’t we provide?”
And it’s pretty sizeable – we then started framing that philosophically. It led us to rethink traditional notions, and well, it led to a mission change.
We looked at the mission, we looked at courses, we looked at values, and what happened was we started getting into the issue of the importance of writing, and speaking. We looked at the importance of a deeply reflective practice.
We looked at the importance of being technologically literate. We looked at the importance of being entrepreneurial, and the real role of entrepreneurship – not as marketing, not as PR, not as a technical thing – but as a human agency.
We asked these seminal questions:
“How do you take the thing you love the most, your music, and how do you bring it to the world?
“How do you find people to perform it with?
“How do you find the places to perform it?
“What is your vision for it?
“How do you find the support to do this, financial and otherwise? How do you make a living?”
These are primary, not secondary, questions to being an artist.
I see this as being an artistic conversation, an essential artistic conversation.
You don’t make music in a vacuum! You make music with others, you make music for the world! You don’t write a piece for it to sit on a shelf, you write a piece for it to be performed, with people, to affect people.
The sooner a musician or any artist is thinking about any of these things, and having it influence contextually what they want to do and where they want to go, the better off they are. I see this as about human agency.
Very interesting.
We also, in a nutshell, came to the position that we really wanted to restore the support and the development of an artist to be what it was pre-20th century.
In the 20th century, things really started to change. Specialization started to occur. Prior to the 20th century, most performers did some composition, they improvised, they could conduct. They were business people, and they were entrepreneurial.
In the 20th century, that kind of stuff peeled away so the composers were put off into the corner and the performers were very much separate from them. Improvisation became a disappearing art in classical music.
Whereas in pre-20th century, they improvised…in operas!
We want the idea of basic flexibility and multiple skills to reemerge.
Think about Bach, he’s the perfect example. He conducted, he taught, he composed, he was a business person. And if you read his biographies…
Oh, so true.
He was thinking about money, about how to put it together, about how to get the commission, about teaching, about there being an organist in the church and how he moved from one job to another…
It’s so clear when you look at someone like Bach.
But go further! Take a look at Mahler – composer, conductor, business person. Think of them all – Mozart, Beethoven – they were also scholars, they were ethnomusicologists, like Bartok.
We want the students to be versatile, and that means they have to know the world around them.
All of these things have to be put into the curriculum where at Mannes (and other music schools) very little of it has existed in the past.
Part II: The Reaction From the Community, and Bringing People Together
So, with this new initiative coming, and with all of this forward-thinking stuff, what is the reaction from the Mannes community?
I think the reaction is as it should be. It breaks down into three categories.
There are those who hate it.
All of it.
And would like to run me out of town on a rail. And I kid you not – that might be a nice way to put it.
Then there are those who are open, and are just really curious as to how it has happened, and what it is going to mean for our community.
And then there are those who wish it had happened many years ago.
It’s natural, as it should be.
The older, more senior faculty members see this as a loss.
They see this as a loss of any notion of independence, they see the loss of this discrete building, and that we will become a “department” of music.
I can see why the older generation has a problem with this, because they are set in their ways and the old way is exactly how it has been for decades. But, there is a tremendous benefit in change.
Yeah, and you have to change. I have a very big philosophy – you have to look to the outside world.
Looking inward doesn’t make sense.
You have to look to the environment. What is the environment?
So the main philosophy for me in all of this is this: what do our graduates need to know and be able to do?
And so the minute you start bringing in a range new things and ideas, it upends the historic barrel cart. Mannes had a static curriculum for around 50 years. It was a point of pride, for the senior faculty.
That said, the world has changed. We are serious about ensuring our students are prepared for the world they are about to enter.
We don’t want to rely primarily on a center for those who opt-in. We want to convert our philosophy into a common practice.
And that freaks a lot of people out.
Part III. What Are the Real Skills Musicians Need, and What Is the Employment Outlook?
The thing is, so many classical musicians don’t feel that having a business savvy is necessary, for one illogical reason or another. How are you going to be able to provide these skills in such a way as to make the student body not only accept but also embrace what you are doing.
You have to make a commitment to figuring out how to bring the outside world in.
I did feel for a long time, having graduated Juilliard, having taught at the Manhattan School of Music, having gone to Mannes many years ago, I did feel there was a paradox in how the curriculums were structured.
Conservatories create professional performers, but in the larger world of practice, particularly when it came to policy and making it in music, these schools weren’t bringing the outside world in very much.
They weren’t discussing many practical issues musicians face.
It could be funding policies, it could be immigration policies, it could be labor management issues.
You are training someone, in the conservatory setting, to play in an orchestra.
But somehow or another you are not introducing to them what it is to be an orchestral player, the life of it, the kinds of things that they need to think about and know about it.
By bringing the outside world in, we see that there are so many more things to talk about than just performance.
You might have to negotiate a contract.
You might have to sit on a board.
You might have to do children’s concerts.
You might have to speak from the stage.
Traditionally, it has been an education in a vacuum. The more we bring in the outside world, the better it will be.
When students, musicians or otherwise, go to college, there is one goal in mind, which is a traditional model of employment.
And it’s just not there!
It’s not there in law, it’s not there in television, it’s not there in the automotive industry…
It’s not there in a lot of fields, but it is especially true about classical music. I mean, how many professional orchestras exist, and how many have good-paying job openings every year? It’s interesting how schools like yours are taking initiative now, as opposed to earlier.
We are talking about people’s lives.
And there’s another side to it.
I’m a big believer in this issue of intentionally thinking about how to provide the best well-rounded music education. I’m also big on a sound and basic overall education for those who will go on into other fields.
We are getting into strengthening language skills, business skills – we want to raise the standards of our liberal arts programs even higher.
We don’t want to water them down because we have “conservatory students.”
Many of these students will do something else, and I want to sleep at night feeling like we are doing our best.
And I don’t think these skills are mutually exclusive to music.
The stronger someone is at reading, writing, and communicating, the stronger they are at being musicians.
So, we are really committed to this duality of the best music education, and the best education.
And that’s also freaking people out.
Your thinking is a major shift in how we think about conservatories, because reading, writing, is important, yet often neglected in musical academia.
It’s completely basic.
What can you do if you can’t communicate at a high level today?
What field could you make it in?
Part IV. Looking to Leonard Bernstein, Yo-Yo Ma, Mozart, and Groupmuse As Case Studies In Versatility
Do you see your new program, Mannes In a New Key, preparing students to work not only as individual entrepreneurs, but also with businesses? Do you see this as a benefit, and if so, how can students at Mannes execute a strategy where they can make a living with businesses, or starting businesses?
The answer is, yes.
We want our students to look at the world around them, and to be able to ask the question of how can we bring to market what we do?
The market is so much broader than just Weill Recital Hall (a recital venue at Carnegie Hall).
We need to be using case studies from the way that this is developing.
What’s interesting about many individuals with “rarefied music careers” is this: many people who could have that old-world career, like Jascha Heifetz, who would have people carry his bags…have hit that place but want to have a much bigger impact on this world.
Yo-Yo Ma is a perfect example of this (with his Silk Road Ensemble). Midori created a music foundation.
Look at Renee Fleming, look at Philip Glass!
These are people who said, we want to be good musical citizens of the world.
So even the people who could have had the rarefied “carry-my-bag” career have chosen to be a part of a larger world.
It’s helpful to have people like Glass and Fleming as models. I think it’s also helpful to have (entrepreneurial young music ensemble) Groupmuse as model.
I do have a perfect business and musical model in mind.
And what’s that?
The model in my mind is actually Leonard Bernstein.
What is so interesting about Leonard Bernstein is that all of the following things are equal to him.
If you watch the videos of the Young People’s Concerts, he’s performing at a high level.
He’s advocating, he’s conducting.
He’s educating.
He’s speaking.
He’s laughing…
And he can be serious too.
Instead of compartmentalizing the main-stage separate from the education stuff, separate from the composing stuff, all of these things were part of a fluidity, of a versatility.
It’s what we were talking about earlier, about restoring things to pre-20th century, where the artists are multi-faceted.
We’re also trying to restore an appreciation for non-classical forms.
Mozart understood the music playing in beer halls, Mozart understood the theater pieces.
And it’s not just from seeing Amadeus that I know this…
Richard and Bill: (laughs)
But it’s true!
So what happens is that you have to be able to build the sensibility that artists are citizens in a different and broader way.
It doesn’t negate the value of artistic excellence.
You have to give students the skills, you will be seeing more and more ensembles like Groupmuse, more and more people looking to generate ideas on how to make it.
Because they have to. If they want to make it, they’re going to have to generate ideas, and they will have to think.
It’s like jazz artists today, as the clubs are starting to disappear, you see young jazz artists going into flower shops, setting up Sunday concerts with a florist.
You see them invading alt-rock halls, and they are getting booked, because they have to!
And they can’t sit around – those kinds of historic clubs in jazz have really declined.
The idea of versatility is central.
Groupmuse and a whole bunch of other people are developing professional development networks, they are developing collaborations, they are developing new kinds of funding models we haven’t really seen in classical music.
You can also take a look at New Amsterdam Records.
They are composers, they are performers, they are a record company, they are a presenting arts organization, they are funders, they are a collective who supports one another, they rally one another. They perform in each other’s ensembles.
And that’s the spirit. We want students to say “I can do this too.”
Part V. Mannes’ 100th Year of Existence, and What Has Made It a Special Place
There is a very special occasion coming up for Mannes. Mannes is celebrating 100 years, a centennial, as a music institution. What does it mean to the Mannes community that this school has been around for 100 years, and what has made Mannes special for the last 100 years?
The Mannes community is very proud of this, as it should be. They want to see us celebrate us in appropriate ways.
Mannes is a miracle.
Mannes has thrived and survived without a big endowment, without availing itself to the scale of other conservatories, in terms of growth,
Mannes went against the grain.
Mannes is one of the last places for students to sing solfege in seven clefs.
Now, that is probably going to change.
Mannes was able to honor tradition and not go out of business – while other schools felt that some tradition had to be forgone, Mannes was able to maintain its identity in deep Schenkerian work.
Mannes was created in some ways for the most altruistic and idealistic ways of thinking.
David Mannes didn’t want Mannes to be a professional training school. He only wanted it to exist for the love of music. It was a community school initially, but eventually turned into a professional training program when his son made it big.
His son, who created kodachrome (the first color film for pictures and cinematography), helped fund Mannes for many years off the proceeds of his invention, providing the foundation to make Mannes a professional training school.
So you had a school trying to adhere to the idea of small, of intimate, of deep, and to continue to be there for the love of music.
These things often run in conflict with cold hard business issues.
So in some ways Mannes is an outlier. The fact that it survived and thrived speaks well to the resiliency of classical music and tradition.
At the same time, I think everyone in the Mannes community needs to be more mindful of the actual changes that took place.
What we are proposing here today, while they may be more changes at once than before, is indicative of our true nature – Mannes has always been changing.
In fact, this is the fourth move. It went from being a community music school to becoming a professional training school.
There is something to be said about looking at the resilience of the school. I think more about David Mannes, more than anyone else, about his love for music, and how he wanted to instill that.
Mannes always in a way was a place that was smaller than Juilliard, smaller than the Manhattan School of Music, it was always a little engine that could.
With this new plan, we want to connect Mannes to the New School and enable it do things that will leapfrog beyond the smaller, intimate ideal of the conservatory without losing it.
I’m not as worried about the size issue, I’m worried about these kind of questions:
“Do you believe in people?
“Are you about people?
“Do you care about the students intensely?”
I don’t think the scale determines that.
I think that’s about how you feel about people, about having heart, about your commitment to honor the fact that students are investing their lives and money into you.
Part VI. Richard Kessler’s Legacy As Dean of Mannes
One last question, and it’s more about you Richard. What would you like your legacy to to be here? When it’s all said and done, when you retire, or move to a different place. What would you like it to be?
Legacy…
I think I would like my legacy to be, some sense that I helped to develop and further a community that…that asked questions. That wasn’t afraid to confront the status quo and makes changes when changes are necessary.
That somehow, I helped make Mannes become a more evolutionary and constantly evolving institution.
Some people are asking “when are you going to stop? How many changes can you make, aren’t you going to stop at some point?”
The answer is no – change is a constant.
So I would like my legacy to be this:
Helping Mannes become more of a place with a reflective culture, and in the reflection wasn’t afraid, at all, to make changes, never allowing tradition to stand in the way – ever – of serving its students the best possible education in whatever the time dictated.
If I could do that, I could be happy with that.
