Bloomington Herald-Times Articles
June 4, 2008
Indiana University
IU's Summer Music Festival reaching out
Musical mix broadens, although its classical base remains firm
By Andy Graham
June 4, 2008
David Baker's students recently gave him an iPod packed with music, from a wide variety of genres.
"I've already got more music on my iPod than one could listen to in a lifetime, just about," said Baker, who heads up the jazz studies department at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music. "All different types, too.
"They're all valid. It's like a smorgasbord. None of us should have blinders on regarding music or any other sort of art."
And that sort of sentiment seems reflected in the events, more than 40 of them, scheduled for IU's 2008 Summer Music Festival.
Sweet Honey in the Rock, the Grammy-winning a capella sextet that has preserved and extended the African American vocal repertoire since 1973, opens the festival June 15.
The festival winds down Aug. 8 with a performance from Maureen McGovern -- celebrated singer of American standards, jazz, pop and folk songs -- in collaboration with IU professor Steve Houghton's big band and the school's studio orchestra.
But Jacobs Dean Gwyn Richards feels the school isn't about to relinquish its reputation as a foremost college context for the classics, nor will it lose sight of its essential teaching mission, in its willingness to branch out a bit with the summer festival.
The festival is still primarily a series of classical highlights, including about 20 chamber music performances. Several groups feature Jacobs faculty, alumni and students, such as the Beaux Arts Trio, Canadian Brass and Chanticleer. IU's faculty and current students are also represented in the Festival Orchestra, students in the Symphony Orchestra, and alumni and faculty in the Jazz Orchestra.
Fred Child, host of the live classical showcase program "Performance Today" for American Public Media, will do a show from Bloomington while spending June 17 and 18 in town for collaborative projects with WFIU and IU.
Richards said the range of festival offerings are "a reflection of the diverse interests of our faculty, of the breadth of our faculty. Increasingly, more of our faculty have been educated in America and have grown up in and around various forms of American music.
"And what we see with the festival is, also, really a broadening of what David Baker is doing. There are many new ways David is getting all of us to think about ensembles and curriculum. What we want for all our students is the ability to move in whatever career path opens to them. So we want our instrumentalists not only to have the solo repertoire, but chamber and orchestral. Then, if they do pedagogy as well, they are truly a multiple threat. We want our graduates to be educationally and culturally oriented to any environment they are in. It's a very interesting musical world in which we live."
Baker, in turn, credits the dean.
"Dean Richards has been very broadminded about it," Baker said while stopping by The Herald-Times' offices for an online chat session last week. "The festival tries to be inclusive -- and we can do it at IU, where we don't have the same financial constraints other college settings might have and we're interested in all kinds of music."
Richards noted that Jacobs' percussion department just added a "world percussionist," Michael Spiro, renowned for his knowledge of Afro-Cuban and Latin music, to its faculty for next fall. He added that the jazz studies faculty was recently bolstered by additions such as Jeremy Allen and Brent Wallarab, the latter the lead trombonist for the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra that is conducted and directed by Baker.
"As our jazz studies department has developed, we added faculty with an ever-broadening range and, currently, it is one of the largest jazz faculty components we've ever had," Richards said.
And faculty contacts led directly to some of the festival's bookings.
"One of our voice faculty, Marietta Simpson, knows Sweet Honey in the Rock well, so that kind of spurred that on," Richards said, "and we also took note that Sweet Honey in the Rock is a match to Chanticleer, in a sense, to have both female and male a cappella groups.
"Maureen McGovern came to us through Steve Houghton, who has toured with her."
Tours need to make money. So do orchestras, many of which are turning to pop standards and themed shows to draw crowds. While most of the performances Jacobs presents over the course of the year are free and open to the public, it sells tickets for its opera and ballet series. The summer festival features both free and ticketed events, and the need to attract paying patrons is another reason to diversify the offerings somewhat,
"The schedule selections have to be right, pedagogically, and attract an audience," Richards said. "We want the overall program to be educationally instructive and also draw people, maybe even in an 'entertainment destination' kind of context, where they come to IU and Bloomington and maybe stay for a while.
"We are the single most active college public education program in the world. Many colleges find it untenable to compete in the summer with such things as the 'young artist' programs sponsored by professional orchestras, but that's not the case here at IU. We have the capacity to do it. We need to create demand for what we do, grow the audience for what we do, and we're doing that. Our attendance is going up."
And it's happening in the summer, in a Midwestern college town of 60,000.
"We're forever grateful for the special situation we enjoy here," Richards said. "It's completely improbable that a school of this size, with this sort of faculty, students and staff, would arise in a city of 60,000 and draw this sort of following and support. The artists who come as our guests recognize what a special environment it is."
