ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.–– Bard College has been awarded a $2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the launch of an innovative Master of Music Degree Program in Curatorial, Critical, and Performance Studies and its resultant ensemble, The Orchestra Now (TON). This unique training orchestra and master’s degree program provides musicians with professional-level orchestral training that is integrated into the interdisciplinary graduate study of music’s place in culture and history. The program is designed to prepare select conservatory graduates for the challenges facing the modern symphony orchestra and to produce scholars and advocates of classical and contemporary music as well as practiced members of a top grade orchestra. Musicians receive three years of advanced orchestral training and take graduate-level courses in orchestral and curatorial studies, leading to a Master of Music degree. Funding from the Mellon grant will help to support student stipends, curriculum development, and salary and honoraria for visiting faculty and lecturers.
“I would like to thank the Mellon Foundation for this generous grant to our new graduate program in orchestral studies, which is modeled after the successful program of our Center for Curatorial Studies,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “We appreciate the Mellon Foundation’s support of innovative programs such as this one, which binds together the arts and the humanities. This new program extends the same contextual approach we value in the visual arts to practitioners of music in an orchestral setting.”
The curriculum of The Orchestra Now involves intensive practical and academic study. Orchestra rehearsals are held 4–5 days a week and courses 2–3 days a week. Courses in orchestral and curatorial studies, taught by Bard College faculty, guest scholars, and performing artists, provide a historical and critical understanding of the orchestra’s past and present roles in society and its responsibility to remain responsive to a changing musical landscape. A Teaching Artist Program, developed by the Longy School of Music of Bard College, deepens orchestra musicians’ understanding of their responsibility to new audiences and provides the members of The Orchestra Now with opportunities to engage in community outreach projects with mid–Hudson Valley schools, regional concert series, and community music education programs. The graduate curriculum culminates in self-designed independent study projects, involving such activities as forming and managing a performing ensemble, curating a program of solo and chamber works to explore a topic of social importance, participating in transcribing a masterwork for new or unusual instruments, or working with community members to explore and express their life experience in words and music.
The Orchestra Now, a training orchestra composed of the program’s members, will be in residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The orchestra and its graduate curriculum are a collaboration of Bard College, the Longy School of Music of Bard College, and The Bard College Conservatory of Music and its Graduate Conducting Program.
The graduate students who constitute The Orchestra Now are chosen by competitive audition and academic review from the finest conservatory graduates in the United States and abroad. The entering class is a cohort of forward-thinking, exceptional musicians who are redefining what it means to be an orchestra. All musicians accepted into The Orchestra Now receive a full-tuition scholarship along with an annual fellowship stipend of $24,000 and health benefits. For more information, visit bard.edu/orchnow/.
