The College Music Society Beyond Fifty
Kathleen Lamkin
It has been a wonderful year of celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of The College Music Society. Since our 50th National Conference in Salt Lake City last fall, we have been thinking historically, remembering and celebrating our past while continuing to focus on the present with thoughts, plans and actions for the future. Mary Anne Rees’s informative book, a history of The College Music Society, is in its final stages of publication and should be available for purchase at the National Conference in Atlanta in September or soon thereafter. Be sure to get a copy and learn of the vision, challenges, leadership and accomplishments of the Society since its founding in 1958.
While celebrating the past, the Society has moved forward since 2007 in Salt Lake City by engaging this past spring in a new conference model, the SuperRegionals, combining the efforts of two regional chapters in producing five major meetings throughout the United States. Because of this success, the Society is considering incorporating the SuperRegional structure periodically in the future.
A major initiative for our anniversary year has been the launching of our first capital campaign CMS Beyond Fifty. This campaign was organized to provide funding for innovative and creative projects in engagement and outreach both on and off campus as well as projects involving music in general studies and undergraduate and graduate curriculum and pedagogy. Our first named endowment, the Robby D. Gunstream Education in Music Award, was created to support these projects and at the same time to honor our executive director for twenty-five years of exceptional work. A goal of the campaign is to create other such endowed, named awards. The campaign initiative has been propelled forward by the Anniversary Campaign Committee, chaired by David Woods. Many members of CMS have already contributed to the campaign and the funds are growing, but the full support of our membership is needed to achieve our goals. Please consider how you can make a difference in our profession and in American society as a whole with your contribution to the campaign. Information about the purpose and goals of the campaign and its projects along with ways to make a donation is located on the CMS web site. Please visit our Home Page and then click on “The CMS Fund”. Thank you in advance for your support of these important projects.
To complement our campaign goals and motto of CMS Beyond Fifty our culminating anniversary event, the 51st National Conference held in Atlanta, September 24–28, 2008, has been developed to lead us in turning our ideas and energies to the next fifty years. There are many questions and challenges to consider. How do we envision our future and how to we affect change? Where, how and with whom can we best lead our profession? What are the specific areas we need to focus on? Robert Weirich, Program Chair of the Atlanta 2008 conference who has written the lead article for this Newsletter, suggested the provocative title of this meeting, “A Changing Profession in a Changing World”. For considering our changing profession the Atlanta program will feature many special events.
This conference will for the first time offer two pre-conference events, one a seminar on careers and entrepreneurship at the stunningly futuristic conference hotel, the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, and the other a CMS/ATMI technology workshop held at the forward thinking and technologically focused Georgia Institute of Technology. Besides the critical areas offered in these pre-conferences, the full conference program also addresses other areas in our changing profession. Presentations and panels will consider such topics as inclusive teaching, performance study in the 21st-century, music throughout our world, new repertories for new teaching, film music, academic citizenship, academic leadership, integration among disciplines, engagement and outreach and connecting through music, along with a wealth of other presentations and lecture recitals. The annual common topic panel, consisting of presidents of the regional chapters, will focus on the topic of “the relevance of the current curriculum to today’s students”. The Festival of New Music concerts will offer compositions from composers from the regional chapters along with the “Fifty for 50” concert, a special program featuring the works of fifty composers performing fifty-second works in celebration of the Society’s fiftieth anniversary. For the first time during the annual meeting of the Society the Robby D. Gunstream Education in Music Award will be announced and given to its first recipient.
Other special program events include the Phi Kappa Lambda Plenary Address given by Robert Spano, Music Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, The College Music Society Robert M. Trotter Lecture presented by Samuel A. Floyd, author and former Director of the Center for Black Research in Chicago and The College Music Society/Association for Technology in Music Instruction (CMS/ATMI) Technology Lecture given by Pauline Oliveros, composer, author and accordionist. Evening opportunities provide the possibility of attending a concert of the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, a concert of new choral music from the South at Spelman College and a dinner at the highly rated City Grill restaurant just four and a half blocks from the conference hotel where we will celebrate both the conclusion of the Society’s fifty-year celebrations and look forward to the next fifty years.
Join your fellow CMS members, along with ATMI and PKL members, in gathering in exciting and progressive Atlanta to complete the 50th anniversary celebrations, to network with one another, and to develop ideas for leading “a changing profession in a changing world”.
