Celebrating our Success in Portland
Cynthia Crump Taggart
Greetings. It was wonderful to see so many of you in Portland at the CMS National Conference. For me, this conference highlighted the many strengths of the Society. I saw senior colleagues mentoring new faculty members and students, both through informal discussions in the hall and more formally through the career mentoring sessions that were organized by the Career Services Committee. I attended outstanding conference sessions that were multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, or interdisciplinary in nature: theorists and composers talking with one another about the analysis of new works, performers giving lecture recitals with musicologists who were giving papers on related topics, and, to steal the title of a conference session, faculty from all disciplines of music exploring “multiple lenses to transform” their teaching and scholarly practices. CMS considers pedagogy through a wider lens than the disciplinary organizations, and the many sessions that focused on pedagogy had strong philosophical grounding and provided innovative, practical ideas for immediate implementation. Other equally strong sessions addressed cutting edge, cross-disciplinary issues such as entrepreneurship education, distance learning, and effective practice in community engagement, providing leadership for music in higher education. But, perhaps what struck me most at the conference was the over-arching sense of a strong, energized community of CMS members who support one another and are eager to learn, share, and explore new ideas together. I feel extremely fortunate to be a member of this community.
We should be pleased that, in this financial climate of schools cutting back on travel funding, we had almost 500 people attending the conference. Faun Tiedge, who served as Program Chair for the Portland conference, and the members of the Program Committee deserve our heartfelt thanks for their outstanding work in planning and implementing this year’s conference. Their vision was discernable in the program of events during the conference. The high level of attendance over the last several years at our national conferences represents a meaningful shift within CMS to greater membership involvement in the Society. This speaks to the quality of CMS conferences and the organization as a whole.
Moving Forward
Now we look forward to the inaugural Summit on Entrepreneurship Education that will be held on January 15- 17, 2010 at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music in Nashville, Tennessee. This will be a joint Music Entrepreneurship conference with the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE). I look forward to studying entrepreneurship education in depth, including discussing its philosophical structuring, curriculum, and more, and I hope that you will join me. You can explore and register for the Summit on the CMS website. I think that you will be pleasantly surprised by how CMS has been able to contain costs while offering an innovative, interactive, compelling program, thanks to the hard work of Gary Beckman, Chair of the Committee on Entrepreneurship Education and Chair of the Summit. We also look forward to next year’s conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which will be held from September 23 to 26, 2010 at the Marriott Minneapolis Center City. Save those dates!
Visioning Possibilities
Following the Portland conference the CMS Board met to discuss future directions for the Society. This was preceded by a far-reaching discussion with the CMS membership through the Forums and Dialogues Committee, led by Douglass Seaton, on the final morning of the conference. During these informal discussions, Forums and Dialogues Committee members led discussion to gather information about CMS members’ views of the changes in and across our disciplines, the future of technology and its impact on the music industry and our work, and how all of this should play a role in how CMS moves forward as an organization. CMS always needs to be looking forward and finding new and innovative ways to serve and increase our membership, and these discussions were the first steps in a larger discussion that will take place over the next several years.
CMS, led by the Board, is undergoing a visioning process to articulate the most important ongoing concerns and future directions of the Society. This is a critical juncture in the Society’s history for several reasons. First, we are starting our second 50 years, which is a logical time to do some purposeful thinking and self-reflection about operations, resources, and strategic directions. Second, the Society has a revised mission statement that should result in changes in what we do as an organization. We must reflect the changes in the mission statement in the workings of our organization. Third, difficult economic times are creating stress on the organization that requires us to analyze critically what we are doing and whether there are changes that we should make in order to serve the membership and the mission of the organization better, given our resource base.
Over the next several months, we will be trying to gather additional ideas from our membership as we move forward with this visioning process that will determine the future directions of the Society. This will begin with a membership survey. When it arrives early in January, I hope that you will take a few minutes to share your ideas and dreams for the organization. In February, the Board will meet to consider your responses and move the visioning process forward. This process will be discursive; the Board constantly will be gathering ideas from the membership, CMS committees, and CMS staff. In addition, the Board will be sharing its work with the membership throughout the visioning process as it unfolds. I am excited to be part of this dialog so that, with your help, CMS can move forward with our visions of what the Society can and should be.