“If I have half a dozen events in an academic year, that’s a


lot,” he says. “This is easily twice or three times that much, and it’s all here. I’ve gone through way more music and done more live performing than ever, and I’ve been able to stay at home more often.” His approach, and priorities, are unconventional, an adjective


that fi ts Schoenhals to a tee. He grew up in Oklahoma in a family that valued music enough that he learned to play but not so much that he was pressured to be a prodigy, and was one of the fi rst graduates of Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music before earning his advanced degrees at the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. In his view, Blair’s newness when he was there was a boon. It


was still too young and small to provide the cocoon that often envelops performing arts students, so “it was integrated into the larger university environment,” Schoenhals says. “That was good for the trajectory of my work, to have that early experience in a non-conservatory university environment.” As it turned out, it was also good that “I didn’t have a lot of


intense classical training pre-college,” he says. “I had done a lot of music, but I was in a rock band, I was in a jazz band, played piano in a cocktail lounge, played for community theater. When I got to


university, a lot of that repertoire was very new to me. It made me realize I had to work hard, but it also excited me because there was so much stuff I was discovering for the fi rst time and just wanted to eat up.” His untraditional path is refl ected in his teaching. “I think


it’s served me well in relating to a variety of diff erent kinds of students and their needs and what their career paths are,” Schoenhals says. “It’s not just about playing Beethoven. Beethoven is intense, hard to beat, but it’s still one avenue. That was the beauty of my background. Those experiences have helped me guide people of diff erent backgrounds into diff erent kinds of career paths.” Like other thought leaders in the academy in general and the


performing arts in particular, he’s had to face the fact that the pedagogy of the past won’t prepare students for the careers of the future. “It’s this unreal world that we are all kind of perpetuating,” says


Schoenhals. “One of the wonderful things about being at Eastern is I don’t have that unreality, honestly. I can deal at a high level of music teaching and making but not have to feel like I’m training young people for competitions that don’t lead to anything. I have some performance majors, but they generally don’t expect that


Eastern | SUMMER 2015 19


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