Hallelujah chorus for the academic assets of the new music center
BY BARBARA MELVILLE
RIGHT FROM DAY ONE in the Arthur Zankel Music Center, Skidmore faculty and student musicians have found plenty to love about the new building. Tops on their list is its whopping 54,000 square feet, including much-needed classrooms, offices, and big chunks of rehearsal and practice space, from which “we get a huge pedagogical bump,” as music department chair Tom Denny exults. Besides all that glorious elbow room, Skidmore musicians also fell hard for the 600-seat
WELL-EQUIPPED CLASSROOMS
Skidmore’s Stravinsky expert Chuck Joseph is the first to welcome a class into the new building, when his music- theory students meet in January. The sparkling white- walled classroom is handsomely equipped with a grand piano, a towering computer rack and large flat-screen monitor, and a whiteboard crisply imprinted with music-notation staves. First Joseph hums a few bars of an unfamiliar melody and challenges his students—singers, composers, instrumentalists —to hum and then name the notes. They do, as one student scrawls the first notes on the gleaming whiteboard. When a piano down the hall bursts noisily into play, a student simply closes the classroom door, and … silence. “Isn’t this new class- room wonderful?” sighs Josephs happily.
“A ‘clean’ environment is a must for learning about an art that is based upon sound and silence,” Joseph explains later. A former department chair who worked with his colleagues for the past 25 years to help shape the new music center, he finds
16 SCOPE SPRING 2010
Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, the solid soundproofing built into the building’s bones, and its well-wired, state-of-the art technology. Practi- cally every perk sweetens or deepens music education at Skidmore. What do Skidmore musicians not love about the new center? Nothing. A headline in the February 26 Skidmore News said it all: “Zankel—A Love Story.” Here are eight things that especially delight both teachers and learners.
the new classrooms “a real haven for instruction” in music the- ory, composition, music history, and ethnomusicology. “Our students can concentrate more. I’ve noted a big change in their ability to concentrate on fairly sophisticated differences in one measure or another of a score.”
“The facilities have already changed how students are able to interact and learn in the classroom,” Gordon Thompson told the Skidmore News. Enrollment in his popular “British Rock and Popular Music in the 1960s” grew with its large new class- room, the two-story Elisabeth Luce Moore Hall. “When you’ve got a room designed for teaching music, suddenly things go smoothly,” says Thompson. “You go in and concentrate on the material.”
SOUNDPROOFING
Want to see silencing capabilities tested to the max? Visit the basement percussion studio where Richard Bastuck ’13 is taking a drum lesson from Mark Foster,
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