Conference Agenda

For much of the history of music in the United States, composers have not just composed: they have been performers, conductors, entrepreneurs and, quite often, administrators, overseeing the production of culture. Leading a modern-day American music school is a project of creativity and bureaucracy entwined, maintaining longstanding traditions of artistic and educational excellence while also grappling with the problematic history of those traditions, which have long excluded vernacular and nonwhite musical voices. What does it mean to compose in America today, while overseeing a major cultural institution in flux? For this special live episode of the podcast Sound Expertise, host Will Robin interviews composer Jonathan Bailey Holland, dean of the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, to answer these crucial questions.