Posted on February 18, 2021; Updated: February 18, 2021
By Carol JG Ward, [email protected], 803-777-7549
Tayloe Harding, dean of the School of Music, was honored with the 2021 Governor of Arts Award for his work in arts education. Harding was one of seven recipients of the award, the state’s greatest recognition for achievements in practice or support for the arts.
The SC Arts Commission recognized Harding’s involvement in the community by serving on the steering committee of the State Basic Curriculum Project and his national leadership as president of the College Music Society.
We talked to Harding to talk about the award, teaching music during a pandemic and new ventures at the School of Music.
Throughout the pandemic, the School of Music continued to fulfill its mission of preparing students. Can you talk about how your teachers and students have demonstrated resilience and flexibility during this time?
I was serving as interim dean of the university in March 2020, when the entire campus had to readjust to online learning, but the interim dean of the School of Music put together a management team that I continue to consult for all types of academic subjects. , in addition to only COVID Management. In June, we formed a summer task force of teachers and music staff to study how to adjust facilities to make music in person safely and how to become more fully involved with online teaching and learning during the summer and fall. This meant adjusting virtually all courses in some way. Our faculty was willing to adapt to totally new forms of teaching and music production and to embrace a public health challenge as an opportunity to promote the impact of the music school on students and communities.
Most of the music instruction and music production is done in person, but we spent a lot of time thinking about how we could expand online capacity not only at the moment, but also to leverage it towards a better future. We just started to scratch the surface of how we can do this.
You were recently honored with the Governor’s Award for the Arts for your work in arts education. How do leadership activities outside the university help inform the work you do at the School of Music?
The award recognizes a variety of educational and artistic curriculum issues across the state with which I have been involved and that have become a model for other states, as well as in the defense of the arts, a major problem for me that has become part of our curriculum at UofSC. I think it also has to do with how the School of Music is developing future music teachers. This has been critical, largely based on the people we hire, but also based on the fact that our faculty and alumni work together and constantly address the next problem. Almost half of all public school music teachers in South Carolina are trained by the UofSC School of Music. Helping to boost music education in our state is one of the great legacies of the UofSC School of Music.
The School of Music has recently embarked on major projects: the Bridging Our Distances initiative and the management of the Koger Center. The school will also run the Greene Street United Methodist Church as a venue. How do these new efforts benefit our students and the wider community?
The Koger Center’s real possibilities for promoting school and music in our state are through its own self-production efforts and not just as a rental location. It is a very natural fit with the School of Music, so we are finding ways to leverage the faculty and staff of both institutions in the production and presentation.
The Greene Street United Methodist Church will provide the school with approximately 11,000 square feet of additional space. Part of it needs renovation to be useful for our music program, but some areas like the sanctuary with its beautiful woodwork and windows have very good acoustics and will need few updates. The jazz program will move there, and it will be an acting space for the school. The church congregation will also continue to use it on Sundays. We are very excited about the possibilities for collaboration in the church on Greene Street and the invitation of others to be part of it.
Bridging Our Distances is a major result of last summer’s post-COVID task force. We decided that we wanted to leverage the work of the music school, student concerts, faculty recitals and invited events in a way that crossed the distances presented to our society by the pandemic and racial and ethnic division. We identified four bridges: uniting communities, amplifying voices, celebrating heroes and stimulating our future.
We’ve been isolated from each other for almost a year now, and music can help heal our society and bring us together again. The next major activity of the Bridging Our Distances initiative will be a series of week-long events, Celebrating Local Heroes with The Concert Truck, where we will celebrate 10 community heroes in Midlands – live where they work – with a final concert at Horseshoe in night of March 29th.
One of the hallmarks of his administration as dean was the hiring of high-level teachers nationally. Can you talk about how these hires helped to move the school forward?
Although all job descriptions have specific teaching, acting, research, writing and service tasks, we want candidates to choose our school because of our five core values, which strive for excellence, ensuring student success, preparing music leaders for the tomorrow, training exceptional musicians and educators and developing diversely qualified musicians. The last three are unique and differentiate our school. We encourage teachers to become student leaders and mentors in their programs and to contribute to campus-wide priorities, where our early adoption sets us apart. We have worked hard on this and, as a result, we have developed a reputation across the country that has proven itself with the nature of the candidate pool for faculty vacancies.
And, more specifically, one of its faculty members, David Cutler, was recently appointed Yamaha Master Educator. How does this kind of recognition help the Music School?
David is the nation’s greatest imaginer, innovator, creator and teacher in the field of entrepreneurship and music business, so it is so obvious that he would be Yamaha’s first Master Educator in that field. His two books – and a third to come out in the next two years – on music entrepreneurship are industry standards. Each college or university that offers a musical entrepreneurship curriculum has been seeded in some way directly or indirectly by the work of David Cutler. This really serves our university because it highlights how we will prepare musicians for the world of tomorrow, boosting national recognition for how we do it and how it sets us apart.
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Topics: Faculty, Recognition, Leadership, Music School