The newest installment in the New School Histories vertical appeared today, an account of the quite different legacies of classical music teaching at the New School and at the Mannes School of Music, which merged in 1989. It's by musicologist Sally Bick, who is ideally positioned to tell this story as she has not only an authority on music in the interwar period but was once a performer, and is now a scholar:This disciplinary divide is rarely understood by the public, let alone the educational institutions that house music programs. I am often reminded of this confusion when, for example, I’m asked what I do for a living. My answer, “I’m a musicologist,” is invariably followed by the immediate question, “What instrument do you play?” At this juncture, I usually stop to allow a rhetorical moment of contemplation and then answer, “I play the library.”
It's a great piece, and suggests ways in which the New School and Mannes, now together, have bridged this divide. It also helps us establish the project of the vertical, both in terms of its scope (all parts of the New School family, including the pre-New School years of units later grafted on to the New School tree, are included) and its authorship (Bick teaches in Canada, and was never a New Schooler).
