photo courtesy of MSUM

MSUM Music Special — A Unique Offering to Mid-West Students

By Jeannette Madden
Contributing Writer

Minnesota State University Moorhead is unique in offering an exceptional Music Industry program to students in the upper MidWest. The emphasis is on music, audio, business and liberal studies, and while taking an impressive group of courses and private instruction, students have the chance to explore a wide range of performance possibilities in a variety of musical styles.
The Music Industry program offers degrees in the following areas: Music Business: including courses in Accounting, Management and Marketing; Digital Audio/Imaging: including courses in Graphic Communication (web design, multimedia, etc.); and Film/Video: including courses in television and film production.

Now in its third year of a reshaped Music Industry curriculum, MSUM Music Program Professors Simon Rowe and Ryan Jackson have observed steady improvement in the amount of quality activity among the students. Highlights of the past year include the release of Dragon Tracks XV, featuring tracks composed, performed and produced by MSUM students. The selections on this CD run the gamut from Haydn to Heavy Metal. The student team “Dragon Sound” continues to move out into the community under the mentorship of Professor Jackson and Todd Wawers, their new adjunct instructor in Live Sound.

During this past year Dragon Sound provided support for all theater and music events on campus and in the community. Recent outings include support for the creation of a live recording of the Willie Akins Quartet at Studio 222 and sound reinforcement for the “14th Annual Celebration of Women and Their Music” at the Fargo Theatre.

This past fall the music program held their Third Music Industry Summit. Guests included Kevin Lyman of “Warped Tour”, Jade Neilson of “Jade Presents” and Minneapolis-based band “Quietdrive.” The student-run record label “Undeclared Records” celebrated its first two releases this year. The music program’s MEISA group remains busy hosting events on campus and supporting university-wide events. A contingent of twenty MEISA students heads to Hollywood in early April for the 2011 National MEISA Conference. Graduating students continue to pursue internship opportunities from Los Angeles to Nashville and international opportunities are in the works for the United Kingdom.

In addition to the music industry program, MSUM is fast becoming the destination for serious-minded young jazz musicians. Last year four faculty-mentored jazz groups attended the Eau Claire Jazz Festival. Dr Allen Carter’s MSUM Jazz Ensemble and Professor Fryer’s Guitar Ensemble accompanied two Tri-College Jazz Combos under the direction of Professor Rowe and Professor Nick Fryer. Seven major awards were presented at the festival and MSUM and the Tri-Colleges (NDSU, Concordia, MSUM) returned home with four of these awards. This year they plan to take five groups to the festival. Another highlight of this past year featured esteemed trumpeter Marvin Stamm in concert with the MSUM Jazz Ensemble. This year’s April guest is none other than the distinguished drummer and percussionist Peter Erskine (tickets will go quickly for this April 28 concert). So far this year, clinics and concerts have been hosted with “The Kyle Asche Trio” featuring Melvin Rhyne and George Fludas, saxophonist Josh Quinlan and “The Willie Akins Quartet” with Montez Coleman and Willem Von Hombracht.

Dr. Rowe explained the reshaping of the Music Industry curriculum by giving a background on how music education for most of the twentieth century was conservatory based.

“But in the last thirty or forty years,” Rowe said, “we’ve begun to develop music education with more of a vocational bent. It began really in the sixties and began with a focus on jazz studies and that happened as some of the working territorial musicians that might have been in the studio decided they would like to come back to school and get an academic qualification of some sort. Down in West Texas and Miami they started some programs for the musicians that were already professionals in their own right, but wanted to parallel that with an academic experience.

“Following on the heels of that jazz experience some of the practitioners thought it might be nice to visit some of the other components of the music industry and to create a vocational learning environment for those pieces. They began to address specifics like audio engineering, live sound reinforcement, or even acoustic music. Those elements came in as well as people thought there should be some focus on the business elements like record company operation; how does a record company work in terms of who is an A&R person? Who goes and seeks out new talent? How do the marketing folks work to develop a product? And how does it work once it gets onto the retail side of things? Over the years things have been addressed such as: how do composers collect royalties from their work and legal issues of the industry? In a nutshell, there was a move to bring that industry expertise into the academic environment.”

Dr. Rowe then went on to explain the current program.

“As early as 1980, we were fortunate enough at MSUM that a program was introduced that looked at these elements. What my colleague Professor Jackson and I are working on is a suitable undergraduate introduction to a lot of these elements. Professor Jackson handles the audio side and trains students in live audio reinforcement and studio production. I oversee the business dealings and I teach the record company operations, legal issues and we get into artist management. By the time they finish their four years here we send them out into an internship situation in whatever their desired area might be.

“The zeal and the curiosity of our students are very nice. It’s at a high level. The success of our students really runs the gamut from behind the scenes sort of non-profit work to people who are pursuing their desire to become successful recording artists.”

Questions and comments: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)