Radically Responsive Music Schools: Leading Change Through Culture-Building

Radically Responsive Music Schools is a philosophical reimagining of music higher education culture from the ground up, arguing that holistic cultural change is the key factor needed for music schools to prepare 21st-century graduates for contemporary challenges.

The author discusses how university and conservatory music programs can incorporate traits they seek to foster in their students - creativity, innovation, improvisation, and entrepreneurial thinking - into the institutions themselves. Through Deep Listening exercises, thought experiments, and other activities, Pertl provides detailed scaffolding for creating music school cultures of belonging and collaboration, wellbeing and intention, curiosity and wonder, creativity and improvisation, and playfulness and joy. Unpacking the complexities of transforming institutional culture, this book envisions the modern school of music as agile, collaborative, and socially aware and outlines pathways for leaders to realize this vision.

Radically Responsive Music Schools is an essential resource for college-level music education administrators, professors, students, or staff members interested in how institutional culture can act as a catalyst for radical change in music programs.

Brian Pertl is a Deep Listener, ethnomusicologist, collaborator, improviser, visionary leader, and Dean of the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music.