Writing
Radically Responsive Music Schools: Leading Change through Culture-Building
Radically Responsive Music Schools is a philosophical reimagining of university music school 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 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.
Table of Contents
An Urgent Need for a Culture of Change
A Culture of Belonging and Collaboration
A Culture of Wellbeing and Intention
A Culture of Curiosity and Wonder
A Culture of Creativity and Improvisation
A Culture of Playfulness and Joy
A Culture of Change Maximization
Field of Dreams
Other Writing
Embracing The 21st Century Superpowers of Creativity, Collaboration, Entrepreneurship, Adaptability, and Playfulness
PUBLISHED JULY 18, 2022
This chapter was included in Michael Stepniak’s book, A More Promising Musical Future: Leading Transformational Change in Music Higher Education. It discusses the superpowers graduates need to succeed in today’s rapidly changing world, and how to build a culture that nurtures these superpowers.
A Case for Hiring Mischief Makers
PUBLISHED JANUARY 13, 2020
Michael Stepniak and Brian Pertl urge deans and directors to take a risk during these tumultuous times and hire faculty and staff members who have a natural impulse to nudge against tradition.
TEDx LU Music education, Improvisational Play and Dancing between Disciplines
PUBLISHED MAY 15, 2013
Brian Pertl gives a TEDx talk on how improvisation and play and the liberal arts ideal should be at the very center of a music education curriculum from kindergarten through college. The talk is accompanied by three improvising musicians, Dane Richeson, percussion, Matthew Turner, Cello, and Mark Urness, bass.
Reshaping Undergraduate Music Education in Turbulent Times Through Cultural Rather Than Curricular Change
PUBLISHED MAY 2017
All too often the best intentioned innovations to music program can be stopped dead in their tracks by the realities of university governance, institutional inertia, and NASM logistics.This chapter from College Music Curricula for a New Century edited by Robin Moore, presents a practical approach to implementing radical change in music departments and conservatories by focusing on cultural rather than curricular change.