School of Music faculty and students have welcomed long-awaited plans for new Music facilities on South Campus.
“This has been among the faculty’s highest priorities since I was a young faculty member in 1972,” said professor and former Dean Bernard Dobroski. “It was the highest on (our) list of priorities, and it’s never left this list of priorities over the years.”
Pick-Staiger Concert Hall and Regenstein Hall were part of a 1960s plan to move the School of Music to the lakefront, Dobroski said. But after Pick-Staiger and Regenstein were built, the third building fell off the list of priorities, he said. The School of Music converted an old dormitory to create its third building, the Music Administration Building near Sherman Avenue.
The construction will add wings to both Regenstein and Pick-Staiger. This central location will provide “creative spaces that allow for the interdisciplinarity that has been a hallmark of the school,” Dobroski said.
“Unlike some schools in the university that sit as islands, we have programs in education, in cognition, in medicine and rehabilitation, in journalism and engineering,” he said.
Music junior Andrew Nogal, who served on the Music advisory board in 2003, said Music students often complained to the board about inadequate practice space and the physical distance between MAB and Regenstein, which serve students with different concentrations.
“The problem with the current situation is that the academic department, the voice department and the piano department are housed in MAB, and at Regenstein we have the winds and strings,” Nogal said. “So those different sides of the Music school don’t overlap as much as they probably should.”
Nogal said he wished the construction had occurred earlier because of the caliber of the Music school.
“Music students tend to think that we’re treated as second-rate students at the university, and in the music school there might be a perception that we don’t get as much funding as we deserve,” he said.
Melanie Woodward, a second-year Music graduate student, said she also wished the renovations had occurred earlier.
“By the time it’s built we won’t be anywhere near here,” Woodward said.
Woodward, a graduate of Arizona State University, said ASU had a new music building, floor-to-ceiling windows, modern recital halls and pianos that were replaced annually. She said she welcomes the planned construction but believes NU’s School of Music’s reputation compensates for its lack of top-notch facilities.
“As nice as it would be to have a new building, it’s not what draws the students, it’s the professors,” she said.
Music freshman Julia Marquis said new facilities may attract students who are deciding between NU and other schools, but she said the current infrastructure did not deter her from applying.
“It would be nice to have a really nice building,” Marquis said. “However, the prestige of this school definitely still attracted me to it.”
Because MAB once was a dorm, its practice rooms are oddly shaped and awkwardly laid out, Marquis said.
“It’ll be nice to have it updated and be in a building that’s actually meant to be a music building,” she said.
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