June 25, 2009
School of Music leadership changes from McCabe to Karpen
On July 1 the School of Music will experience its first change in top leadership since 1994. Robin McCabe, who has served three five-year terms as director, will return to teaching and performing and Richard Karpen will take her place in the director’s chair.
Karpen is a prominent composer and music researcher whose works are performed by leading musicians worldwide. He is known not only for his pioneering compositions for live and electronic media, but also for developing widely-used computer applications for composition, live/interactive performance and sound design.
Karpen came to the UW in 1989 as an assistant professor of music and has served in several leadership capacities since then. Most recently he has been the divisional dean for research and infrastructure in the College of Arts and Sciences. But he began his career in a most unusual way, by taking off for Paris as an 18-year-old high school graduate who disliked school and already thought of himself as a composer.
“One of the heads of the Paris Conservatory saw something in my music and allowed me to take her classes,” Karpen said. “But aside from the fact that the classes were in French and my French was just OK, I quickly learned that my belief about how good I was in music was not founded in reality, because I couldn’t understand a lot of what was going on at that level.”
After a year he returned to New York and decided that he would study to be a composer in the old fashioned way, by forming a close working relationship with a master to study composition, harmony, counterpoint, orchestration and so on. He found such a master in Gheorghe Costinescu, a Romanian émigré with a doctorate from Columbia University and “fierce standards of excellence.”
“Eventually Gheorghe convinced me to go to back to school,” Karpen said. “As soon as I started I decided that I’d dedicate myself to the endeavor through to a doctorate. I got my undergraduate degree at the City University of New York, taking classes from different parts of the university in a special program run out of the CUNY Graduate Center.”
From there it was on to a master’s program in music composition and computer music at Brooklyn College, followed by a Fulbright in Italy and a doctoral program in composition at Stanford, where he also worked at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Symbolic of the repetitions and symmetries of classical forms Karpen spent the last year of his doctoral degree back in Paris as a composer-in-residence at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) at the Pompidou Center.
Given his background, one might think that Karpen is all about contemporary music, but his first quarter here he taught both computer music (a field that combines music composition, computer science and psychoacoustic research) and medieval/Renaissance counterpoint, and there’s nothing contradictory about that, he says.
“One might say that early music is our geometry and our calculus. In classical music, everything from the 1200s on is foundational to what we’re doing today. And it’s great music that still sends chills up our spines.”
Karpen’s first foray outside the School of Music was in the Center for Advanced Research Technology in the Arts and Humanities. At the time, the University had a drop-in computer center for faculty and students in the arts and humanities with not-very-high-level equipment. Karpen proposed instead a center that would support research projects and foster increasingly complex technology in the arts and humanities. The center was funded by the College of Arts and Sciences and he became its director.
It was while he was in that position that he had what he calls a “light bulb moment.” He was working with a lot of graduate students, and he noticed the difference between doctoral students in music, humanities and science areas, who often stayed for several years, and art students, whose MFA program was only two years, so they rarely got more than a year in the center. He realized that artists had few if any opportunities internationally for doctoral and even post-doctoral-level study equivalent to most other disciplines, and this seemed especially problematic in new genres of art based on advanced and emerging technologies.
“Is art easier?” Karpen asks. “No, it’s not. It’s just as difficult as any other discipline to learn to do the kind of work we expect when we go to a museum and see great art or listen to great works of music.”
That insight led him to develop a new program called Digital Arts and Experimental Media, or DXARTS, which offers both a bachelor of fine arts and one of the first doctoral programs for artists. He was the founding director of that program and is still on its faculty.
Karpen moved on to his divisional dean position, he said, because he wanted artists to be represented at the table where decisions are made. “But the most fulfilling part of the job has been serving the broader mission of the college and University. My time in the dean’s office has been a wonderful experience working with inspiring colleagues.”
Taking on the School of Music position is just another way of promoting the position of artists in society, Karpen said. “After many years working primarily outside the School of Music, I’m looking forward to spending a lot more time with the students, faculty and staff there to help foster continued excellence in the creation, performance and study of a wide range of great music. And of course I plan to continue the mission of promoting a better understanding of why and how knowledge discovered and generated through the arts is indispensable.”
On a more immediate level, Karpen said he plans to put more focus on “music of our time and place” at the School of Music — music of the last 50 or 60 years, including jazz. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to de-emphasize classical music. His own musical roots reach deeply into the classical tradition, he said, a tradition on which he’ll continue to build while he is director of the School of Music.
Karpen inherits a School of Music that is in good shape. Under Robin McCabe’s leadership, private support to the school increased significantly and the school’s endowment grew from $1.59 million when she became director in 1994 to more than $8 million today.
McCabe attributes that success, in part, to a strong following of devoted fans who have followed her career as a pianist both locally and internationally since she was a student in the School of Music.
“It has been tremendously gratifying to see our donor base respond to our needs and our missions,” she said. “Our scholarship endowments have grown and we have been able to create professorships and fellowships that encourage our exceptional faculty to deepen their involvement among us. Gifted students inspire our faculty, and are in turn inspired by their mentors. This synergy has been greatly enhanced by the generous support we have received.”
A native of Puyallup, McCabe earned her bachelor of music degree summa cum laude at UW and her master’s and doctoral degrees at the Juilliard School of Music, where she served on the faculty from 1978 to 1987 before returning to Seattle to accept a position on the piano faculty at the University.
In returning to full-time teaching, McCabe will be honored with the Donald E. Petersen Endowed Professorship in Music for 2009-2012. She plans to continue her faculty involvement at the School of Music and her work as an ambassador for the arts and arts audience development.
“Serving as the School of Music director has enriched and enlivened the work and purpose of my life,” she said. “I’m now looking to my ‘next chapter,’ concentrating more on my artistic life as a performer and teacher.”
