FROM THE DEAN
CHRIS PRICE
Peabody Friends,
Dean Fred Bronstein
2
PEABODY
FALL 2020
These past eight months have been remarkable and unprecedented, marked by public health and social crises that have inspired all of us to think anew about the meaning of what we do and our place in the world. For artists and institutions whose missions are to touch people with the arts, it has been a time to find new ways to meet a bold mission. For Peabody, that has meant rededicating ourselves to training the most diverse and outstanding group of artists possible for a constantly changing, unpredictable world. Since the onset of the pandemic last March, after moving all our programs to a remote format within days, we immediately began planning for the fall semester. With the safety of the community and the delivery of the best quality education possible as guiding principles, we planned for a hybrid return, but invested in the infrastructure and training to ensure the highest quality student experience possible in a fully remote instructional mode, which is where we have arrived for the fall 2020 semester. And while there are many challenges in this new world, it has allowed us to further challenge our students with developing the important entrepreneurial, creative, and technological skills that we have been emphasizing in recent years through the Breakthrough Curriculum. Well before the pandemic, Peabody started providing students with a comprehensive education that prepares them for the real world — a world that can change at a moment’s notice, as we have all experienced over these months. This kind of education provides students with the background they need for innovation and creativity, resilience and perseverance, and the skills to be flexible and adaptable as they navigate the ever-changing performing arts landscape. The pandemic has not been the only life-changing event these past months. The national spotlight on the issues of racism and police violence against Black communities has also made us think anew about racism in our own community and industry, specifically in the field of classical music. While Peabody has made real and genuine progress in the recruitment of faculty and students of color, we have much to do to move beyond the historic reality of racism at Johns Hopkins, Peabody,
and in our field. Since spring, Peabody has launched a number of new initiatives, building on our existing work, to convene community conversations, secure new funding to enhance diversity on campus, begin a deep look at our curriculum and the historic and exclusionary way that western classical music has been presented, and to take a leadership role in opening that curriculum up to a wider and more representative group of creative voices. Here, too, as in the case of preparing forward-thinking artists to lead in a new world, Peabody must lead our industry in addressing these historic challenges around race. We are fully committed to that work. While events often shape an institutional agenda — indeed, we must respond to the moment — it is important to have a strong, forward-looking vision. For that reason, throughout last year Peabody was deeply engaged in a review of our first Breakthrough Plan and the development of our new plan, which shapes the next five years for the institute. While the bulk of the work on the Breakthrough Plan 2024 was completed before COVID-19 emerged and before the protest movement that began last spring, our vision was already robust in its direction around priorities that have emerged with ever-greater urgency in recent months, be that the importance of technology as part of the future of performance or the critical need to open up our world of performance to a more diverse world. I’m confident that with this new plan, Peabody is able to build on our progress in recent years, weathering the challenges of the last year, emerging stronger for it, and being prepared to forge ahead as one of the premier performance training institutions in the world. Finally, on August 2, the music world and the Peabody community lost a giant with the passing of Leon Fleisher. For more than six decades, Leon Fleisher’s name was synonymous with Peabody. We are incredibly blessed to have had Leon in our midst for all these many years. While Peabody can never be quite the same without him, it is in part the place it is today because of him. Sincerely,
Fred Bronstein
