PROFESSIONAL GROWTH
Click on the tabs below to advance your career by searching Contests & Awards, Schools, Festivals, Camps, Service Organizations, and our list of Services and Products, Scholarships and Grants and Events and Conferences.
And be sure to browse the excellent career advice offered by legendary Artist Manager Edna Landau in her Ask Edna blog and the entertainment law experts in their Law and Disorder blog.
US/Canada Arts Administration Degree Programs
Music Schools & Departments
Summer Music Camps & Special Programs
Services & Professional Music Orgs (non-profit)
Performing Arts Industry Events and Conferences
AskEdna: Career Advice blog
Scholarships and Grants
Send your questions to Edna Landau at AskEdna@MusicalAmerica.com and she’ll answer through Ask Edna. Click the links below to read Edna’s recent columns on the critical aspects of launching and managing and professional music career.
Communicating with Your Audience
During Edna’s 23 years as managing director of IMG Artists, she personally looked after the career of violinist, Itzhak Perlman and launched the careers of musicians such as pianists Evgeny Kissin and Lang Lang, violinist Hilary Hahn, and conductors Franz Welser-Mõst and Alan Gilbert.
Edna believes young musicians can grow their own careers, with “hard work, blind faith, passion for the cause, incessant networking and a vision that refuse[s] to be tarnished by naysayers.”
Special Reports
MA Top 30 Professional of the Year: Christine Taylor Conda
Chair, Board of Directors, El Sistema USA
Director, Reach*Teach*Play® Education Programs, Ravinia Festival
Christine Taylor Conda’s leadership as director of the Ravinia Festival’s music education programs has made them models for the profession. Reach*Teach*Play, the Festival’s three-tiered program to engage children with music, now annually serves more than 85,000 people.
Conda began her career with the Boston Music Education Collaborative, a since disbanded partnership of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, New England Conservatory, WGBH, and the Boston Public Schools. While in Boston, she also earned a master’s degree in voice with a music-in-education certificate from NEC.
In 2002 she took charge of Ravinia’s Reach*Teach*Play. REACH, which dates from the 1960s, is a year-round program of mini-concerts in schools, instrument “petting zoos,” free Ravinia lawn tickets for families who couldn’t otherwise attend, and invitations to Chicago Symphony concerts. TEACH places artists in primary schools for multi-week teaching programs that annually reach more than 5500 students. At the end of their units, students perform for their friends at Ravinia.
PLAY is based on El Sistema and, like the original Venezuelan model, seeks to effect social change through music for children with the fewest resources and the greatest need. Conda’s 2010 visit to see El Sistema in action at a Chicago school led her to launch, two years later, the first Sistema Ravinia orchestra at the
Catalyst Circle Rock School located on Chicago’s west side. Conda found corporate funding for the purchase of 50 instruments, devised a curriculum, and hired and trained the teachers.
The success at Circle Rock, as witnessed and praised by Gustavo Dudamel, led to more demand and more funding. By 2015, Conda was able to add four more communities, which use the Festival facilities for practice and concerts.
Under her direction Reach*Teach*Play has become one of El Sistema USA’s mentoring organizations to new and emerging programs. In 2016 Taylor Conda was appointed to El Sistema USA’s board, where her work on membership contributed to a huge program growth. In July she was named board chair. Through Sistema Ravinia, Conda is realizing her lifelong goal of using music education as an agent of equal access and social justice.