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
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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: Jackson Cooper
Major Gifts Manager
Pacific Northwest Ballet
For Jackson Cooper, fundraising means “talking to people who love what you love.” That love has carried him to positions as major gifts manager at Pacific Northwest Ballet and as the precocious 23-year-old executive/artistic director at Chamber Music Raleigh. He reports increased revenue streams and board membership at both organizations.
Cooper traces his interest in arts administration to a production of Grease he saw at age 14 at The North Carolina Theater in Raleigh. He remembers thinking, “‘How do I do that? How do I get 1,200 people to be excited about the same thing I’m excited about?’ I learned that it was producing.”
Bitten by the theater bug, he asked his mom to help him fire off an email to the company, which agreed to take him on as an intern, first in its music department then in fundraising. Other roles at Raleigh performing arts organizations followed, including helping to organize a 24-hour theater festival in the city—and that was even before Cooper headed off to college at UNC Greensboro. There, he freelanced as a critic for a handful of North Carolina papers and pursued his interest in orchestral conducting, graduating with a double major in theater and business.
UNC Greensboro didn’t have an arts management program when he attended. Now, in a full-circle homecoming, he teaches it at his alma mater over Zoom and at Seattle University. He has also authored a children’s book about the importance of philanthropy (A Kid’s Book About Kindness) and is co-authoring one about sustainable fundraising, which he reports is scheduled to be issued in 2027 by Columbia Business School Publishing. He sees these recent projects as his way to give back to the field. “I equate my journey now to Taylor Swift: This is my Eras Tour, and I’m in a service era,” Cooper quips.