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The Scene Room
The Scene Room Podcast spotlights the movers and makers redefining the performing arts—focusing on innovative marketing, leadership, and the importance of collaboration. Hosted by Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bowman, with a keen eye on audience trends and cultural shifts, the goal is to explore how artists and organizations are connecting with communities, shaping the future, and redefining what it means to engage and inspire.
The Scene Room
Alexander Brose — Unlocking Potential: The Power of Music Education
With over 25 years of experience, Alexander Brose shares his unique leadership journey. He highlights the invaluable year spent shadowing his predecessor, Peter Simon. This opportunity gave him rare insights and a wealth of institutional knowledge, laying the foundation to lead the Royal Conservatory of Music through its next phase of growth.
We dive into the rich history of The Royal Conservatory of Music and its crucial role in promoting music education across Canada and beyond. As public school music programs face budget cuts, Brose emphasizes the importance of expanding access to music education. He underscores innovative initiatives like Smart Start, which engages children in music from infancy, demonstrating the profound impact of early exposure to music on child development.
This episode offers a thoughtful exploration of music’s transformative power and its essential role in personal and societal development. Tune in for an inspiring conversation about how music connects, educates, and bridges cultures.
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Hi, I'm Elizabeth Bowman and welcome to the Scene Room. Today I have Alexander Brose here. He is the Michael and Sonja Kerner President and CEO of Canada's the Royal Conservatory, based in Toronto. He has over 25 years of experience working in the performing arts and education sphere and most recently he was the inaugural Executive Director and CEO of the Tianjin Juilliard Art School in China. I'm really excited to talk to Alex about his vision for this incredible institution. Alex, welcome to the scene room. Thanks for coming.
Alexander Brose:Hi, great to meet you.
Elizabeth Bowman:You're the new. I guess you came to the Royal Conservatory last year and then you did a year of overlap with the previous president, Peter Simon.
Alexander Brose:That's right. Yeah, so I arrived here in Canada I guess it would have been August of 23. Yeah, had a couple of days to get settled in our new place and the kids into school and then began a year as president and CEO designate shadowing Peter, you know, trying to really just see what it is that he's built or he had built over the past 33 years, which is pretty remarkable. And, yeah, it was a year long overlap. And then I became officially president and CEO just this past September. But the year of overlap was a very unique situation, pretty unorthodox, frankly, to have a president designate there for an entire year, and I think it was unbelievably helpful for me I mean just an incredible luxury in fact, to be able to be here but take a bit of a step back and observe and listen and really start to absorb just the influence that this institution has across Canada in everyday lives of children and teachers. It's just pretty overwhelming. So it took, yeah, it took about a year to figure that all out. It's just remarkable.
Elizabeth Bowman:That's a really great model for other institutions to take on board, because of all the institutional knowledge that you must have acquired throughout the year with Peter.
Alexander Brose:Yeah, I mean absolutely. I mean I would obviously highly recommend it. I think it's a two-way street right. It takes two people to make it work for sure, and Peter and I have just the utmost respect for one another, got to know him exceptionally well and just think the world of him. But, yeah, I would absolutely recommend it if it's possible. I just think having access to that institutional knowledge, and not just from Peter.
Alexander Brose:You know, I was actually able to take a pretty big step back and offer time up to really any member of the staff or faculty who wanted to sit with me and chat for 15 minutes at a time, and it's something that I did when I was in China, when I was building something from the ground up with the Tianjin Juilliard School.
Alexander Brose:Every new hire would come into my office for a little bit during their first week, regardless of their position, just to introduce themselves.
Alexander Brose:I could introduce myself the mission of the organization, just so that we were aligned and on the same page. Obviously, it's a much different situation doing it for an organization that's been around for 135 years, but it was incredible to sit with people, and I sat with about 190 of them over the course of a year to sit with people whose history and relationship with the organization is 70 years long. I mean, they're teachers who have been here for over 50 years, and those teachers who have been here for over 50 years probably went through the conservatory curriculum and exams prior to that. So you know, a 74-year-old teacher here has a 68-year relationship with the organization. That is so unique and it just doesn't happen anywhere and I think I knew that that was a possibility upon arrival. But it really started to hit me as these conversations continued just how kind of ubiquitous this institution is for musicians in the country and how close they feel to the institution.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, it has a very unique position in Canada. I also went through the conservatory system with music theory, singing and also my piano, and I think that's very unique for an institution to touch so many across an entire nation and also, like you know, be a bustling Toronto hub as well. Yeah.
Alexander Brose:Yeah, I mean honestly, I mean I've said it over and over again over the past year plus, but I mean I really don't think there's any other conservatory like it in the world to have these kind of five aspects of the organization all related and all encompassed within one brand, right From the three schools that operate here on the organization, all related and all encompassed within one brand, right From the three schools that operate here on the campus the Glenn Gould School, the Taylor Academy and the Oscar Peterson School. But then the learning systems, which is what we call our curriculum, our books, our exams, our digital training, our teacher certification program, our early childhood program, and then Kerner Hall. Kerner Hall there's really nowhere like it. So it also puts a lot of pressure on us to do a lot of things and to be a lot to a lot of people, particularly as the music in the public education systems in Canada continues to kind of be reduced in many ways, it puts a lot more pressure on us to fill that vacuum.
Elizabeth Bowman:Can I rewind a little bit and find out a little bit about where you came from, your formative years education? How did you get to where you are right now? Let's start at the beginning in brief.
Alexander Brose:Music has always been a part of my life and I have two parents who are although not musical, I mean, I think that they both have musical talent.
Alexander Brose:Music was always in the house, for sure. I actually was really lucky to have the opportunity to grow up overseas. I was born in New York City but at the age of seven moved to South Korea and it was really there that I started to sing and to be musical and I was cast in a production of Tom Sawyer in grade four at the Seoul Foreign School and it was an amazing opportunity. I began to see, even at a very young age, just how much music can connect people and serve as a cultural bridge. I mean, here was a kind of a toe-headed blonde kid singing Tom Sawyer with a largely Korean cast. Right, it was just an amazing opportunity and that actually led to being able to be on Korean television, kind of a Sesame Street-esque show teaching Korean kids how to speak English through music, and so, again, just having that very early exposure to really what the power of music is, not just in terms of performance and beauty and all of that, but real connection and as a tool for learning.
Alexander Brose:Anyway. So I spent many years in Asia and came back to the US, went to university in upstate New York. Really struggled between wanting to either be a music major and something else, or something else major with a music minor or whatever. I ended up majoring in Asian studies with a concentration in China. Given my experience in East Asia after South Korea, I was in Hong Kong so had early introduction even though it's a Cantonese speaking city and country into Mandarin. So Asian studies, major concentration in China.
Alexander Brose:But I was just more of a musician than a student, taking advantage of everything that Cornell University had to offer, knew that music would always be a part of my life. I didn't know how at all. I don't think anyone really truly knows what they're going to do when they graduate from college. I was lucky enough to work for Cornell for a couple of years out in San Francisco and then found a job at the San Francisco Conservatory, which is America's oldest West Coast Conservatory of Music, going through a major transition from a very old building out in a very kind of older section of San Francisco into a new multi-million dollar home in Civic Center and so leading the admissions process there for many years, then going on later to development and fundraising was just an incredibly formative experience for me, working in a terrific city with faculty from the San Francisco Symphony chamber musicians, including Canadian Bonnie Hampton, who just are kind of at the forefront of chamber music. It was just remarkable.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah.
Alexander Brose:So got into music education soon after I graduated from university and kind of never looked back.
Elizabeth Bowman:It's amazing to see how people in senior roles like yours, like, end up there, and there's usually a link in childhood to music.
Alexander Brose:Oh yeah,
Elizabeth Bowman:in the arts.
Alexander Brose:Oh, absolutely Absolutely. And I was also very fortunate. The town that I grew up in, outside of New York City, just a public high school, had just a remarkable music and theater program. I mean just an unbelievable program, with numerous choirs and orchestras and bands and a theater company called the New Players that I was involved in that did nine productions a year, including three musicals, right, wow, musicals right, it's just unbelievable, right? So, being a part of that community, right, being a part of that kind of arts community at a very early age, I don't know you become very attracted to it. It just kind of becomes a part of who you are and it becomes a part of who you want to surround yourself with, you know, just to be around artists, to be around creativity, to be around beauty. Yeah, it's hard to say goodbye to that.
Elizabeth Bowman:That really underscores again, moving back to the conservatory the importance of your role in Canada and in music education, because, of course, all these programs are. A lot of them are getting cut and kids aren't exposed to the same things, and it's so important to expose them young, otherwise we're going to lose our audiences, which is obviously the big thing we're all fighting for within the industry right now. What is your long-term vision, your ideal vision for the conservatory as the new president?
Alexander Brose:It's a pretty, pretty big question.
Alexander Brose:I know, yeah, so I mean, as I've said, I mean the conservatory is a kind of a wildly complex institution, right, it has its hands in almost every aspect of music making, music learning and music teaching.
Alexander Brose:It is all things, almost to all people.
Alexander Brose:And you know, I think, looking audience goers, building the future instrument learners, building the future music teachers, but also building future scientists, building future engineers, building future writers and actors and politicians and lawyers, and everything in between is something that I think music can and should have its hands in.
Alexander Brose:And so we in our building here in Toronto, this gorgeous building, for the past 10 years we've had an early childhood program here that was the result of Peter Simon's vision of really connecting just how important early childhood music study is to teaching learners how to learn right and all of the studies that have been shown, and we've known for a long time that early access to music study opens the synapses, the neural pathways, in terms of really building a platform for better literacy and numeracy and IQ and problem-solving and language learning and all of those things that are important cognitive functions for us in life.
Alexander Brose:So this program called smart start starts at infancy. I mean you can have a six-month-old and join a class here with a trained Smart Start teacher as a parent or caregiver. You would be sitting in the class until the kid is three years old and then after that, in terms of those upticks that I just mentioned, is truly profound. We can't claim causality, but we certainly can say that early introduction to music kind of makes kids spear. It's just an amazing thing to see these young children enjoy music and having it be introduced to them at such an early age.
Elizabeth Bowman:I can see it in my own children. I have a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old and of course they're in a very musical household with their father who's a violinist, and my life has always been centered around performing arts, even as a communicator.
Elizabeth Bowman:But it's amazing to see them learn, focus and learn these things. But it is a fun way to learn it and to see their brains getting trained in that way. Also, I was reading Alex Sarian's book, the Audacity of Relevance recently Great book. I'm actually going to have him on the podcast too. He talks about this issue as well the importance of having them in the theater before some very young age maybe it's before the age of five or six, you know for them to experience some type of performing art while they're young.
Elizabeth Bowman:Statistically it will translate into them being theater lovers or ballet lovers or art lovers throughout their lives, and it usually bleeds into the other arts too, because once you are doing music, you can then appreciate music history. And then you can appreciate, you start wondering like, why was this piece written? Oh, it was a political movement. And then next thing you know you're into politics and then art, and then what was your first show?
Alexander Brose:What was the first thing you saw that you remember?
Elizabeth Bowman:Oh, my goodness, I don't know. I grew up in Ottawa. It was probably the Marriage of Figaro. That's my mom's favorite opera, so I feel like that was likely the earliest one. The earliest one I was in was Falstaff.
Alexander Brose:Really yeah.
Elizabeth Bowman:I was in the chorus.
Alexander Brose:Yeah.
Elizabeth Bowman:And I was like a fairy nymph for some reason you know, and that was mesmerizing Totally.
Alexander Brose:Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the first things I ever saw was maybe Annie or something on Broadway, or maybe it was a Nutcracker or something in New York City which you know is always so incredibly exuberant, but I actually grew up in Cooperstown, new York, as well.
Elizabeth Bowman:And so my first time on stage was as a small kid, in Madam Butterfly in a Glimmerglass opera production.
Alexander Brose:Wow, yeah, exactly Makeup and wig and everything else. And so you just like that smell of hairspray. Whenever you smell it, you're like yep. I remember that from when I was five.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, I did grow up in church choir environment which was very yeah, very involved, and there was a men and boys choir and a girls choir and I was head chorister and all the things and my brother was head chorister, you know it was my mom and I sang in a church choir together. Right, exactly, I mean. These things translate to a love of music throughout your life and general happiness and well-being too right.
Elizabeth Bowman:Oh yeah, absolutely. The past 10 years things have changed in the scope of communications for all arts institutions and likely the conservatory as well. With arts journalists dwindling and opportunities to get your message out there less opportunity to do that. Owned media has come up. What's the
Elizabeth Bowman:importance of owned media, for you?
Alexander Brose:probably played on some of them for our books, I mean, it's, it's. We have all of these wonderful recordings so that our students who are studying the RCM curriculum can go online and hear the pieces that they're playing. Right, it's an incredible resource, thousands of hours of content, and for us it's a question of kind of what we do with it. Right, how do we, how do we make it more accessible? You know, there's always I mean, I think, for those who may be listening, who were studying the RCM in the eighties or something like that, right, they would buy the book, yes, and there was probably a CD tucked into the back of it, right, and you could go and you could listen to the pieces and everything else, right?
Alexander Brose:I actually found one of those Long and Mcquade at recently trying to buy a saxophone book for my younger son, and I picked it up an old copy, right, but that does say something, right? You know, how are people consuming content these days? How are people buying books? What can we do to make it more accessible for people? Do we digitize our curriculum? Do we digitize our books? That's digital replacement in a way. But how do we transform what we're doing through the digitization of our books and our curriculum and all of those recordings? Right? You know why isn't there an Apple music channel for RCM where you can go on there, regardless of whether or not you've bought the book? Maybe you're a level seven pianist or a level five violinist and you want to listen to those tracks. You go on there and there, they are right yeah.
Alexander Brose:There they are. So we're really talking about what it means for the RCM to transform digitally, what the resources are going to be to allow for that to happen, because it's a heavy lift. It's a heavy lift to bring an institution that has been here for 135 years performing very well. I mean, we're doing great things, but to bring it into even the 21st century is a tall order.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, I always loved about the RCM books. I loved how they divided up the repertoire. You have your Baroque stuff and then you're moving into classical. It was always organized in such a way that really allowed the student to understand the way music has grown through the years.
Alexander Brose:So you don know.
Elizabeth Bowman:So you, you don't even know that you're studying that because you're as a student you're like, oh, I just need these contrasting pieces. It's a list or the B list, you know what I mean. But like, then you take a music degree and you study all the periods and then you're like, oh, I see, I see what they did there.
Alexander Brose:Yeah, Well, so it's so funny you say that, lizzie, because one of the stories that I've told kind of repeatedly over the past year or so was an experience that I had when I was working in San Francisco at the conservatory there as director of admissions. And I was sitting in my office one day and I got a knock on the door from our lead music theory and music history teachers and they had just completed their placement exams for the year and at the time we were actually getting a fair number of Canadian applicants and Canadian students who are matriculating and enrolling at the San Francisco Conservatory because of a couple of different faculty who are recruiting heavily at now Royal and other programs throughout Canada. And they came into my office and they said, alex, do you have any idea what's going on in Canada? I mean no, why do you ask? He said, well, you know, every single Canadian student has passed out of our theory and our history exams and we don't know what's going on.
Alexander Brose:And a very minor dip of the toe into trying to figure that out resulted in Royal Conservatory of Music. They had all gotten their ARs or they had all passed level 10. And they had all gone through that rigorous theory and history curriculum side by side, the performance curriculum and practical curriculum, and so it's just really an eye opening thing for me to see that and it's continued, I mean, since getting here, just seeing just how kind of holistic the music education here is in Canada and how really comprehensive the understanding of classical music here in this country and why it's just great yeah.
Elizabeth Bowman:I remember taking the top level of the music history exam for the conservatory and I think I was in grade 10 in school at the time and so far off from my university days, but really I was young and studying basically what I would end up studying in my first year of university. Since I'm a Canadian based in the US, I just wanted to ask you about your presence in the in the United States market. I personally have bought RCM books for my kids.
Alexander Brose:So RCM has had a presence in the US for for a very long time. I think we probably do about between 55 and 60,000 exams a year, for example, and about 7,000 or 8,000, maybe 9,000 of those come from the US, so it's a pretty good foothold. There are pockets within the US that are very devoted to the RCM curriculum. Southern California in particular is a really, really strong base for us. Pockets in Texas, illinois, massachusetts, tri-state area, florida yeah, a lot of really, really terrific teachers who have found out about the Royal Conservatory of Music.
Alexander Brose:We have these incredible events over the course of an academic year called Celebrations of Excellence, and so we have basically the gold medalists those who have scored the highest on their exams in Canada all come to the RCM to Toronto and do a showcase concert, usually in the fall. But we do the same thing for kids who have taken the exams in the US and they actually come to Carnegie Hall and we do a showcase concert at Carnegie Hall every January, which is terrific, and it's been interesting getting to know those students and their families. Many of them have a Canadian connection, right? So maybe their parents were Canadian, they grew up in Canada, now they're living in the US and of course, they were gonna study the RCM. But others found out about it through their teachers. So many teachers have found out about the curriculum and the method and just are so devoted to it because it's so good. Right, it encompasses all the things that we've actually been talking about.
Alexander Brose:It's been really wonderful to see really that awareness growing in the US about what the RCM can do for early music study and beyond and I think as a result of that, I suppose and we need to do a better job. I mean, part of what my mandate is is to really work on the brand of the conservatory right so that a student studying the piano curriculum in Orange County, california, knows that when they graduate from high school there is a school in Toronto called the Glenn Gould School that's part of the Royal Conservatory of Music that they could apply to and come study piano right.
Alexander Brose:I don't think there are many Americans, certainly who know that there's that connection and in fact I don't even know if all Canadians understand that studying the curriculum in Red Deer is something that is connected to a campus in Toronto. And in fact there was a really great interview in the New York Times recently with Eugene Levy and he was talking about his five favorite things in Toronto and one of them was Kerner Hall and really wonderful photo of Kerner Hall and, of course, the comments in the digital online version were so fantastic. One person wrote in, I think from Alberta, maybe BC, saying wow, you know, I went through my books and I got grade eight and I never knew that the Royal Conservatory was an actual building in a school in Toronto. So what can we do? Right? What can we do to really inform and educate people about what this institution really is right, from the books and the exams, but also to the schools that we have here and then the incredible concert stage that we have here in our midst as well?
Elizabeth Bowman:Well, the good news is that you have the product and you have the backing, and so then you're just looking for a strategy. So that's a better position to be in than most. Yeah, that's a very good point?
Alexander Brose:Absolutely no. It's so lucky to have everything that's gone on here for 135 years and even over the past 33 years. Right, peter's vision, you know it's separation from the University of Toronto and what's been built since that time. It's kind of nothing short of a miracle, to be honest. Right To create a degree program, to create a really high-end program for kids 8 to 18 years old from all over the GTA to build Kerner Hall, and it's just a very, very incredible institution and I just feel so lucky to be a part of it.
Elizabeth Bowman:Can I ask what you do when you're not president doing your job?
Alexander Brose:Oh man, I wish I didn't have to think so hard about it. Yeah, I have two boys and an incredible wife and I do love spending time with them. We try and travel as much as we can. We're actually off to Chile next week to see my wife's family in South America, which is really, really exciting First time for one of my sons to go. So travel has always been a huge part of my upbringing. Having grown up in Asia and seen the world at a very young age kind of get the bug, and I think my kids got it to a degree when we were living in China starting in 2017. And up until COVID, we were just traveling and seeing just the most incredible places, and so I think travel will always be an important part of our family and if we can find the time to do it. It obviously takes up a lot of time. It takes you out of the office when you're traveling.
Alexander Brose:I love baseball. Not going to lie, you know I'm a rabid baseball fan and I am a Yankee fan, although I have numerous, numerous no hold on. I have numerous Jays hats and have gone to numerous games and just love the spirit and the culture of baseball in Toronto and throughout Canada and it's, you know, very important board member here on our board has got very deep ties to the Jays and so, yeah, the Jays just love the experience of going to see that team play and hopefully they do better this year than they did last year. And I love political science. I just, you know, having grown up overseas and having been an Asian Studies major and having worked abroad, you know, in Canada and just the elections and politics and all of that stuff. I mean today's election day here in Toronto, exciting. But yeah, I've always just been very fascinated with government and politics and things like that, so I spend a lot of time reading about that as well. Foreign policy, that kind of stuff.
Elizabeth Bowman:Well, it's certainly an interesting time for that.
Alexander Brose:Is it? Ever I won't comment Is it ever Bit of, yeah, bit of kryptonite?
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, thanks for being on the podcast and for having this conversation, and I hope to connect with you more.
Alexander Brose:Oh, Lizzie, thanks so much. This has been super fun. Thanks for doing this. It's been a pleasure to watch your other episodes and I hope to work with you again soon.
