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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
Matthew Loden — Inside the Shepherd School: Vision, Values, and Purpose
What makes a great music institution? Is it world-class facilities, exceptional faculty, or something more intangible? Matthew Loden, Dean of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, brings perspective from both sides of the music world—as a former professional violinist and as a seasoned arts administrator who's led major organizations including the Philadelphia and Toronto Symphony Orchestras.
Loden's journey reveals what originally sparked his passion for arts leadership. "I found that I could enjoy the creative aspects of building something in the same kind of way I enjoy sitting in a big orchestra doing Mahler 3," he reflects. This revelation led him through increasingly complex challenges, from managing the Aspen Music Festival to helping navigate the Philadelphia Orchestra through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Now overseeing Rice's prestigious music program during its 50th anniversary, Loden emphasizes what makes the Shepherd School distinctive: its intentionally small size (just 275 students), extraordinary facilities including the new Brockman Hall for Opera, and its unique position within a top research university. Rather than chasing growth, the school focuses on excellence within a carefully defined framework.
Included in the Shepherd's School's outreach initiatives is the school's partnership with the Concert Truck, which brings classical performances directly to communities throughout Houston—including the annual Rodeo and Livestock Show. This immersive experience teaches students to communicate effectively while breaking down barriers between classical music and new audiences. As Loden describes watching cowboys in Fort Worth encountering chamber music, you can feel his excitement about classical music's potential to transcend cultural boundaries.
When discussing what today's musicians need, Loden offers wisdom that extends beyond music: disciplined curiosity, resilience in the face of failure, and intellectual humility. His thoughts on artificial intelligence in music are particularly nuanced, acknowledging both legitimate concerns and exciting possibilities while asserting that the human soul behind a performance remains irreplaceable.
Have you experienced a transformative musical moment, either as performer or listener? Share your story and join our exploration of how classical music continues to evolve and inspire in unexpected places.
*photo credit: Bedoya Fitlow
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Hi, I'm Elizabeth Bowman and welcome to the Scene Room. Today I have Matthew Loden, the Dean of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. He was named to the position in 2021 and came to Rice with an abundance of experience as a talented musician and a strong leader. Matthew has had an illustrious career so far. He was Vice President and General Manager at the Aspen Music Festival and School. He served as interim co-president of the Philadelphia Orchestra and as its executive vice president for institutional advancement. He was also the CEO of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra before he moved on to take the deanship at the Shepard School of Music. If you're enjoying the podcast, please do like, share, review, do any of those things. It really helps keep these conversations going. I'm really looking forward to chatting with him today about all that is happening at Rice University. So let's get to it. Matthew. Welcome to the scene room. Thanks so much for coming.
Matthew Loden:Oh, it's fabulous to be here.
Elizabeth Bowman:Tell us where you're podcasting from today.
Matthew Loden:Right now I'm on campus at Rice University, at the Shepard School of Music. In my office and I'm going to apologize in advance We've got a building going up next door to me, so you might hear some construction beeping here and there.
Elizabeth Bowman:And you've been at Rice since 2021. Yes, that's an interesting transition. You know, obviously, the moving into post-pandemic period, and just can you tell me a little bit about that?
Matthew Loden:Yeah, 2021 was a homecoming for me. My wife and I are actually both native Houstonians, and so we'd been in Canada. I was the CEO for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and I want to say we had about 18 months of incredibly exciting activity in Toronto, hiring Gustavo Gimeno to be the new music director there and putting a lot of important structures in place to kind of help turn the place around. And then the pandemic hit, and so we had another 18 months living through COVID-19. Covid-19. And one of the things that was amazing about this opportunity here at the Shepard School was that during the pandemic, the Shepard School completed the final building project as part of the long-term plan, which was to put the Brockman Hall for Opera in place, and so I knew that, if I were lucky enough to get this job as dean of the Shepard School, an important part of what I would be doing is opening up that building, and that's exactly what we were able to do in early 22.
Elizabeth Bowman:Amazing. Can I circle back to how you got into arts administration in the first place? Because a lot of emerging or people thinking about careers in the arts. I love asking this question.
Matthew Loden:Sure, I was incredibly lucky in that I was a full-time professional violinist in New York and a lot of other places, playing with different orchestras and Broadway shows, and had a teaching studio and was, like you know, doing what you do when you're a violinist in New York that way, and I had an opportunity to actually start an orchestra. So String Orchestra of New York City is still alive Sonic and the process of working with other colleagues to figure out how to incorporate a board of directors and how to do the fundraising and the artistic planning and the operational work and how to put a New York debut performance together. I loved that activity and I found that I could enjoy sort of the creative aspects of building something like that in the same kind of way I enjoy sitting in a big orchestra doing Mahler 3. And it felt like that was an opportunity for me to have an impact in a different kind of way on the industry itself and that essentially led to a series of wonderful opportunities.
Matthew Loden:I was the vice president and general manager at the Aspen Music Festival in school for six or seven years and that's where I got to really figure out sort of high-level, complex operations five orchestras, three opera performances, hundreds of performances for thousands of patrons over the span of an eight or a nine-week festival in the summertime, and that was just extraordinary, because the world of classical music tends to land in Aspen at some point in the summer one way or another, and I was accrued away from that bucolic, wonderful life to go to gritty Philadelphia when the Philadelphia Orchestra was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, and Alison Volkermore hired me and Ryan Fleur at the same time to be part of an executive team to figure out how to get the orchestra back on its feet, and that was some seriously challenging work but incredibly rewarding.
Matthew Loden:I'm so grateful for that opportunity and also grateful that Ryan is now heading up the enterprise in Philadelphia and there's so much positive that's happening there that it's nice to be able to look back and feel like I had a little impact on helping it be what it is now. And then, from Philadelphia, I went to Toronto in 2018 and I had an amazing time there. Canada is such a phenomenal country and Toronto is one of my favorite cities and made lots of friends, and it's an incredible orchestra. But then you know, the opportunity to run a school of music like the Shepherd School. It comes once in a generation for someone like me. So I wasn't about to miss out on the opportunity to at least try to get this gig.
Elizabeth Bowman:That's a huge breadth of experience. Now you've been at the Shepard School for a few years. What are your priorities going forward? What's your vision?
Matthew Loden:I joke with the faculty that the first part of my vision is to not break anything, because so much that is here. Unlike a lot of my past experience, where it was a lot of crisis management kind of figuring out what to triage, how to be managing in a situation where you're undercapitalized and where it feels like every decision that you make has some kind of existential impact, here at the Shepard School, we're already building on some incredible strength. First and foremost, the faculty is extraordinary, and so a big part of what I have to do is to figure out how to manage a generational shift in the faculty. The folks that actually built this school and made it what it is today. Many of them are retiring, and so finding that next generation of equally amazing faculty to attract incredible students is a key task. Aside from that, one of the things that is just remarkably exciting is that we do have this new Brockman Hall for Opera, which is the second building at the Shepard School, and I think that we probably have more square footage per student than probably any other school of music in North America.
Matthew Loden:We only have 275 students in the entire program, and a big part of our success has been that we have limited our size very intentionally and we haven't run after the sort of the shiny things in order to drive revenue, in order to bring in students who are paying full tuition.
Matthew Loden:What we've done instead is tried really hard to identify what we do really well and to keep doing that really well and make sure that we are distinguishing ourselves within a very prescribed framework and going forward. Of course, the world changes and we want to be able to adapt to that as nimbly as possible. So we're looking at everything from how can we engage responsibly with AI and what is that relationship with classical music going to be like in the future? What is it that we can do in order to give our students outside of the practice room the skills and the tools that they need to actually engage with audiences beyond the concert hall? And we want to make sure that, fundamentally, the craft and the art of performing and writing and researching as musicologists that that's fundamentally intact and still at the highest possible level.
Elizabeth Bowman:I was going to ask you about entrepreneurship. Obviously, today's artists have to be entrepreneurs and they have to be outward, facing public speakers, as well as excellent at their craft. So what kind of entrepreneurship focus does your school have?
Matthew Loden:One of the ways that we are addressing that is through a series of conversations with our faculty and with our students right now to look at what are the kinds of things that they feel like the students feel like they actually want to engage with.
Matthew Loden:We do have some fantastic faculty here who are really quite adept at helping students sometimes get out of their comfort zone. Right, if you're used to spending all of your time playing the clarinet really well in a practice room or in an orchestra, you have to practice. You have to practice getting out in front of people and being able to talk to them about your art form. So one of the things that we've done is we've engaged with the Conc truck over the last couple of seasons, which is a wonderful third-party arts organization that has a box truck with a side that drops down and turns into a movable stage, and we've been going all throughout the Houston community with our students and treating that as a kind of creative laboratory, both for the students to learn how to perform in spaces like parks or museum parking lots or before a baseball game at Rice University University and help them understand that part of their responsibility in being a musician in this day and age is to figure out how to communicate and how to share this art form as much as possible and as much as people are willing to listen.
Matthew Loden:I'm lucky enough myself to be the professor of executive music management, and so a big part of how I approach teaching classes myself is not just the nuts and bolts of a spreadsheet or the business enterprise of an opera company or a symphony orchestra, but that individual sensibility that people have to have as creative musicians to know that you yourself are a kind of enterprise, especially in your early years. If you don't win that first big gig when you're 24, you might be spending two or three years or more trying to figure out how to be a musician, and we want to equip the students with as many of those tools as possible.
Elizabeth Bowman:I love the concert truck idea. My husband is one of the concert masters of the Metropolitan Opera and he was actually originally discovered by Richard Bradshaw, who was the general director of the Canadian Opera Company, when he was busking outside of the St Lawrence Market in Toronto. He was just doing it with his string quartet, probably after a heavy night of partying, and you never know who's listening. That's a lesson for the students listening who are participating in this particular program, because really you think, oh, it's just this truck gig, oh whatever, but you have to treat every performance like it's Carnegie Hall or anything, because you just never know who's listening and what opportunities are going to come. Next thing he knew he was associate concertmaster at the Canadian Opera Company right away. I mean, of course he went to Curtis and he wasn't like yeah, he had a background.
Matthew Loden:One of the first places that we took the concert truck was to the annual Rodeo and Livestock Show here, which is, I think, the largest in the world, and it attracts people of all shapes and sizes and backgrounds and interests. And I have to say it was one of the coolest things to see our students on the concert truck, sort of on the fairground at the rodeo, surrounded by folks in cowboy hats from Fort Worth and other places who were thinking, oh, you know, maybe this will be the Orange Blossom Special or some kind of country music or bluegrass vibe, and instead we were doing straight ahead classical music and they were enthralled, they absolutely loved the experience and they loved the idea of seeing young people who are so passionate about this kind of art and this work and this storytelling through music that is in so many ways timeless. And so we're very much committed to making sure that we find those opportunities for the students and for the school to kind of get out there and be a part of our community.
Elizabeth Bowman:That raises also the fact that you're focused on community outreach in a way that exposes people and the word relevance comes into play a lot in this podcast and I would say that you're bringing relevance to what these kids are studying and really the future of classical music by going out into the community and reaching out.
Matthew Loden:You know, relevance is kind of a it's a bit of a double-edged sword, Of course like you want to matter in the society in which you live and you want to feel like other people care about what you're trying to express through any kind of art form.
Matthew Loden:The double-edged sword of it, though, is that there is still room, I believe, in this world for art, for art's sake and for the pursuit of things that are just achingly beautiful. Right, and the pursuit of that in and of itself sometimes should be justification. We don't always live in that kind of world, especially in a hyper-capitalistic society where the metrics are usually geared around how much money are you making, how efficient are you being, what's your productivity like? And I have found time and time again that when you get the right kind of musical experience live musical experience, where you have an audience and you have musicians on stage performing the transformational kind of emotional moments that people have are uplifting and carry them beyond their thoughts of gosh. I don't know if my tax dollars should support this or not, and instead it turns into how can I be a part of engaging with this kind of enterprise? Over and over and over again, because it is so valuable. Once it hits, it hits and it sticks.
Elizabeth Bowman:I used to help administrate a chamber music festival in Greece and we would go to small towns that had basically zero exposure to classical music, and the musicians in this particular festival were all first-rate musicians who were enjoying their holiday in Greece.
Elizabeth Bowman:But we would go around and we would fly her every day. We'd go around and it was great beautiful weather, but a lot of locals would come. And also it was very funny because having a concert at nine actually meant like it starts at 9.40, because you know, no one would show up at nine, like that wouldn't happen. Anyway, sort of like adapt to the way of the world there. But yeah, they would come and they they wouldn't know who schubert was or what this might sound like, and they were enthralled and so, yeah, there is that definitely that argument as well, that when you're performing music or performing any type of art, you're exchanging energy between you and that audience, and if that's the intention and the audience is receiving it, then that's a beautiful, beautiful, oh yeah.
Matthew Loden:Well, and so much of it is just about access and exposure we actually share.
Matthew Loden:I didn't know that about your Greek chamber music history.
Matthew Loden:I spent two summers in Turkey in a very similar kind of situation where we would play in the agora of a Roman ruin and the Turkish farmers would show up to hear our Mendelssohn octet and we played in like the Odeon at Troy.
Matthew Loden:And you know, having people without any kind of familiarity for this art form show up and spend two hours listening to something and then want to talk to you afterwards or figure out how does your instrument make that sound is incredibly exciting. It also reminds me of a bit of an apocryphal story that when Nixon asked the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy to be a part of opening up China and as a part of ping pong diplomacy he asked the orchestra to go over and tour China, madame Mao was so enthralled and enamored with the idea of the orchestra that she insisted that every single state radio station live broadcast the Philadelphia Orchestra all over the country. And Tan Dun still remembers being out in the fields and listening for the first time to a Western symphony orchestra and that was something that stuck and it gave us that kind of artist in the world, just because he happened to be there at the moment to experience that music, and so I think that's an important part of what our roles and responsibilities should be as we lead these kinds of institutions.
Elizabeth Bowman:What do you believe young musicians need on this topic sort of what do you think that they need most to sustain long and fulfilling careers now, in this current climate?
Matthew Loden:I'll be very general, right. I mean, my normal response would be well, it just. It depends on the musician, right. It depends on the young artist, where they are, how they're wired, what their skillset is. But very generally, I think and the discipline is not so much about spending five hours a day in the practice room, I think of it as a discipline around constantly asking the right questions.
Matthew Loden:It's difficult to get answers to a lot of questions. It could be a technical thing that you're trying to solve, it can be a musical expression you're trying to make, it might be figuring out how to navigate some aspect of the professional field, but it's the questioning and the curiosity about the art itself that, I think, is a bit of a superpower and will keep you engaged, because resilience is the other thing that you have to have in this business. So if you're asking enough questions, you're seeking the right answers, if you're resilient and you give yourself permission to fail time and time again and keep getting back up and getting better and learning from your mistakes, that is going to be, I think, a nice recipe for success. And finally, I think, artistic and intellectual humility.
Matthew Loden:We sometimes spend an awful lot of time as musicians digging very, very deeply into a score or into the sensibility of a particular work, and we have to have a kind of almost egotistical confidence in order to put it out in the world right. You have to know what you're doing. There's no safety net when you're by yourself on stage. But we also have to understand that we don't really always have the answers, and sometimes we don't come close to having as many of the answers as we think we do. And so when you can approach things where you're always seeking and you're not constantly assuming that you've got it figured out, I think that can lead to an incredibly rewarding and rich life, not just a profession, but that's just a good way to move through the world.
Elizabeth Bowman:I totally agree. I mean, especially when you're listening to new works or you're looking at new creations of art in general, like there's only one way to come at it and that's with a completely open mind as to how you're going to experience it, because otherwise you'll just be like, oh, this is just noise or this. You know, because the first time you hear something, it's difficult. People don't like change. Like if you look at how obviously music has transformed through time and how long it took us to get to dissonance, that must have sounded wrong at first.
Elizabeth Bowman:And now there's some satisfaction in having those dissonances and then resolve.
Matthew Loden:I tell my students and myself quite frankly that anytime I'm engaging a new work of art, that my job is to assume that it is actually a masterpiece. And if you start from the standpoint of assuming that anything new has that kind of architecture and craft and thought behind it, then you can be completely critical and you can decide. This is absolutely not the thing for me. But if you position yourself expecting that it's going to matter, that it's worth your time, it tends to open up your ears and your brain a little bit more successfully.
Elizabeth Bowman:And to assume that, if you walk into a situation and only assume that your perspective is what matters, that's also dangerous in terms of art and in terms of having a healthy conversation about what it is that you're seeing and experiencing.
Matthew Loden:Well, I mean, art is ultimately about translation between people, right, and we all acknowledge one way or another, we have the same human condition. We have the same human condition. We have the same foibles, the same hopes and dreams. We want to be safe and warm and loved and a part of a tribe, and finding different mechanisms to express those feelings is the motivation for every great work of art. And so why wouldn't we pay attention to how open we need to be with all of those kinds of experiences?
Elizabeth Bowman:Earlier you mentioned that you're looking into AI the relationship between musicians and AI. What do you mean by that?
Matthew Loden:We're very nascently beginning to explore things. Right now there's an opportunity for a bit of a final sort of capital project here at the Shepard School to build out one of our black box theaters into a real technology media hub that I'm excited about putting in place and through the early exploration of how we might want to populate that space, we're thinking about how do we want to shape our curriculum in a way where maybe we think about asking students for a degree recital instead of just doing what would be considered the normal recital, where you do a concert, know a concerto, a sonata, or you know something that is traditional and familiar. Maybe there's a media component that we need to pay attention to, a video component, an imagery, or maybe there's a way that students can intersect with AI and find new ways of expressing themselves. I don't know the answers, I just know that, again, kind of back to the idea of that, we know those are the questions to ask and I think that there's like with any new technology people are unsure or frightened or worried about the impact. You know, singer-song writers are now going to be out of business because AI can write better songs than humans.
Matthew Loden:In the classical music world. It's relatively easy to understand from a machine learning standpoint what the Vivaldi Four Seasons sounds like and just keep generating Vivaldi sounding Baroque stuff through AI. The thing that I'm excited about actually with AI is that we don't even really know what can be done, and we don't know what new ways of creating sound, new ways of engaging with traditional orchestral or operatic experiences I think that we're really at the beginning of that frontier and I think we have to be careful. And I do think that there is a legitimate concern about copyright infringement and the way in which musicians need to continue to find the best possible ways for their creation to be monetized when appropriate, and so there's a lot to be figured out, but I'm hopeful that a lot of the universities and the great conservatories and schools of music will be leading the way in some of those conversations.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, and as you should. You're a university, you're meant to be thought leaders, and in being a thought leader, you need to explore even the dark side of things, like you can't just make precepts without knowing why. So, and part of learning the rules for how to play is learning how to break them as well. Right, and learning that that's not OK, and that's just part of studying and thought leadership.
Matthew Loden:One of the interesting. I don't know if it's an advantage or not, but the reality is you can't actually fake it as a performer in this industry, right? So AI might help a contemporary composer shape a phrase in a different way, and we might. We'd never know about it. But if your job is as a translator of musical art, as an instrumentalist or as a singer or whatever, you're not going to be able to fake it, right?
Matthew Loden:And so I find that refreshing, and I also find it's a bit of an opportunity for us to continue to put forward what it means to be a live musician in real time in front of a live audience, where all you're doing is setting up everything you've learned how to do on stage and then people get to enjoy it, and that sort of anachronistic way of sharing music in this day and age. I think people respect that. I think there's a whole generation of kids that I have a 23-year-old daughter, and the music that she's been exposed to, the variety of genres of world music we've never had that before in the world and so she doesn't have nearly the kind of societal baggage that people from my generation would have grown up with around different types of music or what classical music was or wasn't, and the elitism of all of that, and so I think there's a generation coming up that really gets excited about seeing their peers do this stuff. Live.
Elizabeth Bowman:When it comes to AI and creativity and performance and that kind of thing, well, we all talk about the X factor that makes a great performance great. Even if you have a technically excellent delivery, it doesn't necessarily mean that your audience is going to be moved right. And that's the same thing with computer generated creations. I believe I'm not going to say I mean, that is my belief that you need to have the soul behind it and then the soul travels through that voice or instrument to that audience in order for them to have those goosebumps or the things that they feel, because I am not sure why, but that's just like we're sharing some sort of consciousness when we perform and that can't be replaced by a computer. It just can't.
Matthew Loden:I couldn't agree more. It's interesting, though, because you also have to take into account what the audience is expecting right? If you also have to take into account what the audience is expecting, right. If you come from within the industry, like we do, then you are constantly seeking out deep musical moments and points of connection, and that's kind of your barometer, right. But if you are at a wedding and you just want to dance or have background music, then AI-generated tunes that sound like you know, michael Jackson or Chicago, like that, might actually be okay, and so I think that we have to be equally careful about not only our judgment around how the music is being generated, but also like what's it for, where is it going and who's going to be listening, and sometimes you can get a different answer.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, that is thought-provoking. Speaking of digital, are you also exploring maybe virtual reality and stuff like that?
Matthew Loden:We will eventually get to the point where we have the bandwidth and the resources to further explore virtual reality. I know that there's a lot of wonderful work that's being done at other schools and other universities. I think that there's probably a commercial aspect of that that can be very appealing. Again, it kind of comes back to the early. Tenants of the Shepard School were very much when we were created in 1975. We're celebrating our 50th anniversary right now. We were designed to be a very small, bespoke kind of musical school and when we begin to look at things that broaden that horizon too much or beyond our capacity as a school of music to do really, really well, then we want to be careful and make sure that we don't overextend or replicate something that other places might be doing better. Right, I would much rather get out of the way or support a peer school in their pursuit of some of the digital items like what you might be talking about.
Elizabeth Bowman:I find it interesting because, in terms of the marketing role of VR I talked on the podcast about this at some point I mean there's so many possibilities. So I find you know, a university might have an actual budget to do some of these like crazy. Obviously this has nothing to do with your educating your music students, so, but in terms of the sponsors you may have for the university, I mean it could be fun.
Matthew Loden:Well, just a couple of years ago established a human performance center here on campus through the school of Natural Sciences, and it's basically set up in partnership with the Texas Medical Center, which is just across the street from Rice, and a lot of what the work is is measuring our student athletes and using data from the way that they throw a pitch or hit a tennis ball or kick a soccer ball, and they're creating physical baselines for trying to establish how they can learn, how it can be a learning tool to throw the baseball better, faster. More of a curve, we have the same opportunity to look at the way a violist pulls the bow across the string, and so, as a teaching tool, I see things like that sort of digital experience in virtual reality as being an incredible, powerful new way of looking at pedagogy and music definitely.
Elizabeth Bowman:Yeah, I mean with with how they're doing these, these things in the video games, even when they're teaching. I mean, I don't know anything about video games, so I shouldn't even like venture into this conversation. I don't even allow them in my house, so, but I understand that people are throwing balls and things in other homes.
Matthew Loden:Yeah, and if you're recovering from a stroke, it's probably a lot more fun to throw a ball in virtual reality to get your muscle mass back than it is to have, you know, some physical therapist screaming at you. And there's a lot of wonderful applications, I'm sure. But I don't have any video games at home either.
Elizabeth Bowman:In terms of your student body. Do you have any partnerships with other institutions around North America or even around the world?
Matthew Loden:We do. We have a number of both formal and informal partnerships. In particular, I'm incredibly proud of and grateful for the artistic ecosystem that is here in Houston, texas. Growing up here, what I thought was just everyone's normal experience to be exposed to astounding visual arts at the Museum of Fine Arts or the Menil Collection or the Rothko Chapel or elsewhere and the performing arts with the Houston Grand Opera and the Houston Symphony and the Hobby Center, I felt like as a kid that was normal and what everyone had easy access to. And instead what I have found as I've lived other places is that not only is it incredibly rare to have the variety and the extraordinary level of artistic expression in Houston, but we have a culture built around engaging with that, and people have an expectation that sometimes they just want to be entertained, but they also really want to be moved and they want to be proud of going to something in their own backyard that could be seen anywhere in the world and be important from an artistic standpoint. And so we have partnerships with Houston Grand Opera and the Houston Symphony.
Matthew Loden:I want to say something like 40% of the Houston Symphony is populated with Shepherd School graduates.
Matthew Loden:Our Shepherd School graduates are frequently on stage at Houston Grand Opera.
Matthew Loden:We actually just had Lauren Snowford doing Breaking the Waves and I remember when I was the director of admissions at the Shepherd School for doing Breaking the Waves and I remember when I was the director of admissions at the Shepard School we admitted her into the undergraduate program here and so that kind of ease of collaboration and camaraderie where the Shepard School can act as an early bridge to the professional world.
Matthew Loden:But beyond that we can also act as a real opportunity for the professional world to look at differently. We did a world premiere with Matthew O'Coin Music for New Bodies last year and he basically came down and we had an entire orchestra of students work with him on the podium while the ink wasn't even dry to do a world premiere performance and we could do that. He was able to do that because we weren't the Cleveland Orchestra charging him for two weeks worth of rehearsals, right, and you get a comparable level of musical excellence and a lot of these experiences and it's fantastic for the students. So we're very well positioned on the third coast that way and we're very grateful for all of the artistic partners that we have in town.
Elizabeth Bowman:Tell me what's unique about the Shepard School of Music we have in town.
Matthew Loden:Tell me what's unique about the Shepard School of Music?
Matthew Loden:First of all, I think the thing that's special about us is that we're a school of music that is very much a part of Rice University and Rice is a tier one research university and renowned for its engineering, natural sciences, humanities and beyond and Rice decided a long time ago that they wanted to have a world-class music school, and so the fact that we're able to be on a campus like this and cross-pollinate with the extraordinary faculty and professors and students that are not naturally affiliated with a school of music like ours, it allows us to find new avenues to do creative research, new ways to perform, and it helps us think about how we approach our music from the standpoint of like how other disciplines approach their own research, and so I think it's something that also we're looking for a very special type of unique student, particularly at the undergraduate level, where, for us, not only do you have to successfully pass an audition to get into the Shepard School, but you also have to successfully be admitted to Rice University, which has a pretty high bar for academic excellence.
Matthew Loden:So we like to think that we're able to attract extraordinarily bright young minds who are incredibly talented and to help steer them into a career in music where the kind of influence that they ultimately might have in an ensemble or an organization it might move far beyond just what they do as musicians. They might be extraordinary ambassadors. They might have incredible chops around being community ambassadors and working with educational aspects of an orchestra or an opera company, and so I think it's something that is pretty unique and we're hoping to continue to be unique, stay small, stay bespoke and to keep moving forward for the next 50 years.
Elizabeth Bowman:Matthew, thank you so much for doing this podcast. It's great to chat with you today.
Matthew Loden:You too, Lizzie. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the Shepherd School and look forward to hopefully seeing you down here in Houston sometime. Maybe come to the rodeo.
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