>> So this is Dr. Tamara Livingston,
I'm Executive Director of the Department
of Museums Archives and Rear Books,
and I am here with Peter Witte,
who is the former chair of
the School of Music to talk about his time as chair and
his involvement with the development
of the Dr. Bobbie Bailey
and Family Performance Center
here at Kennesaw State University.
The date is April 28th,
and it's 10:30 in the morning.
Mr. Witte is currently the dean of
the University of Missouri Kansas
City Conservatory of Music and Dance.
Thank you very much for being here.
I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak with you
because you normally are not here.
[LAUGHTER].
>> It's great to be home.
>> So let's start out with your life pre KSU before KSU.
>> Sure.
>> And the normal thing to do with
the oral history is to start with the very beginning.
>> Sure.
>> You want to talk a little bit about where
you were born in your early life?
>> Sure. So I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
while my parents were at music school at
the University of Michigan School of music at the time.
So, Mom is a clarinetist and dad is a French horn player.
And they met in high school band.
And tragically, three of
their four parents perished
while they were in high school.
So the person who got them into
college was their high school band director,
Seymour Okin, who has always
remained a very important figure in our family's lives.
So Seymour took them under
his wing and got them both into college.
And they were in college at in Ann Arbor.
They grew up in Michigan,
and so they had me while they
were in college as undergraduates.
And so Mom graduated music Education degree,
Dad graduated with a music education degree,
but was quite a fine horn player.
So he got a job in
first with the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.
And then when I was three, he got a job in
the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra.
So we moved as a family to San Antonio, Texas.
Mom learned in the early '70s
that nobody in Texas was going to
hire a woman to be a band director.
So overnight, she became
a string orchestra director in
Harlandale High School in San Antonio, Texas.
Urban serving largely Latino and Hispanic community,
and she just went to work.
Dad played three years there and
summers were with the Santa Fe opera Orchestra.
And then in 1973,
he took an audition both with
the Louisiana Philharmonic at the time,
and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra,
and he won both of them.
And we thought we were going to Louisiana.
I still remember this call.
We were in Santa Fe at the time,
and I was a tyke and Mom said, what?
Congratulations.
And hung up the phone and I said, so what was that?
And she said, well, we're moving to Atlanta.
And so we moved to Atlanta in 1973.
Robert Shaw was the music director
of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
My dad began a career as Second Horn in
the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
And that's what got our family to Atlanta.
And so I was aged six at that time.
So mom taught all throughout Atlanta and Dad retired
just in 2015 after a 42 year career with
the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
and taught here at Kennesaw State University.
And so that's what brought me here to Atlanta.
>> He taught horn?
>> Yes, there was a reason for that. [LAUGHTER].
>> Absolutely. How fascinating.
So then it sounds you're almost
an Atlanta Native if you come in here age of six.
>> Yes.
But we both know that unless you were born in Atlanta,
you're not really in Atlanta Native.
>> So, tell me about your education then.
>> Sure. So I'm a Montessori brat,
so I started Montessori as a tyke
here and then went to the Atlanta Public Schools.
I'm a proud graduate of the Atlanta Public School System.
Inman Middle School and
Northside High School at the time.
I think it's called North Atlanta now.
And then I went
back up to the University of Michigan to do my work.
And so I actually studied with
the same horn teacher that taught my father.
And so, I did my undergraduate degree there,
and then I freelanced as
a professional musician for a while up there.
And then I went back to school in Ann Arbor for
a degree as a conductor and as a horn player.
And that wrapped up really in 1996-97.
And then, oddly enough, I came back home
to Kennesaw State University to start working here.
>> Fantastic. Well, why
don't we talk about how you did come?
>> Sure.
>> KSU, I believe the year was 1999.
>> That was the year. I started
if I'm remembering correctly,
I think I started in 1998 and 1999 was when
I started serving as chair in
some capacity or I think it might be 97.
But right around that time.
So the position was a half time
position to conduct the wind ensemble.
And I remember it paid a whopping $15,000 a year.
And so I came in.
There were auditions over the summer, and I came in,
I think I recall there were
three of us who were auditioning.
And the audition ensemble was maybe more town than gown,
a lot of community musicians,
and the instrumentation was sparse.
So we did our thing,
and I met Steven Bias,
who was conducting
the then Cobb Symphony Orchestra and Joe Meeks and
some folks here in town and
said our hellos and people had known Mom.
And Stephen and I had met each other,
I think briefly at all states or those things.
So we knew each other's names.
So I took the audition and then
accepted the position and then came to
work in that half time position with the wind ensemble.
And then during that year,
there was the position
turned into a full time position the following year,
and I applied for that and I got that.
And that was right about the gestation of
the shift from three departments
to the School of the Arts.
And [OVERLAPPING].
>> These three departments were music,
theater, and visual arts.
>> Correct.
>> Correct. That would have been in 1998.
>> Right.
>> And formerly, it had been the College of Arts,
Humanities and Social Sciences.
>> Correct.
>> So this represents the beginning
of the growth of these three programs,
music, visual arts and theaters.
>> Yeah. And to be certain,
it's Joe Meeks legacy with the music department and
David Watkins and Oral Moses and
all these names that are excuse me,
part of ENSA's history,
who started to set the seeds.
And I had an experience and a set of
experiences that were maybe
a little bit different compensatory, I think.
So I'm a band guy.
Joe Meeks is a very gifted pianist,
Oral Moses is a fantastic voice teacher,
and those two areas were
where the department was anchored at the time.
There was not a school orchestra.
It was the Cobb Symphony Orchestra,
and some of our students played in it.
>> My understanding is the Cobb Symphony.
I think came to the Department of music in 1996.
>> I think that's about right.
>> My understanding was conducted by a tenured faculty.
>> Yeah, Stephen Bias is his name.
And so there were bits and pieces.
And we were doing what we could
to make things work for our students.
There weren't enough students to have
a fully instrumented group,
so there was a town and down relationship
for the orchestra for the wind ensemble,
and for the jazz band.
And for reasons, fortunately,
I was not around to understand these reasons,
but the students essentially came
to Professor Meeks and said,
Professor Meeks, we think
it's time for it to be a
fully instrumented wind ensemble.
Excuse me, a fully student oriented wind ensemble.
And so that was the direction that they went.
And that's when I came on.
And that was, I believe,
the right decision across the board.
When you start these things, it's quite difficult.
So the instrumentation was very spotty when I started.
>> So, can I ask you, then?
That seems like moving away
then from kind of serving the community,
at least in that aspect.
>> In a certain sense,
and it can be, you have to make
a decision about priorities and purposes.
And so this was the right decision at
the time in the early '90s for Kansas.
It's hard to remember what
this region was like in 1990 when you see it today.
>> Very different.
>> Very different. So serving our community
is still important at Kennesaw and
was essential then because otherwise,
there were some musical experiences
that our students might not have.
But there's this tipping point where you have to realize,
we're a university and it's students first,
and we're at that point where we almost have enough.
But if we don't make the decision
to be solely student focused,
we'll never get where we need to go.
So there's some points where you're not quite ready,
but you have to do it anyway.
And so I will tell you,
I remember when I looked at the registered roster
for students in the wind ensemble,
I think there were 15,
and I swear eight of them played the flute.
[LAUGHTER]
>> So we just went to work.
[LAUGHTER]
>> So you're here at KSU.
You are a full-time, now, professor.
>> Assistant professor.
How did you become chair?
>> Through Kennesaw's meteoric growth.
So there was, as I recall,
a search for a provost,
somewhere in that time frame,
and the university found
that there were quite a number of candidates
who were very good in almost all
of the things that were within the college at the time,
but the Bohemians, the visual artists, the theater,
the actors and directors and
the musicians were not
necessarily in a lot of candidates wheelhouse.
So Kennesaw made the decision
to create a school of the arts
and put those three departments at the time
because dance was not yet a department at that moment.
Those three departments became a school, and Joe Meeks,
very generously agreed to serve
concurrently as the chair of the department
of music and the founding dean of the school.
And I was new.
I knew how to work
Microsoft Excel and I could spell Dvorak,
so I had an inclination
about administrative duties, and Joe said,
well, I'd like you to serve as assistant chair,
and I'm an assistant professor pre-tenure,
and so I knew that the answer was yes.
And so that's how I served as first assistant chair,
and then I think it was acting chair for a little while,
and then they ran a national search,
and I was asked to join as chair.
>> Well, so that's very quick time period
between the time you came to
KSU and by the time you became chair.
As a musician, I know that many of
us are not gifted as far as administration wise.
>> Sure.
>> How did you feel about that?
You said you knew the answer had to be yes,
but it is a different world.
>> [OVERLAPPING] Absolutely.
And it really should have killed me because I
was actually making some decisions
and saying no to people who are tenured and I was not.
And so again, this is part of Kennesaw's history,
which is the growth is so rapid and so meteoric
that you have to do things to seize the day,
and they might not be the most traditional things
that you've ever heard of in higher education.
So because of my mother's background,
because of my father's background,
because of my own upbringing in Atlanta,
I had a set of abilities and
experiences that appear to have been helpful here.
It was different. And I still to this day look at
administration as a thing one
does in order to make the art that we want to make,
for students to learn about
the art that they want to learn about.
So I didn't wake up and decide at
the age of eight that I wanted to be a dean.
I'm a reluctant administrator,
so I will do the administrative part so that we can
create an environment where great art can happen.
And so it was different,
and I owe a lot to Joe Meeks.
>> And having known Joe,
I know that he never intended to and was very
conflicted about rising in the ranks [inaudible].
>> [OVERLAPPING] Absolutely. We had these conversations.
>> But I know that he had a vision,
and he had that vision very early on.
And I'm assuming he shared that vision with you?
>> Oh, sure. It was a long gestation,
and I arrived in the late '90s
and there were some things that Kennesaw
was still not really
part of Atlanta as much then as it is now,
just because there was still
a little bit of time on 75 where you
felt like you left Atlanta
and you hadn't come to Kennesaw yet.
There was this little gap in there.
Now it's just all one big thing,
but Joe had a vision
for what should be and what could be,
and of course, these visions are crazy at the time.
There's no way that that can happen.
The number of times I was told not by Joe,
but by others, there's no way you can have
an instrumental music program here.
We just can't do it.
And you just keep saying, well,
the schools in Cobb County are
astonishing in their quality with great choral singing,
great bands, certainly, and now today, great orchestras.
And these kids are all in our backyard.
How and when are we going to serve them?
And so Joe saw the larger arc of what could happen and
started to get a foothold in
his discipline and in the disciplines of music,
and there were to be certain starting points
in terms of the instrumental music program,
but it was spotty,
and the facilities were nowhere near what we needed.
And so I came on and we just started to
work with what it would take to get students to come
here and dealt with all of the challenges,
one of which was facilities.
So I had rehearsals under a tree.
>> Well, that was going to be my next question.
>> Sure.
>> Now you are chair, what were
some of the most pressing issues confronting you?
And as we spoke before,
why don't you tell me about the facilities
that you had available to you
at that time and the gap
between what we had and what was needed.
>> So it was
all nuts to think that we could do what we were doing.
So we had, in the existing music building,
which I think is the original plant facilities building,
which is why the main gas shut off valve is right
outside the old music building,
there was one dual purpose recital and rehearsal space,
and it is about one fifth
of the size of a Cobb County middle school band room.
And that was it.
That was our biggest room.
And when we were small,
it was almost adequate
for the number of singers that you had,
but the second, it was
punishing for any jazz band rehearsal.
And anytime that there were
more than three instrumentalists in there,
it was just simply too loud,
but nonetheless, that's where we rehearsed.
So you had a health and safety issue,
and then you had just the constraints of large spaces.
Practice rooms were insufficient,
the teaching studios were insufficient.
There was no way that this should work,
but it was all that we had.
And so we made a decision to grow, and quite literally,
I would conduct the brass ensemble under
the big tree underneath on Friday afternoons,
because that was the only available space.
>> The big tree is still there.
And so when I drive by,
when I was coming to campus today,
I still remember these little moments of craziness.
And then all of our performances
were in Stillwell at the time,
so there was this detente between the theater program
and the music program about
who could get into Stillwell,
and sometimes that was
smooth and sometimes that was bumpy.
And so we would negotiate space in Stillwell,
and Stillwell, at the time was
the biggest public convening space
on campus that was not athletic.
Maybe 350 seats, and it's fan-shaped,
and it's okay for the spoken word,
which means it's terrible for
music because it's dry as dust,
which is what you want for the spoken word.
So we had to get everything
like an acoustic shell in order to get any resonance.
So the facilities crunch was something we had to fix.
The other part was we had to get
an instrumental faculty that would draw students to us.
And Joe had crazy ideas,
and I added my crazy ideas to Joe's,
and we would talk about all of these sorts of things.
But we had to shift
to a faculty that would recruit students.
Why should I go to Kennesaw?
The first answer was because you could
study Trumpet with Mark Hughes.
And remember my background,
I knew all the music educators in
Cobb County because my mother taught orchestra at
Wheeler High School while she was here and
was president of the Georgia Music Educators Association.
So everybody knew Arlene Witte.
And so I knew all the
music educators from that side of it.
From the professional music-making side,
I grew up as an orchestra brat.
I knew all the guys in the orchestra
and women. I knew all the people.
I use that in the gender-neutral sense,
all the people in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
And so that was a pretty unique Rolodex at the time.
So I called up Mark and said,
Mark, he grew up in Henry County.
He's a Georgia guy
and went up to Northwestern brilliant trumpet player.
He's the principal trumpet of the
Houston Symphony Orchestra today.
And I said, Mark, would you teach at Kennesaw?
And honestly, at the time,
that was a funny thing to say
to a musician in the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
>> Why was he here that day?
>> Because in the instrumental area,
we were not seen as a player yet.
Remember, this is the late '90s in Georgia,
in my own high school upbringing,
I played in Allstate and I played with
the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra
and all those sorts of things.
The most privileged kids who
had great instruments and families who could afford
lessons and all the elements
that help students get terrific.
By and large, all of
those students left the state of Georgia to go study.
It was very rare for a student to stay in state.
>> Really?
>> Yeah. And that's completely
flipped because of the Hope scholarship.
And now the University of Georgia System schools
are challenging to get into.
All of these things were happening at the same time.
We were no longer an exporter of college students.
We were retainer of college students,
the ones that we made in our terrific public schools.
And so all of this was happening at the same time.
But when we called Mark to pick one,
or Doug Summer or Christina Smith, Doug passed away.
He's the string-based faculty member,
but Christina is on the faculty here today.
She's the principal flute of
the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
She has played Principal Flute with the LA Phil.
She's played Principal Flute with
the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,
and Kennesaw State University students
get to study with her.
I'm proud of that.
And so we had to get Mark on and Mark had
enough pride about making something great in Georgia,
as did I. I said, let's try it.
And we took students and just started working with them.
And then I think Doug Summer came on.
And with each great faculty member
in the instrumental area that we brought on,
the next one was easier.
And then, again, we hit a tipping point
where there were something was happening at Kennesaw.
And then we started to acquire full-time faculty,
and it started to cohere as a group.
So a long-winded answer,
but the first challenge was
facilities and the second challenge was
a musical culture that
was holistic and filled with pride.
>> So building that musical culture
and bringing people on board,
of course, means adding additional lines.
>> Right.
>> And can you speak to that?
Was there money floating around for this? I suspect not.
>> It was different than now, certainly.
Again, the enrolments in
the university system of Georgia
were growing like a weed.
And the challenge during
my time here at Kennesaw
was very different than the challenges in Missouri.
The challenges in Kennesaw,
probably still to this day.
The overarching question is,
oh my gosh, what are we going to do
with all these students?
They just keep coming,
and there's nowhere to put them.
That's a problem but I would suggest it's
absolutely the best problem to have in higher education.
There are a whole bunch of institutions in
the heartland who have the opposite problem,
which is where are all the students.
There are too many schools and not enough kids.
In Georgia, there are too many
kids and not enough schools.
Okay. So that's a benefit to
Kennesaw in the aggregate as we see today.
But the real challenge
was figuring out which lines
had to be full-time and which lines could be part-time.
And we made, I believe the right decision,
which was our regional competitor, Georgia State,
and I'm dear friends with a number
of people at Georgia State
had a relationship with
members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra,
many of whom were actually
alumni of Georgia State University
but that hadn't really seized as fully as it could.
And for reasons I disagree with a lot of kids in
the burbs were not willing to go
downtown to study at Georgia State.
And that, while I disagree with it was
beneficial to Kennesaw State University.
And so we started to use some of those assets and say,
there is no trumpet player in America that we
could hire full time that
would be as strong as Mark Hughes.
And this could be a distinctive feature
of an emerging school of music,
being able to study with Christina,
being able to study with Mark Hughes,
being able to study with John Lowless,
these great musicians here.
And so we started to assemble them.
But you had to have a number of full-time people.
And so, when do you balance this?
And Joe Eller was an early faculty member on clarinet.
Fantastic musician.
He got hired away to the University of South Carolina.
And Mike Alexander.
There is no story about the school of
music without the story of Michael Alexander.
And he came on to be both the first director of
the orchestras at KSU
and the music director of the Cobb Symphony Orchestra.
And there were eight string players
at KSU when we
hired Mike to be the director of Orchestras.
There was eight.
That was it. Two string quartets.
And now there are,
I believe, two orchestras,
and what Mike did during his tenure here, magic.
So we tried to find the balance
between part-time people who we
really loved and really loved us and
full-time people who understood what was possible.
Susan Grant Robinson is another person you have
to celebrate in the history of the School of Music.
Magical people.
>> So I'm getting the sense that it was an exciting time.
A lot of things were going on.
A lot of possibilities.
So students are there.
You don't have the facilities yet,
but you're building the faculty.
And maybe this is steering in the conversation,
but at what point then,
is it time for the Department of Music
to become a school of music?
And what are the factors involved in that?
>> So let's see.
That happened actually as a function,
this is going to sound funny of my departure.
So there were a lot of things going.
Remember, I was teaching as I was chair,
not uncommon at a program Kennesaw size at that time.
So I was conducting the wind
ensemble the entire time I was here.
I was conducting the brass ensemble.
I would teach oral skills if and when I couldn't
find somebody else to teach
oral skills in a given semester.
We did a lot of things.
And I was younger,
more energetic, and dumber.
And so I was willing to do all of those things,
and we just went to work.
And as the program grew,
both of those jobs required more and more.
And not to get ahead of ourselves,
but the Bailey Center came online,
and there was developing the plans for that.
And then the addition to
the Wilson building came online, and there's all of that.
So it was clear that something was happening.
And concurrently,
the wind ensemble was getting really good.
So those kids deserved it.
And I was starting to get some calls
about administrative positions elsewhere.
That confused me because what
I really wanted to do is go be
a great band director at
a XYZ Institution, a fancy institution.
And so I had this duality that was going on.
And when it became clear that
the next step for us was UMKC in Kansas City,
I came to Joe and we cried our eyes out and said,
the wind ensemble needs somebody full-time.
And the administrative unit of
the department of music needs somebody full-time now.
And so that's what we did.
We created two positions
there that I had been doing previously,
and they became two positions.
And then we said, and this is the time.
Now, because Bailey was up and the Wilson edition was up,
and literally everything was brand new.
Every music stand,
every methods instrument for a music education major,
every chair, every riser, literally everything in
the School of Music was state of the art,
at least in terms of equipment.
And then we said,
this is the time to make a shift to the School of Music.
So it's a funny story,
but we decided that that was
the time for it to shift to a School of Music.
And that happened.
And so I was on the phone over that summer before I split
finding a music administrator who would
come in on a one-year basis while
the school ran a search for its founding director.
>> So we're almost at the point
where we're going to be talking about the Bailey.
>> Sure.
>> So we talked about the need for a new performing all
that sounds like it was pretty. [OVERLAPPING]
>> Crystal clear.
>> We talked a little about the facilities
that were there and how y'all coped.
So tell me about then,
what was the vision for
the solution to the facilities issue?
>> So we knew we needed a performance hall.
And then the question is what kind?
And the answer is dependent upon who's in the room.
And we also knew that we were
not going to have buckets of money.
And so again, hearkening back to my upbringing.
My father, Tom Witty,
who was teaching Horn here at the time,
ever since I can remember,
Dad had a he could identify what made a great hall.
And very often, when
the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra would perform,
he would perform in Carnegie.
When they went to Europe, he
performed in [inaudible] in Vienna.
He took auditions with the Boston Symphony York.
He knew what it was that made
different halls great and orchestral
French horn players like big romantic repertoire
and a hall that will make that magical.
So, dad knew those things.
And because of the way my father is,
he knew what made each hall,
why it worked and what made a bad hall a bad hall.
So, I sort of had that in my head,
and we made decisions about
what kind of hall Bailey would
be and what kind of hall it would not be.
>> What were those?
>> Well, to be very specific,
we knew we had maybe $6 million.
That's not a lot of bread even then.
So we made the decision
that and Sing and Nuta were the architects and
John Abbott was the lead architect and
David Khan from acoustic distinctions
today is the name of the firm,
and he was the acoustician.
And we got in a room and we said,
we want there to be a hall
that works for the jazz ensembles,
works for the choirs, works for the bands,
works for an orchestra,
works for solo recitals.
And we have a $6 million.
And the keys were cubic volume.
So the cubic volume in
Bailey is the same cubic volume of Carnegie Hall,
and that's not a mistake.
That's not a bug. That's a feature.
>> So cubic volume means just the capacity of the air.
>> The size of the room.
So when you're outside and you look at Bailey,
it's quite a big building.
And then when you walk into the concert hall,
it doesn't feel that large, but it is.
And so by design,
John Abbott and David Khan said here,
the hall has to be this big,
but you don't have the money for a balcony.
You don't have the money for
an elevator to get people up and down.
So there's not going to be any balcony.
And you want the cubic volume for
the orchestras and the bands to sound good.
It's going to be an enormous barn
with only 700 seats in it.
It's going to feel funny. So they
design that soft in the hall.
And if you look at the architectural plans,
there's the main floor of Bailey,
and then there's a soft.
I didn't even know what the word meant that rings
the entire concert hall.
And then there's a wooden cage that sits
inside of that that's slotted.
And so it makes the hall feel intimate for
700 seats but what you can't see is
there's a cubic volume above it of another third of
the building that just helps to make the sound terrific.
And that's why tonight
the Atlanta San New Orkser is going to crank
on Don Juan and Dvorgaq pieces that are big.
The reason it will sound good is we
made a decision that it
had to have the cubic volume
of a world class concert hall.
And I remember vividly,
they put the architectural rendering of
the concert hall of Carnegie on
the plot of the Bailey Centers design and said,
S, these are the same sizes.
And the acquisition said, this will work.
So we knew we had the residence.
One, get the residence.
Two, we knew we didn't have any money,
and European shoe box halls always work.
The musique Veron is a European shoebox hall.
Symphony Hall in Boston is a European shoebox hall.
>> Shoebox, you mean something that's not. [OVERLAPPING]
>> It's not fancy. It's shaped like a shoebox.
It's a rectangle.
Those concert halls always work.
It's not a myth.
It's not arty. It's just boom.
It'll work. So he said, great, it'll work.
Cubic volume shape, and
square things are cheaper to build than round things.
So the architect said, you're okay.
And you're not going to get
people up and down in a balcony,
so that's going to save some money.
And you're going to make a sacrifice about it's
not going to have the most opulent lobby in the world.
So we made sacrifices about
everything except what was inside the concert hall.
That was sacred, cubic volume and resonance.
And if you can get resonance out of a room,
but you can't put it in once it's built.
So if you have a dead space,
it will never be resonant
but if you have a resonance space,
you can deaden it down.
So the accoustician,
David Khan said, Well, that's quite simple,
we will just ring the entire room with acoustic curtain.
And when the jazz band is playing in there,
you can ring the hall and pull all the curtains out.
And it'll deaden the sound.
So again, we had $6 million,
and the fancy schools will
have motorized curtains and you hit a lever and it goes,
we didn't have the money for the motors.
So those are all hand polls,
but we knew that the motors would never break.
And so, those were some of the guiding principles is,
what sort of ensembles and what could you
afford and what would make it
really great at what it did.
Now, there were some sacrifices we made.
It doesn't have an orchestra pit
because when you get a hydraulic pit,
that's a lot of money,
and it doesn't have a percenum arch
so that you can hang sets.
So that means you can't really do,
it isn't designed for opera.
It isn't designed for dance and orchestra together.
It's not a space that was
designed to do those sorts of things.
And those were conversations we had.
People had opinions about those at the time but
rather than build a cafeorium something
that did everything poorly,
we decided, we're going to build
something that is really great.
And I would offer, it is
the finest $6 million concert hall in the world.
>> So in the planning stages then,
it was you, it was Joe Mikes,
and it was all the folks that you mentioned.
But clearly, there were some others who had
some desires to help out,
for example, opera dances.
Who else was involved in the planning?
>> Let's see. It was John Anderson,
and we picked the architect,
we picked the accoustician,
and we picked those two people those two firms
separately, which was smart.
David Khan is a great accoustician,
who had worked with Russell Johnson and ArtCort,
Russell Johnson is one of these iconic accoustitians.
So we got a team together that knew what they were doing.
And then the faculty got together,
and we would have conversations
about what we would hope would happen.
I know that Mike Alexander was
on board at the time and Joe Eller,
I think certainly John Lawless.
Sam Skelton was with
us developing a fantastic jazz program.
Now, some of those guys were part time at the time,
but they were still part of the family.
Leslie Blackwell in the vocal area, Eileen Moorman,
Russell and Jana Young were with us at that time,
and Helen Kim was with us at that time.
So faculty were starting to
galvanize because they saw what was coming,
and we were more attractive place to be.
And so we would talk about what it is that
we could do and what it is that we couldn't do.
And I will tell you it was pretty quick.
And we were making a lot of decisions that
we had to trust David and we had to trust
the architect because none of us had
ever built a concert hall before.
So we read all the books that we could,
and then we had to trust the science
and think that it was going to work.
>> When you said you had $6 million for the project,
were those funds raised?
What was the source of those funds?
>> So Joe will remember the specifics on this.
It was an era when States
were investing more in higher education.
So the bulk of the project was actually state money.
And so we were up and out of the ground
and hard hats and moving
Earth on state money, as I recall.
And then Bobby Bailey came on and said, Well,
what could you do with a little bit more? Angelic.
And she and Joe Meeks had a fantastic relationship.
And she said, well,
what would really put this over the top.
And so she started to help with
some other programmatic elements.
And principally, the announcement in
the first concert would be
that we would become an Altinway School.
And so it wasn't a case where we had to
raise all 6 million or 4 million of it from
private sources in order to get the thing going.
Those funds were available through
state resources, as I recall,
and then other donors came on to top off the project.
>> So tell me about Bobby Bailey then,
and how she got brought in.
I know [OVERLAPPING]
>> And that was the delegation of duties
is Bobby and President Siegel,
Betty Siegel, and Joe had a really terrific relationship.
And I knew that Joe had that part covered.
And Joe knew that I knew about cubic volume and
Shoebox concert halls and acousticians.
And so there was a great give and take.
He would do that part.
Now, he was involved in the concert hall.
I want to be certain.
But in the nitty gritty about those sorts of things,
that was sort of what I did.
And we would sort of report back
to one another about those sorts of things.
So I did not have a number of interactions with
Bobby other than thanking
her and making certain that she felt valued.
And that she would come in.
But that relationship was principally
between President Siegel and Dean Meeks,
and we're just so thankful
for everything that she's done.
>> Well, it must have been exciting to
hear that you had an extra.
>> Absolutely. Well,
and in building projects,
there's always I learned
these phrases that you
don't understand in Layman's terms,
like the phrase deductive alternate,
which is code for.
Well, we'll put it in the building,
but if you run out of money,
we're not going to put it in,
and the building would still function.
So it certainly helped.
And what we did is we made
certain that there was a rehearsal space,
a separate rehearsal space.
The storage for the percussion instruments,
storage for 2D pianos,
and acceptably sized lobby to start with.
Now the art museum is attached,
and it feels much more organic,
but at the time the lobby was quite modest.
And then stands and chairs and all those sorts of things.
But very often, we just built what we could build.
And then we would look at next year's year end funds,
the way that happened so often, and say,
I remember folks would say,
well, we'll pay for the stands and
risers out of next year's year end funds or something.
So it felt to me like we were paving
the road while we were driving on it sometimes,
but it all worked out beautifully.
>> So the Bailey then, the plan for the Bailey,
it was going to solve some of
the school music challenge, but not all.
And so tell me about how we
know that there is an expansion of the Wilson Building.
And the creation of what we now have is the
[inaudible] How did that
play in with sort of the whole facilities?
>> Well, the thinking at the time with
the master plan was that there would be
an arts hub where Bailey and Wilson were,
and that would be the arts district on the campus.
And that was great,
but we didn't have adequate teaching studios,
a music major at Kennesaw will take 30,
32 lessons in a year,
just one student with one teacher,
and there should be a room that's appropriate,
and teaching a tube lesson takes a room this big
and teaching a voice lesson takes a room this big,
and two pianos that are
seven foot pianos nested together for a piano lesson.
There's some space needs there.
And we simply didn't have it.
We were rotating faculty through one studio.
All the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra guys
would play tag team in two or three rooms.
It's a challenge even to this day for
the School of Music [OVERLAPPING] Scheduling nightmare.
So we knew we needed
teaching studios that were appropriate,
and we knew that we needed
practice rooms that were appropriate.
And for the music side of it,
that was the next step.
And in my memory,
it felt almost concurrent.
We were building Bailey and
talking about Wilson simultaneously.
And then the theater program needed space for
a black box that was not
Prisinia March the way that Stillwell is.
So John Gentile and I and
Joe Meeks had some conversations
about how we could put all that together.
Now, mind you, during all of this,
Kennesaw had the wisdom to hire Ivan Pinkala.
So none of this is linear.
It's all organic and it's all happening at the same time.
And so we were making decisions,
and then we knew that Ivan
was doing something magical with the dance program.
And it was really a fluid situation.
But we knew we needed to
seize the opportunities when we had them.
So Bailey was the answer for
the presentational face that there
be a place to convene as
a university for events that were cultural,
or Chautauquas that there is something to be
said for having a convening space that
is not athletic in its orientation.
That is primarily about
the mind and the heart and the soul.
And that's what Bailey was.
It was a galvanizing force for the campus.
And then we knew we needed a kitchen space for the kids
to cook up all the stuff that they did
with their teachers in lessons and practice rooms.
And so Wilson was that, and it went, boom, boom.
And I think largely it worked.
>> Well, a lot going on in very small space of time.
>> Absolutely.
>> So things are clipping along and you break round.
For the Bailey, must have been an exciting moment.
So were you involved in the construction process at all?
>> Yes. So John Anderson was fantastic.
The team between architect accoustian
and the project manager here on campus,
everybody was excited to do it.
And I think we all were in love with the project.
I didn't know nothing about construction.
So I was learning on the dime about essentially,
it breaks down to cost per square foot.
And so I had to trust and learn to trust,
and those were all good things.
So I would check in.
I would get walk throughs.
I remember the walls came up.
They were all prefab concrete.
So the walls went up lickety split.
So it went from a hole in the mud
to a building like that.
>> Do you remember when
the groundbreaking was and they all
opened in October of 2007?
>> I remember that it was,
my recollection and logic would tell
me that it was probably a three year process,
and if they were hustling, it
might have been a two year process.
I remember the weather was good.
There was a lot of workable days.
And then they did some really cool things
with the construction that helped it.
So the walls in Bailey, again,
the acoustics are everything are a styrofoam sandwich.
They're prefab.
So it's a slab of concrete, and then they put down,
I think it was 18 " of a fancy foam.
And then they put another slab of
concrete on top of that.
So it's cement foam,
cement, and it's meant to sound isolate.
And then I can't remember how many of those panels.
But when you walk by Bailey,
you can actually count the panels.
You can see the seams, and then they cut
it and put it together with big fancy stuff.
But it wasn't like they were
building bricks and it went up slowly,
it almost by magic,
we had an enclosed space.
>> Seen overnight.
>> It did.
And I remember vividly walking into this space.
There were bulldozers still
moving earth inside of the hall when everything was up.
And I walked in and my first reaction,
honestly, was that we had made a mistake.
I walked in and I thought this room's too small.
>> Hard to judge at
that point because a horrible feeling.
>> I was terrified. I don't think I ever told anybody.
I was like, I think we
made a mistake. I think we made a mistake.
And I whispered to
the acoustician, it's going to be fine.
It was more than fine.
>> Fantastic.
So the construction was pretty quick.
So you've got the shell, and then
you start putting it in.
What was the acousticians role in all of this?
>> David Khan, I'm going to have dinner with him tonight.
We've maintained a relationship
as a result of that project.
He's very proud of Bailey.
It's a calling card for him.
The quality of that concert hall.
So David said cubic volume,
but Peter and John and John Anderson and Abbott.
It's the quality of
the silence that's going to make the hall great.
So for you and I in this room,
you and I can hear a little bit of
air noise from the air handling unit here.
It might not be on the tape, but if I'm
quiet, you can hear that.
So that means that this room can't be
a great musical venue because no matter
how soft I play on the flute,
there'll be a moment
when that's louder than my flute playing.
And so it caps off the dynamic range on the softer end.
So David said, the room has to be astonishingly quiet.
Well, how about this quiet?
And there's a measurement,
and he would say, no, it has to be softer than that.
What does that mean? It means that
the air handling unit has to be enormous.
So the ducks, if you go up, are huge,
and the air is a lot of air that's moving very slowly.
And that's why the hall is quiet.
The air locks, all these sorts of things.
So David was fastidious
and at times difficult and
unrelenting because he said that won't work.
And it was infuriating to the architects,
and it was infuriating at times to certainly
the contractors, But he was right.
And so it's not easy to be excellent. It's not easy.
And so the hall is really quiet and because it's quiet,
when everybody cranks, it feels really resonant
because that range is that much wider.
But we talked about all this stuff.
None of this is a mistake.
Bailey is not luck.
It was a really fantastic team coming together
at a really magical time in Kennesaw's history.
>> Absolutely. And then the emphasis on
the acoustics really helping distinguish it,
I think, certainly no one would
ever read that. Fantastic.
So tell me now about the opening.
>> So the opening was fun.
We did a couple of
things and we learned from some national stories.
Here, I'll approach it this way.
There was a famous orchestra that I shall not name that
built a new concert hall for itself.
And they opened it
about the same time that it became inhabitable.
So there was no quiet period
where they could figure things out.
And because they didn't quite know how to drive the car,
the public reaction to the hall and
the criticisms from the papers worldwide was.
And the hall never fully
recovered its reputation after that.
And so we knew, that's a bummer.
So we knew that we wanted
some time in the construction phase where
we test it quietly
without the full disclosure of the opening.
>> So you said you wanted to
test it before it was completely
done or before it was over.
>> Yeah, we would go in. So one of
the famous yarns that
the School of Music tells to this day is John Laws,
the brilliant percussion faculty member at KSU.
And we brought him on early,
and he's just electric.
And he came in and he said,
Peter, you want to test the hall?
I don't even think there was carpet.
I think it was still mud.
And he brought these huge crash symbols in,
and we walked in.
Big. And he just let rip on this huge crash,
and it just rang.
And again, and I thought this room is too small.
Everybody was laughing and I was terrified.
So we were always testing to
see just to get a sense of things.
But we had certificate
of occupancy and all those sorts of things.
We knew that we wanted to do a hard hat concert.
And so the first thing that we did.
It was the KSU wind ensemble is we built it.
They rehearsed in there, that was by design.
And the first concert that we gave was for
all the contractors and everybody
who literally built the hall.
>> The acousticians as well.
>> Acoustician, the architects,
their family, the contractors,
the subcontractors, and their families,
so that they could see what mom and dad did.
>> How wonderful.
>> And one of the pieces that we played was
a Timpani concerto performed by John Lawless.
Very difficult and challenging virtuosa work
called Raise the Roof by Michael Daugherty.
>> [inaudible].
>> Exactly. And it was a relatively recent composition,
and it worked beautifully,
and it was a real showpiece.
And then the last piece,
as I recall, might have been Bernstein's Slava overture.
And we were all wearing hard hats.
The wind ensemble was
wearing hard hats for that last piece.
And it was just one of the gestures that we had.
So the first concert was a thank you.
And it was under the radar.
And it was intentionally so that we could
make our adjustments about the hall,
where the curtain should be, does it work?
How do people get in and out?
All those things so that we could get a lot of
that figured out before the big opening gala concert.
>> So you mentioned some of the challenges,
of course, with the accostitian being very specific.
Were there some other construction challenges
that arose during this period of time?
>> I'm certain that they were, and I will tell you,
I'm grateful that I don't remember many of those.
I'm certain if the hall had been a failure,
I would've remembered every one of them.
>> But were there small adjustments
after the hard hat concert?
>> Yeah. And along the way,
I remember we remember that they put the soft
up and there was actually a panel of
curtains that didn't get installed,
and they pulled out all the scaffolding.
And so you can imagine it's probably 30, 40 feet clear.
And when you pull the scaffolding out,
there's no way to install the curtains anymore
and it's like, well, that's gone.
We missed that opportunity.
I have guilt about this is we didn't adequately think
about AV installation hangs in there.
We got all the conduit in there, but I remember it
was Carl Aldag at the time came in and said,
well, where are we going to hang the speaker, Ray?
And I thought, I don't know where.
So there were some adjustments that had to be
made during that process.
But by and large, we got the basics pretty good.
>> Now, of course, a full-fledged performing facility
then requires the staff to operate it.
And I'm sure in the back of your mind well not
in the back maybe the front of your mind.
Certainly, in the front of your mind was,
how are we going to operate this new performing center?
>> Yeah.
>> So tell me?
>> Well, we got lucky.
I can't emphasize enough
how fantastic the faculty
and the staff were at this time.
It might be my happiest time as a professional,
is this time around 2002-2007.
Every person that we brought on
was brilliant at something.
So John Curtis was
the recording engineer that we brought on.
A fantastic sound guy.
And he knew.
Well, if this hall is going to sound this good,
this is the equipment that we need.
Well, John, we can't afford it. I know,
but here's the list and
we'll just chip away at it over time.
And then we hired
Bobby Asher away from Spivey Hall down in Clayton,
which is a great hall with a
fundamentally different aesthetic and
a fundamentally different purpose.
It's a smaller hall.
It's a jewel.
You can't do Don Juan in Spivey.
The cubic volume is too small,
and it was not designed for that.
So we designed our hall to serve
our students and big ensemble pieces,
but also would work for solo ensemble pieces.
So Bobby was down at Spivey, and at the time,
Spivey was the biznis in the university system,
Georgia in terms of concert halls.
We plucked him away,
and Bobby is now working at the University of Maryland.
He is, in my opinion, one of the great,
what's the right word entrepreneur and impresario.
He knows as much about
contemporary music today as anybody I know.
He's always listening, and he was fastidious in
the development of the schedule and
the mechanisms and the rules about how Bailey would work.
And those setup pieces are really important.
So there were some rules like you can't take
a music stand or chair into or out of Bailey.
>> Really?
>> That was a rule.
>> Why?
>> Because stands and chairs leave.
They go into dorm rooms,
and the brass players take them to their Easter gigs,
and they stay at the church.
So I remember vividly,
we got all of the equipment for the stands and chairs.
If you look in Bailey
today and you flip any chair stand underneath,
you'll see handwriting in
a gold Sharpie Kennesaw State University.
I handwrote every one of those.
>> That's your life, one of your legacy.
>> I'm actually quite proud of that.
But one of the rules was you
can't take any equipment in or out.
And so we set up some because we wanted
people to have pride about this facility.
Another rule was the students couldn't put
their cases on the arm rest out in the hall.
You couldn't put your trombone case or
your bassoon case on the armchairs,
pop it open and get your axe out.
All that stuff had to happen backstairs.
There were zones for everything.
We were really specific.
>> Taking it to the next level.
>> Yeah, because we knew this was it.
This was our home.
And if we treated it like,
meh, it was not going to last.
And for the students who were here today,
this is what 10 years later,
there's a norm of
behavior about how you will respect Bailey that
exists today because we set up
what is acceptable and what is
not acceptable when the hall opened.
And Joe was that way and Bobby Asher was that way,
and John Lawless was
that way about how we would
place the percussion instruments.
We just wanted it to be respected, if not revered.
And then the next year,
students would come in,
and it's just how people behave.
And so by Year 4,
there's a cultural expectation that we revere
and that there's pride in being
an owl and that there's
a certain way that we're going to treat this space.
>> Tell me about the reaction of the opening of
the Bailey Performing Arts
Center for the Atlantic Community.
>> Sure. So we had a big gala concert and we wanted to
demonstrate everything that the
then, no still a department.
The department of music at the time could do.
>> This is in October?
>> This is in October.
>> 2007.
>> 2007. And mind you,
we finally had a place where the Department of music at
that time could actually hear itself all at once.
We finally had a room where all the students could
convene and there's enough space for them on stage.
So this was the first time in
the history of KSU that we could do this.
So the choirs and
the orchestra and the jazz band and the bands,
the wind ensemble at the time,
and Mary Ackerman and Guitar.
Everybody that we had
could actually be on stage all at one time.
And so we set up a concert that was nonstop.
It would go from one thing to the other.
It's called the collage concert,
and it's a Eastman School of Music and
the University of Michigan developed this and
schools across the nation will do these things,
and audiences always love them.
But you go from one element to the next without applause.
And the light focuses first on this thing,
and then the light turns off and goes to this one,
and it's a jump cut.
It's a concert for the ADD.
And you then juxtapose contrasting styles,
so it's this really kaleidoscopic piece.
And we did a collage concert to open Bailey.
That was the performance.
And so we had Robin Johnson, who is my wife,
played the English horn solo from Tristan and
Isolde up behind stage.
And there was Leslie Blackwell
the choir singing up in the soffit.
So you had this ethereal sound,
and it was really spectacular. Just incredible.
And Pierre Roy was the arts critic for
the Alan Journal Constitution at the time.
He's now with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra.
And he called it.
What was the quote? I think
a Georgia gym or something like that.
He said, I'm paraphrasing here, but this is the
most significant large concert
hall in Atlanta at the time.
And then the other ringing endorsement came
from Donald Runnicles who
was principal guest conductor
of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
He came on alongside Robert Spano.
Now, mind you, 2007,
we have firmly established our reputation as an upstart.
And many more principal musicians and musicians from
the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra were teaching at
Kennesaw State than any other institution in Georgia.
And there's a vibe that's
starting to happen, and it's cooking.
And now this concert hall comes on.
And the next obvious step
was to have the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
perform at KSU that was always by design.
That was always in the vision that we had.
So Donald Runnicles has
conducted the Berlin Philharmonic.
He's conducted the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
He was the music director at the time
of the San Francisco Opera.
A career on the highest levels.
He has performed in
the finest concert halls in the world.
And he came in and did a solo recital as a pianist with,
forgive me, I can't remember who the soprano was.
But he knew piano the Joe Mia hand picked.
And then playing and then we went
out and said Mr. Runnicles, what do you think?
And he said, this is a fantastic concert hall.
And so, Bobby Asher and I were at a watering hole.
Let's just say with Donald Runnicles thereafter,
and he was literally getting on
the plane the next morning to fly and
rehearse with the Berlin Philharmonic
in the Philharmonie in Berlin.
And we asked him, would you jot something down for us?
I'll try and find that document.
But he jotted down
a Georgia jewel and just turned around and said,
absolutely and wrote it and signed it to us on a napkin,
and that should be part of
KSU's legacy, that simple document.
That's when I knew something
magical had happened for $6 million,
Kenesaw built a hall that a man who was about to
rehearse the Berlin Philharmonic in
the world's finest concert hall the Philharmonie he said,
yeah, you've got a jewel here. Not bad.
>> Fine moment. Well, just when we
thought things couldn't get better then at the opening,
that is my understanding is when the announcement came.
>> [OVERLAPPING] Correct. No. We didn't.
And so I remember,
so President Siegel had
retired and President Pap was on board, and forgive me.
If it wasn't his first year,
it was probably his first or second year.
He was new to the campus.
And so Bobby had done this,
and that announcement was made on
the stage that we were becoming an all Steinway School,
which meant not only the pianos in Bailey,
but every piano in Wilson.
In fact, every piano in any room
in the Department of
music would be a brand new instrument.
And so she had made that gift.
And I remember one of the people was on stage
was the Steinway representative for Atlanta at the time,
and forgive me, I can't recall his name,
but he was at the stage before.
[LAUGHTER]
And he broke down in tears.
And the whole audience was elated.
And Bobby said, I remember this vividly.
He was effusive in his praise for
Bobby Bailey and what she meant and how
generous and insightful she was,
and he was overcome with emotion.
And Bobby walks up in that calm,
yeah, way that she had,
let's keep things in perspective.
And she said, well, thank you very much.
We had just met earlier today.
[LAUGHTER]
There was this line
everybody bust out laughing because it was
a perfect encapsulation of
real genuine emotion that we all
felt for this gift that we had been given.
And then her pragmatic.
Yeah, of course, we need to do this.
You invest in good people and you give them good things.
That's who Bobby Bailey was.
And it was a great laugh line for the evening.
But that was a really fun night.
>> So as chair, then, was it ever in the plan?
Was it ever the vision to be in
Elstein what would have been involved?
Could you have done it without that generous gift?
>> Absolutely not.
So Joe will know the exact numbers.
I remember it was somewhere around 45 instruments.
I hope I'm remembering that correctly in
the aggregate that we're going to be coming on.
And that's seven figures easily to acquire all of that.
And state budgets being what they are,
it is never the case that
an institution gets seven digits just
for a chunk of equipment for
one academic unit. Doesn't happen.
So when somebody bestows a gift
on that and you're able to
take we had some good instruments,
but we had a lot of dross,
bad instruments that had been sitting in
practice rooms with open windows
in the original music building,
getting guitar beat out of them for decades.
And we could just put those in the piano haven,
retirement home, and put all of these new instruments in.
Without her gift, that wouldn't have happened.
If the concert hall hadn't opened,
that gift might not have come.
There's something about investing in
something when all of the pieces are coming together.
>> The synergy.
>> There's a synergy. And it
would have been good money after
bad for her to provide those pianos in
the existing Wilson building with
the existing HVAC and all that stuff.
Because it would have been
a good instrument that would have
gotten with a much shorter lifespan.
But now that we had taken care of the HVAC
in Bailey and in the Wilson edition,
and there was a sense that these instruments could
actually be properly maintained,
it was a gift that followed
the state's original investment,
we actually believe that facilities and people matter,
and then things started to accrue.
>> So, we have a successful opening.
We were in Steinway school,
but we still now have
the Wilson Building addition to talk about.
My goodness. I can't even imagine
what your days must have been like.
>> They were fun.
[LAUGHTER]
Again, I was younger then.
And Mike Alexander was on the team and
he is a visionary in his own right.
So I had sounding boards and we knew.
And that was a kitchen project, which was,
we need practice rooms and we need teaching studios.
And that's principally what the music
department at the time needed out of that space.
And that's fairly straightforward,
which is, who's going to
be taking the lesson in this space?
Is it a brass player?
Yes. Then we need a room of
this size. Is it a woodwind player?
Yes. We need a room of this size.
Is it a percussionist?
Yes. Do you have a four octo Marimba?
Yes. We need double doors.
So we started to build all of that stuff out
in relation to the Bailey center.
It was much more pragmatic.
It went very quickly,
and for instance, I remember,
one of the decisions was,
do we use the instrument practice rooms
or Wenger modules that are in
the basement in the first floor of the Wilson addition?
Practice rooms are very expensive to build.
They're actually per square foot,
the most expensive thing to build
because you're sound isolating
a very small number of square feet.
So you have all the sound isolation for 50 square feet,
cost a fortune per square foot.
So actually, the first floor of
the Wilson addition is probably
much more expensive per
square foot than the same amount of space in Bailey.
It's counterintuitive.
But we went with
those Wenger modules because
we knew that they would work.
You could change the adaptive acoustics
so the kids can actually hit
a lever and get some resonance in the room if they want
it. This is back in the day.
You could patch in your CD player
and play along with the recording.
Now they can do that with whatever
digital device that they have.
But that was one piece that we did.
That project was really fast,
much more pragmatically oriented,
and we just wanted to make certain that there were
some awareness of the relationship
between the two spaces.
So the percussion studio
is on the second floor of Wilson,
and that's so that you can push
the equipment straight through without
going up or down on an elevator
and into the Bailey center backstage.
And John Laws was the reason why.
We want to make certain practically
that the building aged well.
>> So we're coming to the end of your tenure.
>> Yes.
>> So let's reflect back on your time as chair.
And I think certainly a lot to be proud of.
Are there some other moments
that we haven't covered already.
>> Well, the occasion for
our meeting today we're
coming up on the tenth anniversary of the Bailey Center.
And I say this to my friends,
and I say this about my friends.
The most significant accomplishment
is not the building. It's the people.
Magical people.
Students I stay in touch with today,
who have their own families.
You have to remember that the students who were there at
the time knew something cool was going to happen,
and a lot of them never played in Bailey.
A lot of those kids probably should have had
conversations with mom about
transferring to this or that of the other place.
But they felt like something was happening.
That they got to study with people who were incredible,
that everybody in the hall of that little building
in Wilson loved them.
And so as you can tell,
I'm more proud of the people
that we were than the building that exists.
The facilities are the result of the relationships.
>> Manifestation.
But what was already
there, certainly unique time.
I think all of our history.
>> Magical.
>> So we're coming to the end of your chair,
and it's time for you to move on, to something else.
Let's talk a little bit about the
circumstances for you leaving.
>> Sure. So this was in 2007,
2008 position at UMKC that I have at present,
and I'm about to depart from that position.
But University of Missouri Kansas City is
a public institution of today about 15,000 students.
The conservatory is 547 students
under its undergraduate Doctoral.
So that position became open,
and they invited me to talk with them about it.
It became clear that it was a good fit,
and I had been here for a number of years,
and it just was the right thing to do,
and it was quite poignant for a number of reasons.
As you can tell, I love this place.
So leaving here was hard.
It is literally home.
I grew up here as a kid.
And we had this plucky start up pride.
We were ready to take it to the rest of the world,
but it was the right thing to do.
And so when I accepted that position,
I went from
a relatively young institution that was growing
to be enormous to
a relatively older institution that was smaller.
So I think we were what?
Maybe 22, 24,000
students when I departed. I think that's right.
And UMKC is smaller in the aggregate,
about 16,000 students today.
But the music program is much larger.
And it was founded in 1906,
so it's one of the oldest music programs
in the nation, quite distinguished program.
So that was the draw.
It was an urban serving institution.
So it perhaps has an orientation
to Kansas City that might be more like
Georgia States orientation to the City of Atlanta,
but we went there, and I've been there.
Now this is my ninth year.
And we are literally,
as you and I are talking,
Robin and I are about ready to
move to the University of the Pacific,
and I've accepted a position in
California to be the dean
of the Conservatory music there,
which is the first conservatory
founded in the West Coast.
>> Fantastic. Do you
ever have occasion to visit KSU in that time?
>> I did. So a number of times,
I would come down to visit friends,
faculty who are here who have become friends,
visit mom and dad.
And then very generously, David Keeler,
who's now the director of
bands at KSU and conducts the wind ensemble,
doing a bang up job.
Now as a marching band and all that stuff
the athletic bands, it's a real thing.
And so he very graciously invited me to
come back after a number
of years and conduct the wind ensemble.
So it was my old group,
but of course, I didn't know any of the kids.
And here we are rehearsing where we're in Bailey.
And I come back to this ensemble that had been mine,
but these students don't know me from Boo.
And they're rehearsing in
Bailey because that's where
the wind ensembles always rehearsed.
That's how it's always been for them.
So there's this enormous pride that those students,
I don't want to say, take it for granted,
but that's what they expect of college and they should.
But I was remembering,
Olivia Dates and Angie Cook and Cook and
Phil Orman and Brian Reath and Jennifer Peterson,
these musicians who rehearsed in
the old building who never got to know.
But it's a real joy to
remember who helped make this
possible and to see what the school is today.
It's just a fantastic time.
But yes, I did get to conduct the wind ensemble here.
What was that maybe two years or so ago.
>> Well, if there's anything we haven't covered today,
we covered a lot.
>> Well, I think we've covered
a lot of the stories that help
make Bailey possible and what it is.
And I think there are still some of the constraints,
I would suggest today that
we were meant to address when we built it.
The School of Music today is out of
practice rooms and out of teaching studios.
I have a little bit of guilt about that,
that we didn't think big enough,
but you have to recall,
nobody then imagined the merger
happen that would make KSU so large.
Everybody who grows up in Atlanta understands that
this city is just always growing.
But I would suggest that the School of Music
today at KSU is nationally known.
And I had a role to play in it.
But what's happening in the school
today is equal to the stories 10 years ago.
And certainly the long arc of this is Joe Miss's legacy.
So I think it's really important to
understand you have to have
crazy people who can think four and five decades out.
And then you have to have people who
can seize the opportunity
today and attach it to that long arc.
But this region, of course,
is no longer a city on the ascent,
Atlanta is an international city.
I would suggest that the School of Music
is fully mature and is
seen as a national leader and that
when faculty come here,
they know they're coming to
an established and importantly rising institution.
That it's not an institution that you get away from.
It's an institution that you come to and that you
can do things here that will be
the envy of other schools,
some of whom are flagships,
because of our location in a terrific suburban area,
but also in a major metropolitan area.
And there's some cocktails that are possible
because of KSU's location that are only possible here.
And I'm proud to have worked here,
and I'm prouder yet of what it's becoming.
>> Well, Peter, thank you so much.
This has been wonderful.
>> Absolutely.
Thanks for the time.