The CMS Emerging Fields in Music series consists of concise monographs that help the profession reimagine how we must prepare twenty-first century musicians. Shifting cultural landscapes, emerging technologies, and a changing profession in and out of the academy demand that we reexamine our relationships with audiences, leverage our art to strengthen the communities in which we live and work, equip our students to think and act as artist-entrepreneurs, explore the limitless (and sometimes limiting) role technology plays in the life of a musician, revisit our very assumptions about what artistic excellence means and how personal creativity must be repositioned at the center of this definition, and share best practices and our own stories of successes and failures when leading institutional change.
These short-form books can be either single-authored works, or contributed volumes comprised of three or four essays on related topics. The books should prove useful for emerging musicians inventing the future they hope to inhabit, faculty rethinking the courses they teach and how they teach them, and administrators guiding curricular innovation and rebranding institutional identity.
Series Editor: Mark Rabideau, University of Colorado-Denver, USA
Managing Editor: Zoua Sylvia Yang, DePauw University, USA
Series Board:
Elisa Fraser Wilson, University of Texas - El Paso, USA
David Stringham, James Madison University, USA
Reed Spencer, Taylor University, USA
Jennifer LaRue, Florida State University, USA
By Anthony Branker
May 14, 2025
Activating Voices in Jazz History: Students Broadening the Narrative highlights the research of students who have been challenged to assess and interpret evidence found in historical records and engage in field interviews with a diverse representation of jazz artists. This approach serves as a ...
By Edward Sarath
April 14, 2025
Music Studies and Its Moment of Truth: Leading Change through America’s Black Music Roots presents a new framework for racial justice discourse in the context of music studies and education. Centering on Black American Music, the book issues challenges to both the conventional music studies ...
By David E. Myers
April 07, 2025
This volume asserts that institutional teaching, study, administration, and performance of music should derive from “essential goodness:” the transcendent value embodied in meaning-making that is manifest through holistic cognitive, creative, kinesthetic, productive, and expressive reality. The ...
By Chris Stover
December 27, 2024
Reimagining Music Theory: Contexts, Communities, Creativities invites instructors to rethink how we teach music theory, challenging the traditional, classical canon-based pedagogy and offering new and alternative approaches. The study and teaching of music theory are at a crucial and invigorating ...
By Christopher Jenkins
December 19, 2024
Assimilation v. Integration in Music Education engages with an existential question for American conservatories and orchestras: What does it mean to diversify Western classical music? Many institutions have focused solely on diversifying the demography of their participants, but without a deeper ...
By Larry Lee Hensel, Alexander Kahn
December 19, 2024
Caring for the Whole Musician brings together insights from two expert musicians and educators to consider the relationship between mental and physical health and artistic practice for musicians. Offering a holistic perspective that encompasses the whole being – body, mind, and heart – this book ...
By Brian Pertl
November 04, 2024
Radically Responsive Music Schools is a philosophical reimagining of music higher education culture from the ground up, arguing that holistic cultural change is the key factor needed for music schools to prepare 21st-century graduates for contemporary challenges. The author discusses how university...
By Timothy Cheek
October 09, 2024
Drawing on 30 years of teaching experience, author Timothy Cheek demonstrates how a university lyric diction class—traditionally specialized and Eurocentric—can become transformative, through engaging students with other languages and cultures, and promoting diversity, equity, inclusivity, and ...
Edited
By Michael Stepniak
January 29, 2024
Today’s higher education music faculty and administrators are faced with extraordinary pressure to adapt, innovate, and change. But what change is most critical to pursue – and how can it be brought about effectively? This concise volume brings together four seasoned thought leaders with distinct ...
By Ayana O. Smith
August 18, 2023
Inclusive Music Histories: Leading Change through Research and Pedagogy models effective practices for researchers and instructors striving either to reform music history curricula at large or update individual topics within their classes to be more inclusive. Confronting racial and other ...
By Sarah Adams Hoover
January 09, 2023
This book provides an overview of professional musicians working within the healthcare system and explores programs that bring music into the environment of the hospital. Far from being onstage, musicians in the hospital provide musical engagement for patients and healthcare providers focused on ...
By James Harrington
February 01, 2022
Building a Career in Opera from School to Stage: Operapreneurship provides early-career singers with an overview of the structure of the opera industry and tools for strategically approaching a career within it. Today's voice students leave the conservatory with better training than ever, but often...