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This story appeared in the Fall 2019 Letters & Science magazine.

The dust had not yet settled inside the new Hamel Music Center when Jessica Johnson, professor of piano and pedagogy, stepped into the almost-completed rehearsal hall: lofty ceilings, interlocking bands of light, walls softened by acoustic panels. She clapped her hands sharply: one-two.

“Every performance space has its own personality and sound,” she explained. “When musicians walk into a space, they test the sound.”

The claps landed crisply and vanished. Afterward there was complete silence, though cars hurtled through the rain on University Avenue just outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. More than a foot of concrete wraps the rehearsal hall’s interior walls. Three feet of air space separates the corner wall’s two layers of glass. Sounds are not meant to enter, or escape, this room.

This is incredibly good news for faculty and students of UW-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music. After decades of rehearsing in the basement of the Mosse Humanities Building, UW’s musicians will now have a state-of-the-art acoustic environment in which to prepare for performances. And the Sing Man & Florence Lee/Annette Kaufman Rehearsal Hall is just the prelude, if you will: The new Hamel Music Center, designed by Holzman Moss Bottino Architecture in part­nership with local firm Strang, also features a 660-seat Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall and a 300-seat Collins Recital Hall. Acoustics were designed by Talaske/Sound Thinking of Oak Park, Illinois.

With a new name, a new performance center, a new director of the UW Marching Band (Corey Pompey), a new orchestra director (Oriol Sans), new professor of trumpet (Jean Laurenz) and programs like opera and jazz studies pulsing with new energy, the Mead Witter School of Music opens the door on a dazzling new decade.

Trombone student Gregory Scheer and tuba student Jordan Dewester play in the Sing Man & Florence Lee/Annette Kaufman Rehearsal Hall, inside Hamel Music Center. Photo by Paulius Musteikis.

Since its official opening in 1895, the School of Music has offered a rigorous, student-centered musical education. Collaborative, creative instructors enjoy teaching as much as they enjoy performing in ensembles. In fact, UW-Madison was the first public institution in the country to welcome artists-in-residence, with the creation of the Pro Arte faculty ensemble in 1938. And while the UW Marching Band (a key part of the School of Music) plays to thousands at Camp Randall Stadium and other venues during football season, there are more than 300 student and faculty recitals and concerts happening throughout the year—not to mention dozens of outreach initiatives that take UW musicians out into the community and around the state.

“We are the Wisconsin Idea at its most audible,” says Mead Witter School of Music director Susan Cook.

Director of Bands Scott Teeple concurs. What else is music, if not a means of connecting us all?

“What we do moves the human spirit,” Teeple says. “It doesn’t matter what your background, knowledge or level of expe­rience is—music is a visceral experience. Look at the donors who made the new building possible: They didn’t necessarily study music, and yet it spoke to them.”

We are the Wisconsin Idea at its most audible.

Pamela Hamel (wife of L&S alumnus George Hamel ’80) provided the naming gift for the new center, and the Mead and Witter families from Wisconsin Rapids enabled the project to be fully realized at once.

“Music has always had an important place in our family,” Pamela Hamel said at the time of the groundbreaking. “We feel privileged to be able to provide the university’s music students and fellow lovers of music a world-class facility in which to learn, practice, perform and enjoy music. It’s exciting for George and me to imagine just how many students will be able to benefit from and delight in the Music Center for years to come.”

In 2015 the Mead Witter School of Music became the first department or school on campus to assume the name of a benefactor. Other donors helped realize the recital hall, rehearsal hall, green room and other spaces. The Hamel Music Center is one of the few buildings on campus to be funded entirely through philanthropy without state dollars.

“I think the support from these donors says that music at UW-Madison is strong, and it deserves to be supported in new and bigger ways,” says Teeple.

Piano student Flora Deng admires the ceiling in the Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall, as experts apply copper leafing. Photo by Mary Ellen Gabriel.

To fully appreciate the excite­ment around what this new building can and will do, you must first understand what the old building wasn’t and could never be.

Take prior rehearsal space: cramped, damp and most definitely not soundproof.

“Imagine the Wind Ensemble rehearsing Stravinsky’s ‘Concerto for Piano and Winds’ while in the next room are 300 members of the Varsity Band rehearsing at the same time. There was a lot of sound bleeding through the walls, which made it difficult to focus and listen,” says Teeple.

Performers at Morphy Recital Hall and Mills Concert Hall dealt with humming HVAC, buzzing lights and slamming doors. Technology was outdated—cassette players, overhead projectors and reel-to-reel videotaping were the only options. And prior to going on the stage, musicians had nowhere to wait.

“Musicians need a professional green room, to store instruments and be at ease before going onstage,” explains Soh-Hyun Park Altino, professor of violin. “Before, we had to use a classroom, and performers left their cases on the floor in the hall and climbed stairs holding their instruments. This new building is so much more performer-friendly.”

The Daniel Gregg Myers Green Room in the new music center offers a comfortable space with plenty of cubbies for instrument cases, where performers can warm up in advance of performing, and where friends and family can gather following performances.

Students will have access to the Hamel Music Center’s acoustic and recording technology, including streaming capabili­ties for audio and video.

Of Note:

The interior color scheme reflects Wisconsin's natural landscape.

Reclaimed wooden planking comes from Menominee tribal lands.

Images from Tandem Press founder William Weegee animate the wallpaper in the Collins Recital Hall.

The copper chandelier is a gift from the Class of 1965 (and was made in Sheboygan, Wis).

Teeple calls the entire space a “state-of-the-art musical lab.” And while there’s no doubt that the sparkling new venue, located next to the Chazen Museum of Art, will add verve to Madison’s cultural scene, Teeple and other faculty are most excited about what the Hamel Music Center means for UW-Madison’s music students.

“Our students deserve to play in spaces that are acoustically suitable for them,” Teeple says. “They have achieved success under challenging circumstances.”

While classes and administration will still be housed in the Humanities building, the Hamel Music Center will more than meet the technological, acoustical and spatial needs for top-notch performances. It also raises the bar for everything else, from teaching to performing, and it elevates the profile of the school, signifying that UW-Madison is a place where music matters.

L to R: Jordan Dewester, Flora Deng, Gregory Scheer, Isabelle Krier and Nick Hanke look forward to state-of-the-art rehearsal and performance space. Photo by Paulius Musteikis.

There has always been, says Daniel Grabois, professor of horn, a sense of larger possibilities within the Mead Witter School of Music: for collaboration, for interesting research, for innovative teaching. It’s part of the spirit of the school.

Grabois leads the UW Horn Choir in winter concerts at the Chazen Museum of Art, continuing a 45-year tradition started by his predecessor. But in the spring, he turns the Horn Choir into a rock band called Twisted Metal. Students can play whatever rock music they want, but they have to create the arrangements.

“Students know how these pieces are supposed to sound,” he says. “But then you put the instrument in their hands, and they’ve never played that way before. It leads to a general stylistic awareness—if you had to re-learn what you thought you knew, in order to play rock music, then maybe you can bring that learner’s mindset to playing Mozart.”

Grabois also runs EARS (Electro-Acoustic Research Space), where he teaches students how to create music with electronic instruments processed through computer software. As of now, demand far exceeds available classroom space—but Grabois is committed to “doing incredible things with what we’ve got.”

For Grabois, teaching is all about imagination.

“Music is an art form,” he says. “And the more you can encourage students to imag­ine what they want to achieve—instead of just focusing on technique—that’s the human way to learn.”

Many music faculty spearhead game-changing outreach initiatives. Teeple leads Winds of Wisconsin, an intensive music-making experience that unfolds over two semesters, and gives high school students additional skills to develop as musical leaders within their schools. Johnson leads Piano Pioneers, a program that links UW-Madison student musicians with lower-income Madison families to provide high-quality piano instruction that would otherwise be unaffordable. Altino visits middle schools and high schools around the state, listens and observes, and asks: “What’s missing?” As a result of one such close collaboration, an undergraduate string quartet will perform the original compositions of middle-school students from a public school in Madison.

“Just going in and performing for them does not close the gap,” says Altino. “But supporting the music teachers, being able to talk with young students and help them with what they are working on, that makes an impact.

Faculty offer workshops and master classes to band leaders and music teachers in the area. And many faculty create original works, including Laura Schwendinger, professor of composition, whose opera Artemisia was performed in a world premiere in New York last fall, and whose special fanfare will be performed at the building’s opening celebration.

Professor of violin Soh-Hyun Altino connects with violin student Isabelle Krier in the Hamel Music Center's Collins Recital Hall. Photo by Paulius Musteikis.

A current of excitement runs through any conversation about the coming year in the Mead Witter School of Music.

“I’m really excited,” says Teeple. “We are doing some pieces that I am so geeked out about.”

Among them: a piece commissioned by Omar Thomas called “Of Our New Day Begun,” dedicated to those who lost their lives in 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., and a brand-new symphony by Jodie Blackshaw, an Australian composer. All student ensemble performances are free and open to the public (and can be found at music.wisc.edu/events).

And the school is expanding its reputation as a place for collaborative, innovative musicians to teach and study. Johannes Wallmann, a veteran of the New York and San Francisco Bay Area jazz scenes, arrived in 2012 to lead a new Jazz Studies program. Opera, too, is on the rise. Since 2015, University Opera has been the proud recipient of four National Opera Association Opera Production Competition awards, as well as Honorable Mention in 2018 for The American Prize (Falstaff).

Susan Cook looks forward to the coming decade. “We will expand opportunities for our students, attract top-notch performers and forge partnerships of all kinds,” says Cook. “We want to find new audiences and engage them in different ways. We have only begun to imagine the possibilities ahead of us.”

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