As CMPI embarks on its sixth year of programming, we have once again put together an exciting calendar of masterclasses, workshops and performance opportunities! All of these are designed to give CMPI fellows the information and experiences they need to grow as musicians, and equip CMPI parents with the knowledge they will need to be able to support their children after they graduate from CMPI.
We kicked off the 2024/25 school year with orientation sessions at the Merit School of Music and Northeastern Illinois University. Orientation is an opportunity for the full community of CMPI fellows and parents to come together, learn about what the year has in store for them, and have conversations about topics related to music education, including college preparation, scholarship research, practice habits, and many more. Christopher Hurd took new headshots of all the fellows in attendance, and we can’t wait to unveil them on our website soon.
CMPI’s ten senior fellows have already begun to undertake a specialized curriculum of college application and audition preparation. It began with studio classes at Merit and Nichols Concert Hall, where the seniors performed excerpts from their audition repertoire for each other and exchanged peer feedback. Earlier in September, our eleventh and twelfth graders attended a virtual workshop led by Dr. Heather McCowen on Finding your Musical and Financial Fit. Seniors will also each have the opportunity to perform their college repertoire in a CMPI recital in October, November, or December, and again in mock auditions and masterclasses in the fall and winter. Our goal for our seniors is for them to perform their audition repertoire in numerous contexts before embarking on their actual college auditions in the spring.
Of course, performance opportunities are not reserved solely for our twelfth grade fellows. Each CMPI fellow will perform solo repertoire at least three times: at one of CMPI’s six shared recitals, at our technical juries in November, and at our performance juries in April. Many of our fellows will also have the opportunity to perform their solo repertoire for our guest masterclass faculty, who this year include Rachel Barton Pine, Jennifer Gunn, Antoine Tamestit, Johannes Moser, Anthony McGill, Demarre McGill, Pascual Martinez Forteza, Randall Goosby, and Lina Bahn.
Because CMPI’s goal is for fellows and parents to develop a broad understanding of the opportunities that exist within classical music as well as some of the industry’s “unwritten rules,” we have planned monthly workshops that cover a wide variety of topics and feature a wide variety of perspectives. Our workshops in September included a practice strategies workshop led by Joshua Jones, and the aforementioned college preparation workshop led by Dr. Heather McCowen. Coming up, we will discuss summer music camp in October, instrument purchase in November, and a musical careers panel later in the spring. Stay tuned in to our newsletter for summaries of these workshops and events!
CMPI fellows are also fortunate, as members of a pathways program, to be able to access opportunities through Equity Arc’s National Collective of Pathways Programs. These opportunities include an annual Pathways Festival Orchestra, where fellows from pathways programs from across the country get together for a weekend to form a side-by-side orchestra and participate in intensive rehearsals, sectionals and performances. This year’s festival orchestra will take place in Chicago, and will feature musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Civic Orchestra of Chicago. Previous festivals have taken place in Chicago, Nashville, and Cincinnati; I encourage you to look through CMPI’s news section to read about our fellows’ experiences in those festivals.
The 2024/25 school year is already promising to be exciting and filled with musical growth and opportunities! Please continue to read our newsletter each month to stay caught up on all the amazing things our fellows are doing this year.
Images
CMPI logo