NYU Alumnus Funds The First BFA Program Of Its Kind In The U.S.
New Department, To Be Named For The Legendary Music Executive, Will Focus On Record Producing As An Artistic Discipline And The Music Producer As Artist
Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and NYU alumnus Clive Davis, who is founder, Chairman and CEO of J Records, jointly announced today the record executive’s $5 million gift to the School for the creation of a new Department of Recorded Music. The formal announcement will take place on Friday, November 8, 2002, at an evening event held for high school juniors, seniors and their parents at the Equitable Center Auditorium in Manhattan. The program will include performances by both Monica and Mario, two major young artists who are signed with J Records.
The Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music is the first of its kind to offer a four-year, degree-granting undergraduate program that recognizes the creative producer as an artist in his own right and musical recording itself as a creative medium. In preparing young people, the Department will educate them in all aspects of contemporary recorded music.
“Clive Davis has acquired a legendary reputation for spotting and developing new musical talent in the course of his 35 years in the recording industry,” said Dr. Campbell. “His inspired leadership and golden ear have changed the business of contemporary music forever. We are grateful to have him as a partner in this initiative, which will cultivate in young minds Mr. Davis’s tradition of creative management, and in doing so, shape the music industry’s next generation of leading executives.”
“I am enormously proud to play a part in the creation of this new program, which will give ambitious and hard working young men and women the fundamentals and skills to serve as the foundation for success in the industry that I love,” commented Mr. Davis. I can think of no better place for such a program to reside than at the Tisch School of the Arts, the country’s greatest performing arts school, located in the performing arts capitol of the world.”
Clive Davis graduated Phi Beta Kappa from NYU with a B.A. magna cum laude in 1953 and from Harvard Law School in 1956. Successively head of Columbia Records, Arista, and most recently, J Records, Davis has signed and nurtured such performers as Janis Joplin; Blood, Sweat and Tears; Santana; Billy Joel; Bruce Springsteen; Aerosmith; Whitney Houston; Patti Smith; and Alicia Keys. He won a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Trustee Award in 2000 and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.
“The creation of the Department of Recorded Music signifies that contemporary recorded music will be a new domain of knowledge, which will have a lasting impact on the consideration of sound recording itself as an art form,” added Dr. Campbell. “It will provide opportunities for students to master the range of disciplines and mediums that support recorded music in the culture and, using the example of the creative record producer, to have a career in the recorded music industry.”
Graduating students of the new Department will earn a B.F.A. The curriculum includes practicums in the recording studio where students are expected to become proficient in a range of recording studio practices. Students will be expected to construct a viable and coherent performance image for a selected creative artist within a number of promotional distribution mediums, including radio, film, music videos, and interactive technologies. In addition to practical work, students will study the cultural impact of recorded music and the history of a number of musical genres, including, but not limited to, Rock, Pop, Hip Hop, Jazz, Latin and World Music.
The installation of the Department of Recorded Music at the Tisch School follows in the tradition and history of the School for mapping new areas of study that integrate both the practical and critical approaches to the arts. For example, the School established the first Department of Cinema Studies at a university in the U.S. It founded the first Department of Performance Studies, and the School’s Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program is still the only department of its kind in the country. Moreover, the Interactive Telecommunications Program, the Tisch School’s pioneering graduate center of the study and design of new communication media forms and applications, was the first such department of its kind at an art school.
The Tisch School of the Arts, comprising the Performing Arts Institute, the Jack H. Skirball Center for New Media and Film and the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television, is one of the nation’s preeminent centers for professional training, scholarship, and research in the performing and cinematic arts. It offers both graduate and undergraduate degrees and draws students from around the world. Nearly 3,000 students pursue degrees in acting, dance, design, drama, musical theatre, performance studies, film and television, cinema studies, dramatic writing, photography and interactive telecommunications.