Melanie Piercy, a second-year master’s voice student, is excited about an idea she’s developed to measure the brain waves of vocalists in order to learn which areas of the brain are most active during recitals.
At a Peabody “Pitch” competition held in November, Piercy had just five minutes to share her carefully laid plan in front of a juried review board and her classmates. She talked animatedly about what she hoped to learn from such research, which could add to our understanding of singing, mood, and related emotional activity in the brain. Clearly swayed by the value of Piercy’s work, the reviewers suggested she connect with Johns Hopkins researchers to collaborate on brain research already underway.
Piercy was just one of 70 students who participated in the Pitch competition, the culminating event in the semester-long Pitching Your Creative Ideas course that is a foundational part of Peabody’s Breakthrough Curriculum and operated through LAUNCHPad. Students in the course develop skills in collaboration and presentation by building an interactive artistic project or designing unique programming tailored to specific audiences.
“This is where the rubber meets the road,” says Zane Forshee (MM ’01, GPD ’03, DMA ’11, Guitar), guitar faculty artist and director of LAUNCHPad, who teaches the Pitch course. “Students get to put all the skills they’ve been building in earlier courses — Exploring Arts Careers and Building a Brand and Portfolio — plus their own artistic work, into a setting where they’re applying for a grant.”
The winning pitches received a $5,000 Peabody LAUNCH grant, funded by the Dean’s Office, to help pay expenses to launch their projects during the next academic year.
But the Pitch course is much more than a grant-writing experience. Says Forshee, “We take them through the entire process of developing their project ideas, writing a grant proposal (which includes details such as budget, timeline, promotional ideas, and work samples), and then competing and pitching their ideas.”
Kelsey Tryon, a master’s bassoon student, found the course to be particularly helpful. “The pitching was
a really good experience; we started by practicing one-on-one, then in small groups multiple times … and eventually pitched to the whole class,” says Tryon. “What’s great about this is that we already need the portfolios, so even if I don’t get this grant, I still have a portfolio ready to submit for other grants.”
Other ideas from the November Pitch event ranged from bringing real-time video music lessons to high school students in rural areas, to offering more live classical concerts in smaller towns that traditionally focus on pop music, to recording older classics that are not available digitally for modern audiences. With each presentation, time was allotted for follow-up questions from the review board members, who also made suggestions on how the proposals might be improved.