Creative industries in Washtenaw County add hundreds of millions of dollars to the local economy. In the weeks and months to come, host Deb Polich, the President and CEO of Creative Washtenaw, explores the myriad of contributors that make up the creative sector in Washtenaw County.
ABOUT MARK CLAGUE:
Mark Clague researches all forms of music-making in the United States, with recent projects focusing on the United States national anthem (“The Star-Spangled Banner”); American orchestras as institutions (especially in early Chicago and San Francisco); the Atlanta School of composers; Sacred Harp music and performance; critical editing; and the music of George and Ira Gershwin. His interests center on questions of how music forges and shapes social relationships: the art of sound as simultaneously a transcendent emotional expression and an everyday tool for living.
Professor Clague is a professor of musicology with tenure at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance at the University of Michigan who also enjoys affiliate appointments in American Culture, African and Afro-American Studies, Non-Profit Management, and Entrepreneurship. He serves as director of research for the School of Music, Theatre & Dance and as co-director of its American Music Institute. He further serves as faculty advisor to student organizations including Arts Enterprise@U.Michigan, the Ypsilanti Youth Symphony Mentors, Mu Phi Epsilon, and the Interdisciplinary Music Forum.
Before joining Michigan’s faculty, Professor Clague served as executive editor for Music of the United States of America, a series of scholarly editions of American music published by A-R Editions for the American Musicological Society. He also held editorial positions for the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago, where he helped complete the International Dictionary of Black Composers under the direction of Dr. Samuel Floyd. His dissertation for the University of Chicago – “Chicago Counterpoint: The Auditorium Theater Building and the Civic Imagination” – was completed under the direction of Professors Philip Bohlman and Richard Crawford and won the 2003 H. Wiley Housewright Dissertation Prize of the Society for American Music.
His first book is an annotated edition of The Memoirs of Alton Augustus Adams, Sr.: First Black Bandmaster of the United States Navy (University of California Press, 2008). He is currently completing a book for the University of Illinois Press titled “Music for the People”: Chicago’s Auditorium Building and the Institutional Revolution of Gilded Age Culture, along with a manuscript entitled “O Say Can You Hear: A Cultural Biography of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.'” His writings on teaching music history and arts entrepreneurship appear in the journals College Music Symposium and Music History Pedagogy as well as the books Teaching Music in Higher Education and Disciplining the Arts: Teaching Entrepreneurship in Context.
Professor Clague’s research appears in the journals American Music (on the film Fantasia and critical editing), Black Music Research (on bandmaster Alton Adams), Michigan Quarterly Review (on Motown), Opera Quarterly (on Chicago’s Auditorium Building), and the book American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century (on early orchestra organization models) as well as in the International Dictionary of Black Composers, The Encyclopedia of Chicago, and African American National Biography. In addition to being a contributor, Professor Clague also served as project editor and cities and institutions editor for the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, Second Edition (Oxford).
Professor Clague has lectured throughout the United States and China and has presented papers at national meetings of the American Musicological Society, American Studies Association, Brevard Conference on Music Entrepreneurship, Center for Black Music Research, Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical (Lisbon, Portugal), College Band Directors National Association, College Music Society, Experience Music, Feminism and Music Theory, Institute of Musical Research (London, U.K.), Michigan Music Educators Conference, Music and the Moving Image, National Association of Schools of Music, Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Society for American Music. He has spoken as a guest at universities, including Bowling Green, Columbia College Chicago, CUNY Graduate Center, Grand Valley State University, Michigan State University, Northwestern, Peabody Conservatory, University of Chicago, and the University of Southern California.
His awards include the University of Michigan’s Albert A. Stanley Medal, a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, the University of Chicago’s Wayne C. Booth Teaching Prize, the 2003 Wiley Housewright Dissertation Prize of the Society for American Music, a 2004 and 2006 Teaching with Technology Fellowship, an 2007 UROP Advisor Award, 2009 Advisor of the Year from the University of Michigan Leadership Awards, a 2013-14 Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship, a 2013 Sight and Sound subvention for his recorded history of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and a 2013 NEH grant for $200,000 to host a month-long K-12 teacher institute titled “Banner Moments: The National Anthem in American Life.”
Professor Clague was board president of the Great Lakes Performing Artists Associates and continues to serve on the board of directors of the Star Spangled Music Foundation and the University Musical Society, where he chairs the education committee. He is also a member-at-large of the board of the Society of American Music, where he chairs the outreach council. He is on the advisory board of the Sphinx Organization.
Before joining the Michigan faculty, Professor Clague was principal bassoonist with the Chicago Civic and Rockford Symphonies and played periodically with the Grant Park and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. In March 2003, he performed André Jolivet’s Concerto pour basson, orchestra a cordes et piano (1954) as the Concerto Competition Winner of the University of Michigan Campus Symphony Orchestra. He has given pre-concert talks for the Ann Arbor, Berlin, Detroit, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago Symphonies as well as the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, the Detroit Chamber Winds, and the University Musical Society. He has written and edited program notes for the Detroit Symphony as well as the Sphinx Virtuosi and served as centennial historian and American Orchestra Forum host for the San Francisco Symphony.
Professor Clague is most proud of the many talented students with whom he has worked. His doctoral advisees have earned jobs at schools including DePaul University, Roosevelt University, the University of Iowa, Oberlin, Bowling Green State University, and at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Students he mentored through Arts Enterprise @ UM have worked at Google, the Colburn School, the Ann Arbor Symphony, Seattle Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the University Musical Society.
RESOURCES:
University of Michigan Arts Initiative
"Arts Initiative names Mark Clague inaugural executive director"
TRANSCRIPTION:
Deb Polich: Welcome to 89 one WEMU's creative:impact. Thanks for joining me, Deb Polich, president and CEO of Creative Washtenaw and your host, as we meet the artists and creatives who impact our community. I am really delighted to welcome back one of our favorite guests to the show. Mark Clague is familiar to our listeners. He has appeared a number of times as a U of M professor, musicologist, and the foremost expert on The Star-Spangled Banner. Now, Mark is in a new role. He was recently appointed as the executive director of the University of Michigan's Arts Initiative. Let's find out more! Mark, it's a delight to welcome you back!
Dr. Mark Clague: Absolutely, Deb! I'm thrilled to reconnect with creative:impact!
Deb Polich: Thank you! You know, the Arts Initiative was established by former U of M president Mark Schlissel about five years ago. At that time, we had the dean of the School of Music, David Gier, on the show, to learn more about it. Can you remind our listeners why it was started and what its intention was?
Dr. Mark Clague: Well, the Arts Initiative indeed has been in development really since 2019 and has gone through many iterations, as you can imagine, with COVID hitting us just a few months after it was launched. But, I think of it as a kind of like a grand experiment in higher education. What happens at a university like the University of Michigan, a premier research institution that tends to think of, of its mission around the sciences and engineering and, of course, athletics are so dominant? But what happens if we put the arts in the middle of that conversation? And I think that's really the fantastic new thing is to have the support of the higher administration--Laurie McCauley, our provost, and Santa Ono, our president, who, of course, is a musician himself. So, I think both of them have an ability to really see the potential of the arts in the research university, at a university like Michigan, and really just see what will happen if we really make the arts a core component of what a university is about.
Deb Polich: And with that, is there any other precedent, any other university that you're aware of, either here in the U.S. or abroad that has staked a position and set a priority for arts and creativity?
Dr. Mark Clague: I would say this is sort of a national movement, if not an international movement. You know, universities like Columbia, Rutgers, Stanford, University of Wisconsin, Northwestern, there's a lot of schools that are thinking about what the arts can mean to us today. And I think it really responds to the challenges we have as a community--as a world community. I mean, there's so many tensions in the world right now and divisions in the world right now. And the arts have a special power to convene, to bring people together and to allow people to engage with sort of new ideas, unfamiliar ideas, discomfort. So, I think a lot of universities are experimenting with this. What makes Michigan unique, I think, are two things. One is the scope of what we're planning. So, my new position is in the administration building with the president and the provost. So, it really has an endorsement from the center. And so, I'm able to reach across the campus and bring people together, sort of above and through silos and divisions that separate the schools and departments and really sort of bring the faculty, staff and students together. And then, I think the other thing is really the depth and breadth that we have at Michigan, I mean, it's a huge school with like amazing programs. We have more top ten programs than any university in the nation. And so, we have the incredible quality of like a School of Music, Theater and Dance and a Stamps and a Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning, as well as the public engagement of the University Musical Society, the Art Museum. All of the great work in the arts that's happening in LSA with creative writing and sort of computer arts. And our residential college has an amazing program. So, we have that incredible quality and the breadth of the ability to take the arts into unexpected places, like the medical community or the engineering community, and really see creativity and sort of artistic thinking as a core skill for the thinkers and leaders of tomorrow.
Deb Polich: Yeah. And of course, this is a conversation we have all the time on creative:impact. I've repeated over and over again how the arts and creativity intersect with every single other sector. The fact that there's kind of an applied science, if you will, to this through U of M's arts initiative is really, really exciting. So, you've been at the university throughout this whole time, but you've been the interim director for the last year. Why did you want this position?
Dr. Mark Clague: That's a great question. And I think, for me, it's so exciting to have the potential to touch every student, staff and faculty member to really better serve the people of the state of Michigan and the world through the arts. And I've always been located in the School of Music, Theater and Dance, and the musicology department and, you know, tried to do a lot of interesting programs, like through the Gershwin Initiative, through my research on American patriotism and The Star-Spangled Bnner to touch people. And so, this particular role puts me at the center of a whole series of relationships I think that can maximize the impact of the arts and not only on campus but beyond and really test and try to live up to those talking points that you mentioned. You know, we're constantly you're talking about the arts and the way it makes us more human, more empathetic that it it creates these possibilities and sort of you just wonder and sort of creativity to open up the human experience. But how do we take that rhetoric and the talking points and make them real? And that, I think for me, is what's really exciting about this new initiative at the university to really sort of deliver on that promise.
Deb Polich: 89 one WEMU's creative:impact continues. Mark Clague, newly appointed director of the U of M Arts initiative, is my guest. So, U of M is not only walking the walk, it's talking the talk. It put $20 million towards its initiative. I think they announced it about a year or so ago. $20 million is a lot, but it also can go really quickly. What's the priorities for the spending and the moving forward?
Dr. Mark Clague: Great point. And it is a big number. And I think that represents the commitment of the university. But when you're talking about a five-year initiative, when you're talking about trying to impact the Ann Arbor campus, the Dearborn campus, the one in Detroit, and really the whole state, I wish I had more potential. And we're doing fundraising and all sorts of things to really maximize that impact. But for me, the big priorities are around transforming the student experience, making arts and learning core to the university, both for our professional art students who want to become artists and opera singers and designers going forward to really look at arts research on campus. You know, we think of research being more in the sciences and physics and medicine, but artistic practice is a form of research as well.
Deb Polich: Sure.
Dr. Mark Clague: And so, we're trying to elevate the role of arts research to see that as important and as serious an endeavor as any other kind of research on campus. And then really, one of the things I'm most excited about personally-- I grew up in in Michigan and I'm a long-time resident of Ann Arbor. I was born about in a hospital. It's Saint Joseph Hospital in Ann Arbor that's really about 4 or 5 blocks from my office--
Deb Polich: And Clague School and a street is named after your family, too.
Dr. Mark Clague: Exactly! And so, I really want the university to live up to its public mission. And I think the arts are one of the ways that we can reach across the entire state. So, our third big goal is engagement with the community, not only locally, but really Upper Peninsula. I want to go to Kalkaska as much as I want to go to to Traverse City and Grand Rapids and really stretch the thousands, literally, of events, arts exhibits, artistic readings, performances, chamber music, string quartets, theater, Broadway, just dance, everything we have going at the university and make that really reach out across the state. So, we sponsored a tour, for example, of a theater show that was written and directed and created by students that was telling the stories of incarcerated individuals through our Prison Creative Arts program. And we sponsored a tour that went from Detroit to Grand Rapids and all the cities in between this May. And I'm hoping that that's just the first pilot of a much more ambitious program to bring the arts to the university across the state of Michigan.
Deb Polich: Well, you know, that town-and-gown relationship and conversation in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County began probably in 1837 when the university first moved here. And it sounds like you're thinking about that not only just town-and-gown, but gown-and-state, which is also really interesting. Are you getting much back from the State of Michigan research corridor, universities, MSU or Wayne State? Are they engaged in the conversation with you?
Dr. Mark Clague: That's really sort of our goal. I mean, the Arts Initiative is a service organization at the university in a sense. We are bringing people together and trying to provide the bandwidth and the funding that sparks collaboration. And so, those collaborations are not only on campus but across the state. So, I was recently in Detroit for the Concert of Colors and met with a lot of people with the the Cultural Exchange Network and sort of building those bridges. It's going to be an important part of our work going forward. But I would say...I mean, officially, I've been in the job for about three weeks now without the speed control or the limit of the interim title. So, I think we'll be taking off. But if anybody's hearing this conversation and wants to reach out, please contact me via email and let's talk!
Deb Polich: Absolutely. And just real quickly. Your position at the U has been, perhaps, not as public as your position is now. Are you enjoying the getting out there and meeting up with folks?
Dr. Mark Clague: Yeah! I actually love that part of this new role. You know, being on stage at the Detroit Institute of Arts Film Theater to introduce the Big 3 Palladium Orchestra for the Concert of Colors performance last week, or two weeks ago, it was really, really exciting. And there's a lot of joy in the arts. And so, it's really an honor for me and a privilege to be doing this work.
Deb Polich: Well, I want to congratulate you again on your role! Can't wait to see what you develop, and your team develops! And thanks for being on the show!
Dr. Mark Clague: My pleasure! And thanks for helping to spur those conversations and collaborations!
Deb Polich: Likewise! That's Mark Clague, newly appointed executive director of U of M's Arts Initiative. Find out more about Mark and the Arts Initiative at wemu.org. You've been listening to creative:impact. I'm Deb Polich, president and CEO of Creative Washtenaw and your host. Mat Hopson is our producer. Please join us every Tuesday to meet the people who make Washtenaw creative. This is 89 one WEMU FM Ypsilanti. Public radio from Eastern Michigan University.
If you'd like to a guest on creative:impact, email Deb Polich at deb.polich@creativewashtenaw.org.
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