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Jun 23, 2026
Old Dog, New Tricks: Brevard Music Center at age 90
Old Dog, New Tricks: Brevard Music Center at age 90
00:00
27:09
Transcript
0:00
If you were to scan the rosters of symphony and chamber orchestras throughout the country and internationally, not to mention the credits of film scores, commercials, and anywhere else calling for real classical musicians, you'd likely find one or more players who've studied or taught at the Brevard Music Center.
0:17
This is the 90th season for the center. More than 1,000 student musicians from 47 states, the US Virgin Islands, and 20 countries are spending much of their summer in Brevard, diving into six intensive weeks of study.
0:31
It's no longer just classical music. Jazz and Americana have their own curricula alongside opera and vocal performance, and that broadened educational focus is reflected in the concert season.
0:42
Brevard Music Center hosts live music virtually every night of the week through early August.
0:47
Sometimes a classical recital in the afternoon is followed by a performance that evening, drawing nearly 2,000 people to Brevard's one-of-a-kind amphitheater.
0:57
I'm Matt Peiken, the founding journalist of "See Hear," covering the arts of Western North Carolina.
1:02
As the 90th season got underway, I spoke with CEO and President Jason Posnock about Brevard's place in the world of music, its challenges in preparing students of today for a career in a highly competitive field, and the culture of community baked into Brevard's operating code.
1:21
[classical music] Joining me right now is Jason Posnock, CEO and President of the Brevard Music Center. Mm-hmm. And I knew Jason originally as the concertmaster for the Asheville Symphony Orchestra.
1:33
And I guess before we get into life now in Brevard for you at the Brevard Music Center, can you give me a sense of the, how your careers at the ASO and Brevard Music Center intersected, and what led you to come to Western North Carolina?
1:49
Thanks so much for having me, Matt. It's a real pleasure to be with you. And my story with the Asheville Symphony and Brevard Music Center happened pretty much hand-in-hand.
2:01
My wife, Dilshad, who is a flutist, and I were living in Pittsburgh, and were invited to join the faculty of the Music Center back in 2006. We had a great time. We came back in 2007,
2:16
and at that time [lips smack] we were expecting our first child and thinking that life might look a little different for us moving forward. And during that summer, [lips smack]
2:30
the Music Center was preparing to welcome Keith Lockhart as the new artistic director here at Brevard, and they were considering growing their instruction and performance department from two people to three people. So
2:49
started having a conversation about that, and at the same time, I saw that the Asheville Symphony concertmaster position was open for the first time in 25 years. And I knew the conductor from my time in Pittsburgh.
3:05
Dan Meyer was assistant conductor in Pittsburgh, and I had been playing quite a bit with the orchestra. So called him up, asked if I could get in the audition, and the next thing you know, it is early August.
3:19
The Music Center season was over. They let me stay a few extra days.
3:23
Went up there, we won the audition, and the job came through, and in January of 2008, with a three-month-old in tow, we moved from Pittsburgh to Brevard, North Carolina. Wow.
3:37
And so you were the artistic director at Brevard at that time, right? I was the associate artistic administrator. Okay. So it was quite a junior position. Very much a
3:52
artistic administration position, but looking to really focus on giving our students a professional orchestral experience while they were here.
4:02
And my boss was the dean of the faculty, as that title was known at the time. And it was, yeah, it was a different time here at Brevard. Tell me about that. It's been almost 20 years since you started there. Mm.
4:15
Obviously, your responsibilities have grown a lot. So tell me, what's different about life at the Brevard Music Center now than it was in the mid-2000s?
4:26
For one thing, this year we're going to welcome over 1,000 students and participants to our programs. Back then it was just over 400. So it's nearly two and a half times the number of students.
4:40
Our programs now start in late May and go almost until the end of August. When I started here, it was pretty much the third week of June until the first weekend of August. So we've really expanded our programming.
4:53
We've expanded our genres of music that we both teach and present, and we have expanded our calendar. Let's talk about each piece of that. Sure.
5:05
You've mentioned that the programming itself has expanded, wider varieties of music. Talk about that. What kind of music are you both teaching now?
5:15
Not kind of music, but I guess what styles, genres, practices within music are you now teaching as part of general curricula there that you weren't, say, 15, 20 years ago? Sure.
5:28
We now have a jazz program that over the past 13 years or so has become one of the top programs in the country. We have 120 students in it.
5:40
They happen to be here on campus right now rehearsing with Branford Marsalis for their culminating concert.
5:47
We have three bluegrass programs that we have introduced to our curriculum, which is really important because this is music of our region, and I think we were not doing much of that Back when I joined
6:03
and as part of our real efforts to increase the accessibility to our campus, I want everybody to feel welcome. And it's okay if a Brahms symphony might not be how you want to spend your Saturday night.
6:18
It's still an incredible place to experience live music and to experience instruction. It's one thing to program it from a concert experience, have such a variety.
6:29
It's another to thread your educational programming with this, with these students.
6:34
And when you said that you're bringing in bluegrass, I was wondering, and correct me if I'm wrong in this, most of your students come here steeped in some grounding of classical music education.
6:44
Probably not too much with Americana, at least as it applies to their music.
6:49
How have you both introduced bluegrass as a relevant genre for their music education and how they can apply some of that into where they're going musically? Sure.
7:03
So our bluegrass camps are focused on students and participants who really are steeped in that tradition.
7:11
So for our banjo program, they really come here, they want to study with Béla Fleck, and they want to be in a community of banjo players, and it's an amazing thing.
7:23
However, we also have started to program this bluegrass music in our regular concert series.
7:32
So for instance, this summer we have Woody Platt and Shannon Whitworth, who are an incredible duo, happen to be married, which I know helps that.
7:43
But Woody, of course, was founder of the Steep Canyon Rangers, and they just have a great sound. I love their sound.
7:50
And our students are going to be what you might call the backup band, except what it is learning how to perform with maybe a different dialect.
8:02
So when they get hired by the Cincinnati Symphony or the Indianapolis Symphony to play a show, it's probably gonna be a pop show, and they need to learn how to speak that language.
8:16
It's a little bit different than playing a Mahler symphony. Yeah. You said students come to you.
8:21
For instance, banjo students come to you with that concentration of music already in mind that they're going to focus on that. Right. They are not necessarily classical musicians. Correct.
8:30
How did you, you and your staff go about framing the appeal of a Brevard Music Center education to bluegrass students who probably weren't thinking of formal educations?
8:45
This is a kind of music that's passed down generationally and in, in b- I guess it's a stereotype, the swamps and the, the porches of the South.
8:54
And how did you go about even, first of all, you and your staff thinking, "We want to embrace this as a formal education practice," and then, and then recruiting and appealing to students who might want to play that music but have never thought about formal study?
9:11
Sure. So for the banjo in particular, when Béla Fleck is the head of the program, banjo players from all around the world want to be here. Mm.
9:26
This was-- Banjo camp is a thing, and there are some of these sprinkled throughout the country, but Béla has never put his name on one before.
9:36
And back in 2018, through partnerships here with Mountain Song Productions and John Felty and Woody Platt, who are great friends of ours, we built this new program, and it-- banjo players were racing to be here. Wow.
9:53
And on the success of that, we, we brought in Bryan Sutton to develop a guitar program, and Kasey Driessen has since developed a fiddle program. So it is a little bit if you build it, they will come.
10:07
And did you always-- When you built that, did you always have in mind this is going to be on top of and alongside our classical music core, or have there been changes and challenges within classical music in terms of the numbers of students who can participate in a summer program like yours?
10:26
And was it imperative to broaden your program for the long-term sustainability of Brevard Music Center?
10:35
We believed it was crucial to expand, not because we had to or were forced to financially, but because we believe in teaching basically any kind of music
10:51
in the way that the Brevard Music Center believes in teaching it, which is centered around mentorship from student, from faculty member to student.
11:02
It is experiential so that the core orchestra experiences here, our flagship orchestra, is a side-by-side orchestra. Students learn directly from their teachers while doing what they're here to do.
11:16
Every program that we have built here that has succeeded has those values at its core. Mm. And our bluegrass programs are the same.
11:27
The final concerts, there are always opportunities for the students to come on stage with their teachers. All through the week, you can see just gatherings of people sharing stories.
11:38
And you were talking about that communal nature of passing from generation to generation. That's happening here in those bluegrass programs. It also happens in our classical programs, in those one-on-one lessons.
11:53
That's one of the things that's always impressed me about Brevard Music Center, that it just seems such a, like at the natural core of what you do there and the cultural core of what you do, that to have this cross-pollination between students and faculty and students of, of s- of one discipline interacting with students of another discipline.
12:12
And has that always been the case with Brevard Music Center? I don't know if you can go back yourself and what kind of knowledge you have of what was happening there in the 1930s and '40s.
12:23
But I imagine, like you said yourself, you weren't offering nearly as many off- musical offerings as you are now. Sure.
12:30
Has that cross-pollination always been there, just without your design, but just naturally happening? Or was that something you and your faculty at, were very conscious about building?
12:42
When the music center was founded, it was actually at Davidson College in- Oh, nice... just north of Charlotte. It was founded as the Davidson Band Camp for Boys. It moved out here by the mid-'40s,
12:55
and it really evolved from that band camp into an orchestra camp. There was always a focus on nature, and I think that is one of the things that really attracted James Christian Foll to move the camp out here.
13:11
It is still important today, that connection between nature and learning music and performing music. So I th- and what was always important, at least my perception of it, being a,
13:27
I guess the resident historian that I am, is it's never just been about playing the notes perfectly and then going home. It has always been about the journey.
13:42
I think the thing about Brevard Music Center is from the earliest days and certainly through now, it is about the journey of coming here, being open-minded and having an open heart in your educational pursuit,
14:00
and then growing in ways you never expected to, both as a musician and as a person. So I think those values have always been there.
14:08
Today it might look a little different than it did in 1956, but the core of who we are, we have always been an organization that has an educational mission.
14:19
The performance season, the, our summer season is the organic outgrowth of the work that our students and faculty do together. Wow.
14:29
And I think that's what makes us, that's what makes the atmosphe- atmosphere here so special. You just hit on something that I think is really important, that it was an outgrowth- Mm-hmm...
14:40
of this educational camp that was happening, not the other way around. You weren't presenting- Mm-hmm... seasonal programming, then decided to have an educational component layered on top of it.
14:50
And one of the things that, that also impresses me about your programming, and I can't imagine this is an easy lift, because not all of your concerts do this, but you thread your students into your main stage performances.
15:04
You have intimate recitals. You have concerts meant for a couple thousand people watching.
15:09
You have students at, at, performing at all of those kinds of venues, from the intimate recital hall to the full-blown concert, your operas and all kinds of music that the students are part of.
15:22
Is that something that the students work toward, or is it just expected of them that you're coming here, you're going to be on stage with the stars that we bring in to headline these performances.
15:36
You have a professional role as an accompanist with these stars. Is that how you frame it to them? That is the curriculum. Absolutely.
15:45
There are very few concerts in the nearly 100 concerts that take place over the year that do not include students. The one thing is we have a faculty chamber music series that typically does not include our students.
16:00
Virtually everything else we do includes our students in one way or another. Even our flagship orchestra is more than half students. Yeah. And the college students also have their own orchestra.
16:12
The high school students have their own orchestra. So they are coming here to learn, and the performance is part of that learning journey. So the way I always think of it is that they are
16:26
working, they're studying, if you will, during the week. It's almost like a little mini course each week. And at a given time, we raise the curtain, we invite the public to
16:40
be part of that work, because they are part of the performance. It is, it, listening to music, going to a concert is very participatory.
16:50
It is not something that you just sit back and let happen, and if we did the concert the next day, it would be a different concert. Virtually every day of the week you have some public- That is true...
17:01
including multiple programs on some days. You'll have an afternoon program with an evening program very different from one another.
17:08
I imagine too that students go there expecting, certainly the college students, maybe even at the high school level, but certainly the college and conservatory-level students are looking for a professional leg up, that to gain a sort of concentrated dose of education that they can't necessarily get anywhere else, but that's going to help them professionally.
17:30
And I'm wondering, there are fewer orchestras than ever that have tenure-track full-time positions in them. The industry is changing.
17:38
Yet there's other opportunities that also didn't exist yesteryear for classical musicians.
17:43
I'm wondering if you can speak to what challenges and opportunities face your students and how Brevard Music Center's positioning itself to help meet those students get to where they need to go. You're right, Matt.
17:56
A career as a professional musician, it doesn't matter what kind of music you're playing, it's hard. When I was teaching regularly, and if there was a student who was showing some interest in going in that direction,
18:11
the advice that I would give was, "You should really only do it if you have to. If playing music is like breathing and eating to you, then go for it.
18:21
If being an engineer or an architect or a lawyer will make you just as happy, you might wanna think about doing that." Yeah. But what we do here at Brevard is we try to model many different kinds of careers in music.
18:37
So we have orchestra players, we have university professors, we have freelancers, we have people who play chamber music. We have had people who live in LA and do session work.
18:52
So there are so many ways, and most musicians have to cobble together by performing, teaching, traveling. A lot of travel for most musicians.
19:05
To me, when I was doing that, when I was living in Pittsburgh and living my life as a freelancer, it was interesting because it was something different every week, sometimes every day.
19:17
But you give up a sense of stability, I think, if you go that route. There are very few orchestra jobs. It's hard. That is a hard path. And... But if you wanna try to do that, we're gonna try to help you.
19:33
So that happens in the private studios when teachers are working one-on-one with our students.
19:39
It happens when they have a studio class, and they get their kids together, and maybe they have mock auditions, or they're teaching them, "Okay, when you go to an audition,
19:49
these are the kind of things that the panel's listening for." So if you can know that from people who sit on the panel, it can help you prepare.
19:58
One of the things that I've become aware of only relatively recently is that a lot of younger musicians are taking matters into their own hands, presenting their own concerts in alternative spaces- Mm-hmm...
20:09
becoming influencers. This is something musicians just even a decade ago didn't have at their disposal.
20:16
Now there are musicians on TikTok and Instagram who have tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of followers, and are making their way that way.
20:25
Is that something you and your staff and your students are familiar with, and is that something that your curricula is going to want to adapt to, is to help create an entrepreneurship with your students?
20:41
So I wouldn't say we're on the cutting edge of that, Matt.
20:44
I think [chuckles] we're aware of it, and we do weave it into the curriculum in the sense that there are lectures or presentations that talk to our students about
20:57
how to write a resume or how to present themselves in social media, tho- those sorts of things.
21:04
I have absolutely no doubt that as every year goes on, we will have to incorporate more and more of it because our students will be looking for it. They're gonna need it, right? Yes.
21:16
Given the landscape that's happening, fewer orchestras are hiring full-time staffers.
21:21
There's so much competition with AI now, with the ability for somebody to create a score, no matter what the quality is, without any music education.
21:31
And young musicians are gonna have to be inventive and entrepreneurial to some degree, unless they're one of the very, very lucky few to break-- to, to get hired. They're gonna have to do that at some point. Absolutely.
21:46
And I think for us, our students in the sort of these core orchestral instruments, they're here with us for just about six weeks. It's not very much time.
21:57
So I don't think we're in a position to teach them how to do all of those things.
22:03
I do think we are in a position to impart to them how important it is for them to be versatile, open-minded, creative, inventive, for them to take chances out there because the landscape has changed so much.
22:20
So if they can come here and leave us with a more open mind than they got here with, we've done something important for them. Yeah.
22:29
Is there anything about this 90th season for Brevard Music Center that is particularly new or of a certain highlight of something that y- you just don't necessarily do or see every season? I think our 90th
22:43
anniversary season programming is really a celebration of everything that we are and that we strive to be.
22:51
We have incredible guest artists from Yo-Yo Ma to Gil Shaham to Garrick Ohlsson, Steven Hough, the world's greatest artists all here this summer.
23:03
We have non-classical artists like Jason Isbell and, of course, Shannon & Woody. It...
23:11
Really looking to present the best of who we are, and that's really exciting. That's, that is celebrating, I think, our core values.
23:25
It's celebrating the decades that... I'll say it this way. It's celebrating the hundreds and thousands of people who have given their hearts and their souls over the decades to the Music Center.
23:42
We wanna celebrate all of that this summer. Let me ask you. You've been there 19 years. You left ASO after 16 years. I'm wondering, what are you doing in your performance career?
23:55
I loved being the concertmaster of the Asheville Symphony for 17 years, actually. And I actually-- I like to say retired, but my wife isn't ready for me to use that word anywhere yet.
24:06
But actually, my last concert with the Asheville Symphony was the day before my position as president began. And that's really why it was the right time to do that.
24:19
As the president and CEO, that always has to be first for me. So it was time to let somebody else sit in that chair, and th- they ended up with two people, so I know that's going really well for them.
24:32
My wife is the s- solo piccolo player for Asheville Symphony, so... And we are great partners with them, so I still stay connected.
24:41
But for me musically, I think I get the greatest joy at this point from smaller, more intimate events.
24:49
Maybe it's a house concert for 30 people where we're playing a little chamber music, and somebody's sitting five feet away from me, and
24:59
it has that very participatory sense to it where we are all going through the mu- experiencing the music together. So that gives me the greatest joy.
25:11
But I will say, during the summer here, I play in the orchestra, and I love to sit in the back of the second violin section and work with the students there.
25:20
And we, how can you not wanna play Brahms Four or a Mahler symphony with somebody, a young aspiring musician who's never played it before? Yeah. There's nothing more energizing for me.
25:36
It's heartening to hear y- that you still have that fire to work with youth in that same way. You're here for the 90th season. Any chance you'll be there for the 100th season? [laughs] You never know, Matt.
25:47
That's not completely up to me, but we have a wonderful board, so I love working with them, and I love being here. Clearly, it's where we've decided to raise our family, and Brevard Music Center means so much to me.
25:59
What I will say is the 90th anniversary, as celebratory as it is, really is going to serve as the kickoff t- to, to our centennial. It's, I remember our 80th.
26:11
It, it seemed like that was gonna be a long time between 80 and 90, and it's here in a flash. So- Yeah... 90 to 100 will get here even quicker. That just tells you how years go by when we get older.
26:24
It seems like- You're exactly right... time marched slowly when we were young. Yes. You know? Anyway, I know we're running out of time here, but I appreciate your time here today, Jason. Yeah.
26:33
And I'll come out to Brevard and see a show or two this season. You just let me know when. Sure. Thanks so much, Matt. [upbeat music] Thanks so much to Jason Posnock for today's conversation.
26:44
You can check out everything about Brevard Music Center's 90th season at brevardmusic.org. And this podcast is part of the soft launch for See Hear, my new journalism platform for Western North Carolina.
26:57
There'll be video, audio, written stories, and you can subscribe for free to see it all at seehearwnc.com. Till the next time I see you here, I'm Matt Peiken.
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