When Dan Dunford was studying trombone at The Mannes College of Music, The New School’s classical music school, he never interacted with any of the students from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. Holed up on Mannes’ Upper West Side campus, his only time meeting a student from the Jazz division was through a friend at NYU.
This semester, however, with Mannes merging with the Jazz and Drama schools and moving to new headquarters on 13th Street, Dunford says he has met more students.
This fall, Mannes students said goodbye to the stately building the school had inhabited since 1985 on 85th Street and moved to Arnhold Hall at 55 West 13th Street.
Arnhold Hall will now serve as the home for The New School for Performing Arts, an initiative proposed at a Town Hall Meeting last February which unites the New School’s three performance schools: Jazz, Mannes and Drama under one roof.
The building now has larger, renovated practice rooms and will include a glass-box theatre facing 13th Street and a concert hall on the fourth flour, both set to open in mid-October.
Richard Kessler, the Dean for the New School for Performing Arts told the Free Press in an interview last spring, that administrators from the performing arts divisions feel that the consolidation is necessary in order to encourage collaboration between students from different divisions.
“Just from being around more I’ve met so many new students,” Dunford, who is a graduate of Mannes and project manager for Mannes Moves Downtown said. He hopes that the shared practice spaces will lead to collaboration between the students on innovative musical projects.
Current students have already begun working together in new classes which both Jazz and Mannes students can take.
“I’m more of a jazz musician but I do not really associate myself with the aesthetic of jazz,” Nick Dunston, a sophomore at the Jazz school said. “I blend jazz and classical so I was very excited about Mannes moving down.” Dunston says he is part of a new ensemble class which is comprised of half Jazz and half Mannes students.
Other Jazz students as well seem pleased to share their new space with other musicians.
“It’s nice to have students from all types of musical backgrounds together in one building,” Nick Greenberg, who studies guitar, said. “Hopefully the move will lead to some interesting collaborations between the two schools.”
Some say that sharing practice space with students studying a different genre of music will take some getting accustomed to.
“It’s just different practicing next to an opera singer when you’re used to practicing next to your buddy playing sax,” John O Koozin, a sophomore at Jazz, said. Both Mannes and Jazz students interviewed for this story were pleased with the new practice space.
“It’s all cool because the brethren is still there,” Koozin said.
Tamar is a poet, writer, New York-lover and dweller. She studies jounalism+design at The New School.
