From the Provost

November 12, 2024

This coming Friday, Bloomington will best New York... in song. 

IU’s Jacobs School of Music will host the world premiere of the new opera by Mason Bates, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, before it arrives in New York. Earlier this year, the School entered into a co-production agreement with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City to premiere the opera at IU. 

Leaving L.A.

Early last December, I received an exciting call from the Jacobs School of Music Dean Abra Bush. Excited calls from Abra are not uncommon – we talk frequently about new opportunities and happenings – but I could tell this one was different. She had just gotten outreach from the Met that the new opera premiere they had slated for Los Angeles had fallen through. Would we be interested? 

She wanted to take the next flight to New York, and I eagerly said yes. There were dozens of unknowns at the time, including timing, cost, design and whether we could actually pull it off. There were plenty of tricky points (and more to come along the way), but a few weeks later, the commitment was made, and planning officially kicked off. 

To be sure, IU’s longstanding reputation for the quality and depth of our faculty and education for students, and world-class facilities, helped make this possible. But so did the willingness to take a risk. 

Creative risk-taking is an inevitable part of most success, and while daring does not always end in a world premiere opera, this was yet another moment where taking the phone call and chasing the unknown paid off in unexpectedly brilliant ways. 

United in ambition 

If you know the opera’s story, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Michael Chabon, it involves two brothers brought together in New York and united by their love for the arts, particularly comic books. 

Across our Bloomington campus, thousands of faculty, staff, and students are equally drawn together by their love of the arts. Those passions inspire practice and productions here of myriad kinds, from theater and ballet to film and interactive media. Indeed, so much creativity abounds at IUB on any given day, it is nearly impossible to take it all in. 

And yet, like Jacobs, we must keep pushing.  

With every new day, we must keep asking how we can take what we’ve done well historically, our greatest strengths, and leverage them in new ways, for a new era of students, and a new burgeoning age. How can we take positive advantage of technology? How can we capitalize on students’ interests in fields like business and engineering, cutting-edge technology, and other professional areas that offer better defined and more immediate career pathways?  

How can we transform the enriching journey of music into a destination in itself? 

Rising to the moment 

One answer for the Jacobs School has emerged through a new collaboration with the Kelley School of Business on a new Music Business degree that will launch next fall. Music plus business, as only IU can. And the interest from prospective students is already high.  

This same kind of creative innovation is now happening across IUB in new and updated degree programs, experiential learning opportunities, and more. It is apparent in the development of new interdisciplinary learning spaces, like those we have in L.A. and the one we are pursuing in Washington D.C. It is in the reimagining of our museums as interactive hubs for teaching and learning, like with the newly christened IU Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, and evident in the upcoming leadership search for the Eskenazi Museum of Art. 

I am grateful to all those here, like Dean Bush and our amazing Jacobs team, who are daring, reinventing, and leading to meet the moment. 

IU has a richer tradition and greater resources invested in the arts and humanities than nearly any public university in America. But even we, perhaps especially we, remain a work in progress. We must answer the call and make ourselves relevant and ready for today – and tomorrow. And I am assured we will. 

Like the lead characters in the opera, Kavalier and Clay, who will take the stage for the first time at the Musical Arts Center this Friday, we will come together and make noise anew for New York and all the world to hear.