Gazette | Cover Story: Small Technology, Big Promise

And the future is even looking bright for the department’s decrepit home on 34th Street. For now, it’s still the drabbest building on campus, but the pigeons that long roosted in its eaves have been shooed and the guano scrubbed away. And Department Chair Jeffrey Kallberg adds this good news: as Bennett Hall, the English Department building next door, undergoes extensive renovation [“Gazetteer,” January/February 2004], the music department looks forward to acquiring the use of its spacious fourth floor, which formerly housed offices for English graduate students. Above the drop-tiles in the central area lies the original high ceiling that was built when the space was used as a gymnasium for the College for Women. This acoustically resonant section will be converted into two flexible classrooms that can double as small performance spaces. Each will be equipped with a nine-foot grand piano. And there will be practice rooms, instrument storage space for the as-yet-unacquired gamelan, and space for recording and digital music.

And after those renovations are finished, some time around Spring 2006, the music department will temporarily squish its offices into Bennett Hall while the Music Building undergoes its own overhaul.

“This is a wonderful liberal arts department of music,” says Cristle Judd. “The performance story is only part of the many good things going on here—world-class scholarship and composition by our faculty, new faculty specialties and courses in jazz and music from many parts of the world, community partnerships and ethnographies through the West Philadelphia Gospel Project, undergrad research projects on medieval manuscript fragments at the Free Library, music and technology classes in a state-of-the-art computer lab.” The list goes on.

Expect to hear even more from Penn’s music department as it moves into the 21st century equipped with long-overdue new facilities.

And expect to hear music.

Karen Rile C’80 is the author of the novel Winter Music and numerous works of short fiction and non-fiction. She teaches undergraduate fiction workshops at Penn.

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