TAKING CENTRE STAGE
Q & A with Conservatory director
Classical guitarist Brad Mahon, PhD, is the new director of the Mount Royal Conservatory, where musicians such as Yuja Wang, Jan Lisiecki and Emmy Award winner Dave Pierce studied.
The appointment brings Mahon’s career full circle, back to the institution where he has studied, and taught, over a long career in music education.
Mahon comes to Mount Royal from the Medicine Hat College Conservatory of Music and Dance, which he joined following work at the Conservatory of Performing Arts at the University of Regina.
Q. You’re a great guitar player. What attracted you to an administration job?
A. I miss the guitar. (Some days), I wish I could just sit with that guitar and you could teach someone or perform, but I think — honestly — (administration is) a different way to be creative and help your colleagues. When you look at some of the things we deal with (as educators and administrators), you’re using the same kind of problem-solving skills you might use trying to help a student or wrestle with a tricky passage in a particular movement or piece as a guitarist.
Q. What are your goals for the program?
A. I’d like to develop a music entrepreneurship program here — having students really learn the business of music. In most (conservatory) programs, people come out and they know their musical history, they know their improvisation, they know the skills and notes, but do they have a marketing and communications plan?
Another certificate program we want to do for post-graduates — people who come out of a bachelor’s degree — is the idea of having a certificate in studio teaching. A lot of us go to university and we learn to teach the way we’ve been taught, the way our teachers taught us, but a lot of times you come out of a degree program, and there’s a room with a seven-year-old sitting there (waiting to learn) — so learning to teach, some of those entrepreneurship things, and just continuing to build our presence in the community.
Q. Mount Royal offers some unconventional new programming, such as Kathak Dance (classical dance from India), Taiko drumming and Chinese classical music. What’s the thinking behind that?
A. We do classical music really well. We always will and always have. And you know I say to people ... Bach, Beethoven, Brahms will always be safe at the Conservatory here, they will always be our cornerstones. But we are trying some new things. We’re experimenting with world music, pop music … folk music, indigenous musics and asking, how can this music be successful here? Just to try some new things. Calgary in particular is a very multicultural city — we celebrate that in Canada — and Calgary is no exception. You’ve got a multicultural city, and so we want to have multicultural program, but still remembering what we still do classically and with some jazz as part of our cornerstone.
Q. You’re flying to China soon to recruit gifted young musicians to attend Mount Royal. Does having the Bella Concert Hall make Calgary and the Conservatory an easier sell internationally?
A. Having the Bella helps. We have this concert series where we have about 18, 19 shows, and when we have these artists come in, we say, “Hey, you’re coming to town, will you do a little teaching? A master class? Private lessons?” Like a mini-residency. Those are the kinds of things we can now use as leverage — to say to students. We just had (violinist and conductor) Pinchas Zukerman and (opera singer) Amanda Forsythe here and (pianist) Angela Cheng. They do the concert (at the Bella), but the day before, they each come in and they teach a class. That’s the kind of thing we can do (with the Bella) — attract world-class artists and not only do a show, which is their bread and butter, but (have them help with) our bread and butter, which is music education.
Q. On a lighter note, who were your guitar heroes as a kid?
A. One of my guitar heroes from the time I was a kid was Rik Emmett, from the band Triumph. They were kind of a hard rock, or what some people would say was a progressive rock band — but they had this great diversity on their albums. They had this weird, kind of quasi-instrumental thing or jazz theme and then Rik Emmett would always do something on an acoustic guitar solo, whether it was steel string or nylon string — I always loved his playing. It was melodic. It was technical. So he was always a guitar hero (of mine).