The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News October 1, 2004

Jazz studies in a tight squeeze

Standing outside Hales Gym, the sound of jazz music mingles with the stomping feet in jazzercise class. But the music isn’t being played by a tape or CD player. The Conservatory of Music’s jazz studies department has been housed in the increasingly deteriorating Hales Gym basement almost since its inception in the 1970s. While the King building has incorporated multi-media classrooms and a newly remodeled third floor, the increasingly popular Environmental Studies department has the Lewis Center and, of course, the over-50-million-dollar Science Center now houses state-of-the-art laboratory facilities, the College has been able to shrug aside the constraining space issues that currently plague the jazz studies department until now. The Conservatory is in the preliminary planning stages for a major renovation of the Hales Gym basement. The cost and timeframe of the project have yet to be determined since the Conservatory still needs to find and hire an acoustician and an architect. Preliminary plans include renovating Hales’ shell, repairing cracked plaster and peeling paint and adding heating and air-conditioning systems. Hopefully these changes will make the space safer for students’ instruments and more comfortable for the students and professors. Once that stage of the project is complete, the Conservatory will purchase a series of movable modular rooms that are acoustically suitable for the needs of the jazz studies department. If, in a few years, an addition to the Conservatory were built to house the expanding needs of the school, the rooms could be moved fairly easily from Hales to the new facility. At present, there are 43 jazz studies majors and nine faculty members. While all of their lockers for instruments and the majority of their classes are in the Conservatory, rehearsals for the department are primarily held in the Hales facility. Jazz studies students carry their instruments and books back and forth from the Conservatory to Hales multiple times a day, making a small sacrifice for their music. But even ignoring the chipping plaster and extreme temperature changes that can adversely affect instruments, the hard truth is that the three rooms currently reserved for the department’s use are simply inadequate.The need for space is not unique to the jazz department. Their woes starkly echo the ongoing complaints made by the SPACE committee, the advocacy group for more student theater space on campus. Other student theater groups are a growing faction as well. Hall Auditorium and Little Theater can only accommodate a certain number of productions a semester. With limited performance and rehearsal space productions are forced to adapt to less-than-savory performance spaces such as Wilder Main and the ’Sco and rehearse wherever and whenever they can. The College has made great strides in providing new facilities and positions for departments that have not traditionally received top billing. But it is inevitable that other departments of the College are not getting enough money. In an ideal world, every department would get all the funding necessary to provide the best equipment and facilities possible for its students. In reality, the most any department or committee can hope for is that they will be seen as the next top priority. The renovation of Hales is a big step in the right direction. Hopefully the College will take heed and start putting its money where it is really needed.

–Editor-in-Chief, Douglass Dowty
–Managing Editor, Faith Richards
–Commentary Editor, Casey Ashenhurst
 
 

   

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