The Glenn Korff School of Music will begin this fall with regular webcasting of selected concerts in Kimball Recital Hall to help its performances reach a worldwide audience.
John W. Richmond, director of the Glenn Korff School of Music, was interested in pursuing webcasting at UNL and brought David Bagby, the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts’ Information technology services manager, into the process. They looked at what other schools were doing and attended several conferences.
Jeff O’Brien, the Glenn Korff School of Music’s information technology associate, has also been key in coordinating the technology for the project.
“Part of the problem, in addition to the technology piece because we didn’t have the bandwidth when I got here to think about doing this with any reliability and quality, was the intellectual property question,” Richmond said. “Copyright law changes almost daily.”
The university’s ambitious recruiting goals to grow UNL to 30,000 students, however, presented an opportunity, he said.
“We need to reach new audiences and new prospective students,” Richmond said. “But we also needed to be prepared to respond to the disappointment that parents of students from vast distances would have that they would send their son or daughter off to school to a place and then never be able to hear them in recital or in performance of some kind.”
In order to overcome the initial investment hurdle, NET became partners with the webcasters, and Glenn Korff made an investment last fall resulting in the naming of the school.
The Glenn Korff School of Music and NET did a series of test webcasts last spring that went well.
“The experiments went better than we possibly could have hoped,” Richmond said. “We now have the ability to format the webcast so it would appear on a computer, a tablet, a smartphone; it would reformat itself automatically for whatever device is receiving it.”
Three cameras will be installed initially in Kimball Hall, with plans to eventually expand to seven. An additional two cameras are being installed in the Westbrook Recital Hall. NET is able to run the cameras and do the behind-the-scenes work remotely from their studio on East Campus.
A mix of performances have been selected to be webcast that will be advertised in the Glenn Korff School of Music’s semester calendar of events, representing approximately one performance a week that will be webcast. Additional events, including student recitals, will be added later and advertised on the Glenn Korff School of Music website.
The first concert to be webcast this fall will be Hixson-Lied professor of piano Mark Clinton’s faculty recital on Sept. 18 at 7:30 p.m. His recital is titled “The Poetry and Passion of the Piano” and includes works by Robert Schumann, Ludwig van Beethoven, Frederic Chopin, Johannes Brahms and Jean Sibelius.
Other performances scheduled to be webcast this fall include:
Faculty recitals by Jamie Reimer on Sept. 25
Darryl White on Oct. 1
The University of Nebraska Brass Quintet on Sept. 29
The Wind Ensemble on Oct. 8
University Singers on Oct. 16
The Moran Woodwind Quintet on Nov. 13
Cocoa and Carols on Dec. 7
Symphony Orchestra on Dec. 11.
Webcasting isn’t the only change that live audiences will notice. Kimball Hall’s original 1960s seats have also been reupholstered and repaired. The seats have new padding and lumbar support, along with new lighting installed in the house and fresh paint in the lobby, thanks to an investment by UNL Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Ellen Weissinger.
For a schedule of which concerts will be webcast or to get the link for the live broadcast, visit http://music.unl.edu.
