- Hello, I'm David Crabtree.

In a moment, we'll be joined by Brian Cole, the Chancellor of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

We'll talk about his time from leading orchestras and operas across the world to leading the next generation of art students.

We'll also discuss his successes, challenges, and future.

That's next.

- Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

(upbeat music) ♪ - Welcome and thanks for joining us.

I'm here with Chancellor Brian Cole of the North Carolina School of the Arts.

Thanks for joining us.

- Thank you very much for having me.

It's a pleasure.

- I love talking about what happens at your school.

I love being on your campus for people who haven't been there and they hear us talk about an art school or a school of the arts.

They may think fame, performance.

What do you wish they understood about the disciplines that you're teaching?

- Well, first of all, it's unlike visiting any other college campus.

I think anybody imagines they're gonna go visit a university and have a university tour.

It's not like any one they've had before.

It's a little more like visiting Universal Studios to some degree, because there's so much that goes on there.

But I think that kind of plays into that to answer your question too.

When we talk about an art school, I think people often would have a very narrow assumption of what that means.

They probably very quickly imagine just the most traditional art forms that they've grown up around there throughout their lives.

Music, dance, maybe drama.

But what's really amazing about UNCSA, and I can say objectively, not just as chancellor, there is no other place like it, period, is it's much more than even a university or a school of the arts.

It is this entire ecosystem of the arts.

Literally every aspect of the arts and entertainment industry is happening on this campus at any given day.

It's this little 74 acres.

So the kinds of things that happen at this art school, this university of the arts, is everything you can imagine.

Every aspect of what contributes to arts and culture and entertainment in our country, we have students there that can major in and specialize in these careers.

And we have world-class faculty that are in or coming from those industries that are teaching and mentoring and supporting those students and connecting them to careers.

Many times before they've even graduated, students are already engaged with the arts and entertainment industry.

So I would encourage anybody that thinks about an art school when they consider a UNC school of the arts to think much bigger, because the activity that happens on that campus and its impact on the global arts and entertainment industry, I mean, certainly within the United States, within North Carolina, but really increasingly around the world, is pretty profound.

- How many students enroll now or will be this fall?

- We finished this year at about 1,350 students.

That is a combination of certainly our undergraduate student population, which is our largest.

We also have a small graduate student population, but we also have a residential elite high school program.

So combined, that's the enrollment.

- For people who may be hearing about this school, maybe they're new to the state, hearing about it for the first time, again, high school and undergrad and grad all in one location.

And these students are from all across the country and some international students, right?

- That's right.

We have about 50% students from North Carolina and 50% outside of North Carolina.

But in that other 50%, we really recruit from all across the country.

I think almost every one of the 50 states and also from many countries around the world.

- It's an exciting place to be.

And one of the things that makes it exciting for me when I'm on campus is you walk and you talk with students.

If you have the opportunity to hear them perform or to watch them, to listen to them talk about learning how to direct, how to write better, how to connect with audiences, that's something that you would not hear at any type of technical school or with specificity in some of those areas.

- It is true.

We have students from all five different disciplines, big categories on campus.

We have School of Music, School of Drama, School of Dance, School of Design and Production, which is not just theatrical production, but global entertainment, live entertainment, and then a School of Filmmaking.

So some of those are disciplines that are focused on kind of repertoire and repertoire throughout history.

Some of those are inherently focused on generative art making, like film.

Everything they do is new.

But really, every one of those disciplines is focused on also creating new kinds of art, telling stories.

And inevitably, any one of our students or any artist is a storyteller, whichever of those mediums or disciplines they're working in that I mentioned.

And all of our generation's students are interested certainly in performing and interpreting great works from history, whether it's five years ago or 200 years ago, but very, very interested in also creating their own work, leveraging their own authentic voice in that work.

They really have such leadership skills in terms of, like you mentioned, directing, producing work, leading organizations.

The leadership that comes from sitting in an ensemble of musicians or the leadership that comes from directing a film or producing a film, the leadership that comes from our stage managers that learn how to coordinate and produce any kind of number of shows.

There's just this unbelievable varied skill set that comes from interpreting, performing, creating, leading.

It's really inspiring to be around.

- When was the school first opened?

- Well, we are just finishing our 60th year since we opened our doors.

- And some notable alumni who have won Tonys, Grammys.

There's an Oscar winner there now, all from the school.

Ira David Wood, one of your proud alumni, and we love to claim him in this area.

It's quite remarkable.

- The alumni footprint is incredible throughout the arts and entertainment industry.

I think particularly incredible because we're a very small school and we're a pretty young school compared to our peers.

Our peers, UNCSA's peers, are really mostly large private conservatories or large conservatories or organizations within comprehensives throughout the entire country of the world.

So for an institution of our size and relative youth to produce the incredible footprint of alumni that we have is incredible.

You mentioned we did last year have our first Oscar winner.

We've had other nominees, but Paul Tazewell last year won Oscar for costume design for the first of the "Wicked" movies.

We've had other Oscar nominees in the past.

That was our first win.

If you go back to '85, another person that's an alum that was nominated that people might not realize is from School of the Arts is Tom Hulce, who was nominated for best actor in "Amadeus."

He's also a UNCSA alum.

But we have, really, if you look at every Best Picture or other nominated productions and films within the Oscars, within the Tonys, I mean, within the Emmys, also the Tony Awards, any given year, those projects have UNCSA alums all over them.

We've had about 10 Emmy wins and about 10 Tony wins.

Tony nominations just came out this year.

We're excited that Paul Tazewell is nominated again for a Tony.

And then also Joe Mantello is also nominated for best director.

Really incredible alum, music producer, music director, Mary Mitchell Campbell, who was a piano grad from back in the day.

She's getting a Lifetime Achievement Award, the Isabelle Stevens Award from the Tonys.

So super excited.

I mean, it's really fun to see all the nominations and the award seasons for School of the Arts, but really, it's just one of so many different measures of these incredible, successful careers.

And the work that we see students doing, our alums doing, is just mind-blowing and inspirational.

- You've been chancellor now six years?

- Six years as chancellor, seven if you count the interim year, which I do.

(both laughing) - Yes, understood, understood.

In fact, my predecessor here was your predecessor as well?

- That's right.

- Is that right?

- Lindsay Bierman.

- Yeah, small world.

- He's the person that called me and offered me the job as dean of the School of Music.

- All right, you spend your day surrounded by these students that I talked about a moment ago.

They are all chasing enormous dreams.

And I think that's fair for any of us to talk about our dreams we have.

But in anything to do with the arts or that is performance-driven, it can be contagious more quickly, at least that I think, than some other career paths might be.

Am I onto something there or?

- You mean in terms of how they kind of get the bug to do this?

- Yes.

- The inspiration for that?

- And it goes deep when it happens.

- It goes very deep.

I always, in fact, we just had commencement this past weekend, and one of the things that I frequently mention in those remarks is that to protect inside of you the thing that made you love the arts in the first place.

And to protect your creativity and protect your generosity, but protect the thing that made you want to do this in the first place.

- What made you want to do it?

- You know, it wasn't parents.

I mean, my parents supported me, but my parents were not artists.

They weren't like any creative industries.

For me, it was transformative teaching.

I can trace my entire interest in music back to my third grade, my elementary school music teacher, who was just a really inspirational person and gave us experiences.

And I started, I think I was playing the recorder.

I'm sure it sounded horrendous.

Singing in a choir, things like that.

And she gave me experiences and she made me love music.

And that led to me wanting to do it in middle school.

And I had another transformative teacher.

And in high school, these teachers, without any one of them, I'm not sitting here with you today.

- So how do you protect it?

- It's hard.

There's a lot of distractions in life.

And there's a lot of pressures.

But some of those students, they have early experiences where they get the bug for this.

And some of it happens much later in high school or other times in life.

Wherever that was, I think it's very easy.

The thing that can erode that in somebody is the fact that this art form and this experience of being an artist is just constantly subject to criticism and valuation and what other people think about what you do.

And I think it's very hard for many artists, whether they're students or professionals, to separate themselves personally from the work they're creating.

Sometimes that's impossible because the work is very personal.

But when that is what can really, I think, not take away, but really cloud the reason that somebody did it, inevitably, being an artist is not gonna necessarily make you happy, but it's gonna bring you joy.

And that's a much more important thing.

So there are the outside influences within the industry, whether it's training or in the professional world, that can sometimes cloud or hide the joy that you feel from creating something and tapping into what it feels like to create something, to create something from nothing, which is essentially what artists do.

- Well, there are also sometimes when you may have that dream that the bug is creating and you have folks telling you, you can't make a living doing that.

You need to study or do something else.

My mother told me that about broadcasting.

You'll never make a living in that.

Go do something else.

I tried doing other things and it didn't work because the calling was to do something in the field of communications.

And I would think on your campus, your faculty and fellow students encourage folks, don't listen to that noise.

Follow your heart.

- It's very true.

And there is, I think, a misconception of the starving artist and that it's the lack of stability and that it's a hard road.

I mean, it is in many cases.

I mean, you can, in some cases, compare a lot of the highest level artistic careers to athletics and what it means to go into professional baseball and what it takes to actually get to the major leagues 'cause people can sometimes value the evaluation of these careers.

They kind of make it in that direction.

But it's just much bigger than that.

There's just so many more opportunities.

And if you think about artistic careers as narrowly as these specific disciplines of the traditional paths that we've known for decades, of being a classical musician and joining an orchestra or performing in an opera company, of being a dancer and joining a professional company, of being an actor and going to Broadway, these are all wonderful career opportunities.

And we have students pursuing and succeeding in these areas all the time.

But the world of the arts and entertainment and the creative industries is just so much bigger than that.

And the reality is the creative arts training has a really varied and diverse skill set that can apply to so many things.

And I actually don't think there's any less stability than pursuing careers in the arts and creative industries than many other industries.

It's just these kind of tropes that get passed around.

But there are so many opportunities.

And if you just look at our students and graduates over the last five to 10 years, there are many that have gone in very traditional paths, and there are many that have gone in all kinds of parallel and adjacent paths within the arts, leadership roles in the arts, others that have completely outside of the arts that they credit their artistic creative arts training to the success in those fields.

We have a graduate from design and production that runs safety systems for SpaceX.

There are executives with credit card companies, any number of technology companies.

There's graduates of the arts that lead Fortune 500 companies and any number of also nonprofit organizations, arts organizations and others, because the skill set of creative problem-solving that comes from artistic training and the discipline that it takes to achieve these things and the ability to work with teams, collaborating, working under deadlines.

But like I said, the creative problem-solving, this is something that people outside of the arts now recognize and actively recruit artists for because it's real.

And so there are, at a place like UNCSA, there are all the traditional pathways that you would imagine, and there are three times more of these other pathways.

Tiffany Little Canfield, who's our commencement speaker this past Saturday, she's one of the biggest casting directors in the country right now.

So she casted both the "Wicked" movies, she cast "Only Murders in the Building," "Paradise," all these TV shows that are going on now.

She said in her speech, she said, "You know, when I graduated--" she graduated as a drama student, as an actor and director-- she said, "The career that I have now, "I didn't even know existed when I was graduating from college."

And now, she has this huge impact on the arts and entertainment industry.

She also said, by the way, to your former point, when she told her mother that she was going to go into drama school, she jokingly told our students, her mom said, "So you're actively choosing homelessness."

(laughing) And she has proven her wrong every step of the way, but that's kind of those old tropes about what artists are, and it really comes down to just a very narrow understanding of just how big the creative-- the arts and entertainment industry is, and we're talking about a multi-trillion dollar industry together, and the economic impact of arts and culture on the United States is something-- I think it was last measured in 2025.

It's over $1.2 trillion, and it's bigger than about five or six other industries combined, including, like, warehousing and transportation and agriculture.

I mean, this is a huge, a huge opportunity for students coming out of the School of the Arts.

- Your qualification to do this runs deep.

You talked about playing a recorder in the third grade.

Do you still remember the numbers as you fingered that recorder?

- Oh, I could do it.

- Yeah, of course.

- It wouldn't be beautiful, but I could do it.

- I can remember learning the Marine theme in "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."

I still remember those numbers.

So transitioning from that, you are a bassoonist.

So how many instruments do you play?

- Well, I'll correct you.

I have a degree in playing the bassoon.

I haven't played it in a while, but that was-- - But once a bassoonist, always a bassoonist, right?

- The dean of our School of Music is also a bassoonist, too.

I mean, I grew up playing the piano, and then the saxophone was my first wind instrument, and then I started playing the bassoon in high school, actually.

And so I play those-- I have played or can play those instruments.

I've been teaching myself over the past two years to play guitar just 'cause I've always wanted to.

That I will definitely not do in public yet, but I really am enjoying that as another kind of creative outlet.

- And you're also qualified to lead orchestras.

So is the correct terminology, are you a maestro?

Are you a concert master?

What would I say?

To a layman, what do I say?

- I would just say conductor.

That's what I would tell me.

- Well, that could be on a train.

- Yeah, the maestro term is a really formal terminology, but I just as a conductor.

That was my graduate studies and professional career was in conducting.

And that really came from, you know, as a bassoonist is primarily an orchestral instrument, I loved orchestral music and I loved playing orchestra, and I wanted to be as close to that experience as possible.

And for me, kind of the natural step to do that was to lead it and be a conductor.

So I got interested in college, and then that was my professional career before I had an opportunity in administration in higher education.

And I still do some conducting.

I don't do as nearly as much as I used to in the past.

A few times a year, I'll do concerts.

Every now and then I'll do something with School of the Arts.

- Do you have a favorite piece that you enjoy conducting more than all others?

- That's pretty tough to say.

I don't know if I could say a favorite.

I will tell you that, I mean, a lot of the big romantic orchestral literature, you know, going from like early romantic periods, you know, like Johannes Brahms, all the way through into well into the 20th century.

As a young conductor, it was an incredible experience to be at the center of that and be involved in that.

I will tell you, it's not necessarily gonna be like, this is my favorite piece I've ever conducted, but I remember having a particularly kind of out of body experience one time conducting one of the Brahms symphonies because the music is so powerful.

It was kind of, as a young conductor at that point, a pretty kind of overwhelming to have that experience earlier in my career.

But you know, this isn't so much a piece.

One of the kind of conducting I have enjoyed the most or have found the most rewarding is actually in the pit.

So that, you know, being for conducting dance, conducting opera, music theater, I've really enjoyed that kind of conducting, which is much different than being on a concert stage because you're kind of a part of a much larger operation.

You know, you're in the pit and you have the, you know, 50, 60 piece orchestra there with you, but then you have the entire stage, whether it's the Nutcracker with, you know, dancers and the production values and, you know, all the other people that are behind it, you know, the crew and stage managers and costume design and makeup.

That is a really fun thing to be a part of.

And I thought for me, been some of the most rewarding experiences because of the incredible collaboration involved, because of the teamwork it takes, because, you know, what all of those elements can do together produces just something transformative.

And so those experiences, and particularly in opera, music, theater and ballet, being in the pit has been something that's, that's been some of the most rewarding experiences.

- I'm presuming you have to be intimately engaged in that music.

You have to know the music, even though you have the score in front of you and you're flipping pages every eight seconds, it seems like, and you're following along with everything, but you have to know what you're anticipating and what you're hearing.

- You have to know.

- You're not gonna sight read as a conductor, are you?

- Well, you definitely shouldn't be up there if you are.

But you really, ideally, you need to know it better than anybody else that's down there or on stage with you.

The interesting thing about that though, is that, and this kind of speaks to the role of conductor, conductor has all the power and at the same time, no power, because the conductor makes no sound.

You're responsible for putting all of these different, diverse voices together to make one cohesive voice or realize a vision that you have for this piece of music or for this production.

But in the end, you make no sound and you are, it's all of the other people around you that produce the music.

And it kind of goes through you and through the vision that you're there.

And that's really the role of the conductor in the first place, is kind of the leadership of, there's all these different parts and voices and they can be played hundreds of different ways, but you need to bring everybody on the same page to buy into one vision or one interpretation.

And I have great, just immense respect for all the performers because while I, it's my responsibility to know all of these parts better than anybody else, or to the highest degree possible, each one of them has an expertise with their part that I don't have.

And that, I think, having the understanding, the extreme importance of the role everybody plays and a respect for the work they're doing, I think really enables the best conductors, the ones that I really respect out in the world and look to as idols.

That's what I think what enables them to unlock something, incredibly, this entirely new level that comes from everybody buying into what they're trying to do, what they're trying to interpret.

- It sounds a bit like being a chancellor.

- I think there is a very similar skill set to being a conductor, to being a dean or a chancellor within the arts, I do.

And it is very much, it comes a lot to, this is also similar to being a chancellor, is what people think that job is.

When you look at a conductor on the stage, what people see and take away and remember is really just 20% of it.

They see the person on the stage waving their arms and conducting a performance, but that's really maybe 20% of it.

It's so much of it is the study that's done in advance.

Being a business person, being a human resources officer at times, being a public relations person, a psychologist, all those things together really are the totality of the job.

- Less than a minute left, for a young person watching tonight or today, whenever this may be, thinking, "I really want to explore this," may have been moved what you said, what do you tell them about their future?

- It's limited only by their imagination for what they can do.

Everybody has talent and the entertainment and arts industry is so much bigger than people think it is.

And for somebody that has the drive, that has a voice, there is a place for them.

And it may not be in all of the exact traditional places that they've imagined, but the industry is so much bigger than people imagine.

- Chancellor Brian Cole, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, we are grateful for your time.

Thank you for hosting us when we're on your campus and sharing with us what the vision for this school is and what it can mean for this state.

And for those of you who haven't seen that campus, I would encourage you, make the journey.

Thanks again, Brian, and thank you for joining us.

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