A $4.6 million donation to the Mizzou New Music Initiative was announced on Monday, May 5. The gift comes from donors Dr. Jeanne Sinquefield, Rex Sinquefield and the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation and brings their total donations to the Mizzou New Music Initiative over $15 million since 2005.
The Mizzou New Music Initiative encourages composers to write new music through a variety of programs for students from kindergarten to graduate school, the compositions are then recorded and disseminated. Dr. Stefan Freund, the artistic director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative, said the new donation will add a mixed media recording studio, a recording engineer position, a managing director for the Mizzou New Music Initiative and more scholarships and awards for composition students.
“We are fighting an uphill battle by not being an established and prestigious school of music like Julliard, Eastman, Indiana, Michigan,” Freund said. “We don’t have that tradition, we don’t have that reputation, we don’t have that prestige. So we have to continue to build it.”
Jeanne Sinquefield said she wants to make Missouri a center for musical composition through more composition programs and improvements to the School of Music. The Sinquefields donated an additional $10 million to the School of Music, the largest donation to the fine arts in the University of Missouri’s history, to help fund the Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield Music Center. The center finished construction in 2020.
“Every single year we come up with something new, like having a mixed media studio and having a certificate in music production,” Jeanne Sinquefield said. “You get creative people together and they know I like progress.”
The Sinquefields’ first donation to the School of Music was $50,000 to create a K-12 composition competition, which has been held every year since 2006. Her involvement in composition at MU has only grown as she founded the Mizzou New Music Initiative in 2009 and continues to provide funding for improvements.
“[Jeanne Sinquefield] prides herself on being actively involved in what we’re doing, coming up with ideas,” Freund said. “One of our programs, Sound of Art, she does the outreach for that…St. Louis [Symphony] Orchestra collaboration would not happen without her involvement. She comes to our concerts. She’s in constant communication with me.”
The Mizzou New Music Initiative runs the Mizzou New Music Ensemble, a group of nine graduate students who work with MU faculty and student composers along with composers from around the world to play and record new music. The ensemble played “Waves,” a piece composed by first-year composition student Trent Fitzsimmons at the gift announcement ceremony, where he received a $5,000 scholarship.
“I had two visits here, one my junior, one my senior year of high school, and I kept finding new things that I could do here at Mizzou as a student thanks to Dr. Sinquefield,” Fitzsimmons, who lives in New York, said. “And I think it’s the combination of the great life here at Mizzou and all the fantastic opportunities as well that led me here.”
Two incoming first-year composition students receive a full-tuition scholarship through the Mizzou New Music Initiative every year. Composition students can compete for the chance to write a piece for an MU ensemble or members of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra through the Sinquefield Composition Prize and Sheldon Commissions each year.
Through the graduate assistantships and post-doctoral fellowship the Mizzou New Music Initiative welcomes talented students from across the country, Freund said. This talent trickles through the entire School of Music as composition students write for ensembles in the School of Music and graduate students play in ensembles and work with students across the School of Music.
“There’s a lot of energy around new music and what we do here in Columbia,” Freund said. “Our goal was to make Columbia a center for the creation and performance of new music. So we see that on a weekly basis.”
Edited by Julianna Mejia | [email protected]
Copy edited by Natalie Kientzy | [email protected]
Edited by Emily Skidmore | [email protected]