Mens et Manus: Redesigning the Musicianship Curriculum for the 21st-Century MIT Student

We propose a full redesign of the musicianship labs at MIT, bringing together current best practices in music pedagogy and recent developments in hardware and software that enable more advanced classroom teaching and assessment to create labs that better complement and align with our music theory classroom subjects and the changing needs of twenty-first century musicians. In summer 2025, our team will combine our diverse teaching, performance, and pedagogical expertise to reimagine our labs, focusing on developing students’ individual musicianship skills while encouraging collaborative music-making. This restructuring has been needed for many years but is especially timely given current budget constraints that require we combine previous smaller labs into larger multi-subject ones. Labs serve more than 150 students per semester, and we will pilot and assess the redesign in Fall 2025.