Punk may be dead, but students in the School of Music rallied at the Arch today to show that jazz is not.

On May 15, music performance professor Charles Geyer told students that a committee of several classical performance faculty members agreed to end the jazz major and stop the search for a new jazz studies director. The program, started in 1998, had been without a director since the winter of 2005.

The committee announced at a faculty meeting that current majors will be the last to graduate from NU with a jazz studies degree.

On Wednesday afternoon, music students protested the recent decision to end the jazz studies major. (Photo by Genevieve Knapp / North by Northwestern.)

Daniel Friedman, a junior in the School of Music, said there were no jazz faculty members present at the meeting because there are no tenured professors in the jazz studies department. He also said the search for a new director should have been successful.

“There were several candidates for the position of jazz studies director, and none of them worked out,” Friedman said. “But if the dean really wanted she could find somebody.”

The music students at the Arch passed out flyers and asked hundreds of passing students to sign a petition, which will be given to ASG at the end of the week. Two saxophonists and a bassist* gave a jazz demonstration, showing students what they’d be missing if the major were cut.

As of 6 p.m. today, over 700 people had joined the Friends of NU Jazz Facebook group. The group’s Web site has also published several letters of support from musicians and writers.

“It’s like choking someone and then accusing them of suffocating,” said Matt Martin, a School of Music senior who was supporting the program today at the arch.

Martin explained that to get into NU’s jazz program, a student also has to be admitted into the classical music program.

“They’re two entirely different art forms and you have to play both at the highest level possible,” Martin said. “Who has that kind of time in high school? The only legitimate way to get in here is to be a great classical musician, but we call this the School of Music, not the ‘School of Western Classical Music.’”

Jazz music originated in the early 20th century in Louisiana, and in the early 1910s a unique style of jazz known as Chicago Style Jazz was born.

“We live in Chicago, a city with a rich jazz tradition,” Friedman said. “I’ve grown so much as a musician here because of access to the artists who live in Chicago and visit NU.”

“Aside from hip-hop, jazz is the only true from of American music,” Friedman said. “Every other music school has recognized jazz as a vital art form. It is an utter shame for Northwestern to take such a step backwards, and it shouldn’t happen.”

Related:
Students protest end of NU jazz major (Chicago Tribune)
Friends of NU Jazz facebook group
Friends of NU Jazz’s website

This sentence originally identified a musician as a cellist, instead of a bassist.