College of Performing Arts Launches Online Radio Station to Feature Student, Faculty, and Alumni Work
College radio stations have always been an integral part of university life, giving student disc jockeys the opportunity to learn new skills, while also helping to build community around campus.
Now, NSCR – New School CoPA Radio, a new initiative from the College of Performing Arts (CoPA) at The New School, will give students, faculty, and alumni a unique, innovative platform for their music to be listened to and appreciated by their community and beyond. The online radio station, which is available here, spans a wide range of genres, and features more than 400 artists, 500 albums, and 3,840 individual tracks and songs, all by students, faculty, alumni, and staff from throughout CoPA, as well as alumni from the wider New School community.
“Our new radio station is so important for a number of reasons, including the fact that performing arts schools tend to focus on live performances, but the majority of music and drama is experienced by the public through recorded audio and video,” shares Keller Coker, Dean of the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music. “It will also provide a place for people to access the work of the College of Performing Arts’ community from anywhere at any time.”
Listeners will be able to hear tracks from award-winning faculty members like Jane Ira Bloom, Mary Halvorson, Reggie Workman, and Julian Lage, in addition to works by acclaimed alumni including Nadine Sierra, Richard Goode, Robert Glasper, and Sasha Berliner. The station, which is available to listen to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, will also feature original works by students from throughout CoPA.
In addition to highlighting original student work, NSCR – CoPA Radio will also be an opportunity for students from throughout the college to work with recording software and hardware, which in turn will enable them to produce more of their own work, and have an outlet for that work. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the CoPA community has been producing a high level of work remotely thanks to the college’s efforts to ensure that students were well-equipped with new technology and adaptive learning tools, which now includes NSCR – CoPA Radio.
“CoPA Radio provides a platform that enables music by students, faculty, and alumni to be heard beyond the classroom or local NYC club scene, music that might not be as easily heard otherwise without an ‘on the air’ presence facilitated by CoPA,” says Steve Cardenas, a Jazz faculty member whose work is featured on the new station. “There’s a great benefit in having the music available in an easily accessible format, which sets up the possibilities of establishing more substantial connections between the music students and faculty within the greater New School community.”
NSCR – CoPA Radio is now the second radio station on campus, as the university has been hosting WNSR New School Radio since 2008, a student-run, web-based radio station, which operates through a partnership between the WNSR student organization and The New School’s graduate and undergraduate classes.
In addition to the new radio station, the CoPA community has integrated new models of learning and performing into the classroom during the coronavirus pandemic, which includes students like Carolyn Regula, Mannes PDPL ’21, who has embraced social media, where she regularly creates content for her channel “The Cello Doll.”
Additionally, many faculty, students, and alumni have released albums created in part during quarantine, including Jazz & Contemporary Music faculty member Sarah Elizabeth Charles, Mannes alum Clifton Joey Guidry III, Mannes faculty member Brandee Younger, and more, while noted alumni and faculty from CoPA and The New School were recently nominated and won Grammy Awards in a variety of genres.