Director of the School of Music

We are pleased to announce that the University of Minnesota has selected Dr. Patrick Warfield to serve as the next Director of the School of Music, effective June 26, 2023.

Dr. Warfield comes to the University of Minnesota from the University of Maryland, where he has served as Associate Director of the School of Music and currently as Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Humanities. Since 2021 he has also directed the Presidential-level arts initiative, Arts for All. In this role, Prof. Warfield has worked to make the arts more inclusive and accessible, tie them to other disciplines, and place them in the service of social justice by launching new interdisciplinary academic programs and creating funding opportunities for faculty and students interested in using the community-building and community-sustaining power of the arts to improve the world around them.

A well-known pedagogue, Dr. Warfield was a founding member of the editorial board of the Journal of Music History Pedagogy and has taken part in roundtables at the Teaching Music History Conference and the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. He has provided musical commentary for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Washington National Opera, the Smithsonian Institution, and the French Embassy, and has curated and narrated concerts with the United States Marine Band, the Washington National Opera Young Artists Program, and the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra.

Dr. Warfield earned his undergraduate degree in music education (clarinet) at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and his graduate degrees in musicology at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, where he was a student of J. Peter Burkholder. At Maryland, he is an affiliate faculty member in American Studies and African American Studies.

Read the full press release here.

Ben Tobin led this search with Stephen Kalogeras, David Grimes, and Alaine Small.