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Spring '26 Leading Through Dissonance cohort with guest speakers.

The College of Music’s Entrepreneurship Center for Music (ECM) will expand its programming this year with several key grants from across campus: A��Roser Visiting Artist Grant; a��Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Impact Grant from Leadership Support and Programming; and the renewal of an��A-Lab grant from the Center for Leadership.

The Impact and A-Lab grants both help fund��Leading Through Dissonance, the ECM’s leadership series that focuses on how musicians can respond thoughtfully and ethically to challenges impacting today’s arts spaces. The series kicked off this spring and, through these grants, will continue through the 2026-27 academic year.

Leading Through Dissonance will have two cohorts this year, one per semester. All participating students receive a stipend for attending, helping to alleviate the financial burden of extra time spent on campus.��

Interim ECM Director Marilyn Brock says the A-Lab grant, awarded for the first time last year, allows her to accommodate student needs. “It's wound up being a great opportunity because it gives me flexibility to develop this new series based on patterns I’m seeing in feedback from students including the topics they want to talk about,” she explains, also noting her observation of broader patterns among arts organizations “when difficult current events have a direct impact on them, and they have to figure out how to respond.”

The Roser grant will allow the ECM to host a residency in March 2027 featuring��, a piano duo comprising George Lopez and Gulimina Mahamuti, in collaboration with the college's composition and piano departments. The residency will include classes and seminars, a guest appearance in the Leading Through Dissonance series and a performance.

“They’re both phenomenal pianists, phenomenal musicians,” says Brock. “They also have so much amazing lived experience—as entrepreneurial artists, as teachers, as people who’ve really lived the life of building a portfolio career. They have an incredible journey of how their own individual paths unfolded over the years.

“I’m very excited about the residency, and to have the time and space where they’re doing multiple events, and students get to learn from them and engage with them in multiple ways.”

Brock says the grants allow the ECM to enhance resources available to students, and to consider the larger impacts of college programming. “These grants really make a profound difference—we have a lot more opportunity to expand the events and opportunities that we provide our students. They really help our overall trajectory for the year.”