Dr. Patrick Warfield Appointed Director of School of Music

After a nationwide search, the University of Minnesota School of Music and CLA Dean John Coleman are thrilled to announce the appointment of our next Director, Dr. Patrick Warfield. Dr. Warfield has also been appointed as a faculty member. 

Dr. Warfield, who grew up in Wisconsin, 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.

As a musicologist, Dr. Warfield focuses on the complexities of the high/low-brow cultural divide that emerged in late nineteenth-century America. His articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, American Music, Eighteenth-Century Music, 19th-Century Music Review, and MLA Notes. He has also published a collection of marches by John Philip Sousa in the seminal series Music of the United States of America, a biography of Sousa with the University of Illinois Press, and he is currently working on a history of one of the oldest, continuously operating instrumental ensembles in North America, “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band. 

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.

As a veteran administrator with a strong record of success in interdisciplinary collaboration, student recruitment, and community engagement, Dr. Warfield will bring these values to the School of Music:

• a commitment to artistic, academic, and pedagogical excellence
• a knowledge of music’s power to improve communities
• a belief in the central role music can play on a research campus

With these guiding principles in mind, he will collaborate with School of Music faculty, staff, and students to identify shared objectives and determine how best to serve the interests of the School and the community. In accepting this appointment, Patrick writes: “I am incredibly honored and excited to join the School of Music, the University of Minnesota, and the Twin Cities’ communities. This is a pivotal time for schools of music across the country, and I am committed to working with faculty, staff, and students to build upon the School’s many strengths and meet the opportunities ahead. Together we will ensure that the sounds we create are heard across campus and influenced by the communities around us.”

University of Maryland President Darryll J. Pines penned a note of gratitude to the departing Dr. Warfield in recognition of his contributions: “You embraced the Arts for ALL Initiative and more importantly, you became the lifeblood and energy behind getting faculty, staff, students, alums and friends interested in all things that are artistic. You have made a huge impact and essentially have become the face of the Initiative. I am simply grateful for your service to the School of Music, the College of Arts and Humanities, and to the university.”