A master of change at NEC

New president is raising profile of venerable school

erik jacobs for the boston globe (above); andrew hurlbut (below)Tony Woodcock (above), president of the New England Conservatory, practiced hard before throwing the honorary first pitch at a Red Sox game (below).

Tony Woodcock's knees shook as he stood in the middle of the diamond at Fenway Park last spring. The prospect of bungling the honorary first pitch at a Sox game in front of 40,000 fans was plain terrifying for the 56-year-old Brit, who grew up in Wales playing cricket.

"If you get it wrong, they boo you," he says. But, having taken two half-hour pitching lessons, Woodcock got it right: The ball he threw sailed over home plate into the catcher's mitt, and now rests encased in plexiglass on a table in his office. "I'm desperately proud of this," he says. "That whole experience with the Red Sox. . . It's a piece of Americana that's sort of adorable."

At the same time Woodcock has become acquainted with Boston's favorite pastime, he's also been getting to know the New England Conservatory, where he finished serving his first year as president in June. With his leadership, the arrival this fall of new orchestra director Hugh Wolff, and the recent successful conclusion of a seven-year, $115 million capital campaign, the venerable Huntington Avenue institution - the oldest independent music school in the United States - is entering a new era.

"In the past we've had a musician who's been in charge," says Robert Paul Sullivan, who has taught guitar full-time at NEC since the mid-1970s and is now chairman of the school's faculty council. "Tony is more of a businessman. Also a musician, obviously" - Woodcock plays violin - "but in this day and age, it's like town managers: You want a professional coming in to run [things], not some mayor who runs the barber shop in town."

Woodcock has a record of healing the fiscal ailments of orchestras in his home country, in Portland, Ore., and most recently, in Minneapolis, where he directed the Minnesota Orchestra from 2003 until 2007. During that time, he restructured finances to balance the budget for the first time in a decade.

That accounting acumen is a big reason why Woodcock was chosen to head NEC, which needs an infusion of cash to stay competitive with other top music schools. NEC's enrollment of 750 undergraduate and graduate students is only slightly smaller than the Juilliard School's 830 students, for example, but its $100 million endowment is dwarfed by Juilliard's $778 million. The nation's most talented young musicians are sometimes lured away from NEC, where full-time tuition is $32,900 - Juilliard's is $28,640 - by better financial aid packages at other schools.

"Juilliard can afford scholarships to a much greater degree than we can," says Jack Vernon, the former chair of NEC's board of trustees who headed up the search committee that hired Woodcock.

While NEC accepts just 33 percent of applicants, down from 47 percent seven years ago, it is still less selective than other top conservatories. New York City's Juilliard accepts 12 percent of its music applicants, Rochester's Eastman School of Music accepts 23 percent, and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where every student receives a full scholarship, accepts only 5 percent.

Reaching out

NEC also needs money to fix up its facilities: The school's dormitory is an aging building that fits only 200 students, and though Jordan Hall is renowned for its architecture and acoustics, its practice rooms are more grungy than glorious.

Woodcock is looking forward to major renovations - a campus master plan should be completed by next spring - but he's not waiting for new money to make repairs to the school's four buildings, which are literally falling apart. Soon after arriving at NEC, he collected pieces of concrete that had tumbled to the ground from the façade of Brown Hall. He carried them in a bucket to a board of trustees meeting, and that unignorable physical evidence of the need for attention to aging facilities helped convince trustees to borrow $20 million in bonds. The money will pay for an 18-month maintenance project that began last spring to fix leaky roofs and shore up crumbling walls.

Woodcock has made a point to reach outside those walls, making new connections with more than 60 of Boston's community and arts leaders during his first six months in office.

"He's put out more feelers than anyone has for the past 50 years - probably for the whole history of the conservatory," says Sullivan. "He's on his own outreach program."

Linda Nathan, the founding principal of the Boston Arts Academy, a public high school, says Woodcock made a refreshing effort to meet her students soon after arriving.

"NEC, as long as I've been running the Boston Arts Academy, has always been this amazing school down the street," says Nathan. But whereas the members of the Professional Arts Consortium, including the Berklee College of Music, the Boston Conservatory, and four other area schools, helped found the high school 10 years ago and continue to support it by sending faculty and students to teach at the academy, NEC has remained aloof - until now. Woodcock says he expects his students to start teaching at the academy this coming year.

Internally, there have been no major pedagogical changes under Woodcock's leadership. But he has brought a more open management style that includes monthly memos to conservatory staff about administrative changes and decisions.

"That's really been appreciated by the faculty," says Sullivan, adding that teachers' initial nervousness about Woodcock's hire - the same nervousness that accompanies the arrival of any new academic leader - has subsided. "I have not had any faculty come up to me and say the [presidential search] committee made the wrong choice," he says. Inclusive leadership and openness are Woodcock's trademarks, according to Jan McDaniel, who worked with him during his tenure at the Minnesota Orchestra. "We tended to operate in silos," she said of the orchestra's staff, musicians, and leadership before Woodcock's arrival. "Tony is not a silo type of person."

Changes ahead

The $115 million fund-raising drive, started by beloved former president Daniel Steiner, who died in 2006 of complications from chronic lung disease, provided the money needed to endow a position for acclaimed conductor Hugh Wolff, whom Woodcock hired to head up the school's orchestra program starting this fall.

"He's a celebrity who's had a very distinguished career, but he's not going to be one of these visiting people who you see occasionally in the corridor," says Woodcock. Wolff has moved his family to Boston and will spend 20 weeks a year working at the conservatory. After years lagging behind the school's more celebrated strings program, which was championed by Steiner, the orchestra will become a "signature program" for NEC, says Woodcock.

Improving the school's opera program is another of the president's near-term goals. Already, two students have earned fellowships, through a new partnership with Opera Boston, to sing with that company's ensemble.

Finally, Woodcock has hired consultants to help design a new curriculum element he's calling "entrepreneurship."

"It's problem solving," says Woodcock - and the problem is that the music world is changing. Audiences are shrinking and aging, orchestra jobs are few and far between, and a successful musician has to be more than an excellent instrumentalist. She also has to be able to market herself and create her own performance opportunities, and take music outside the concert hall and into the community.

"The way classical music is right now, we kind of have to bring ourselves to an audience rather than have it come to us," says Josh Weilerstein, an NEC senior who plays the violin and whose parents both teach at the conservatory.

The details are yet to be determined, but the entrepreneurship program will give students the practical skills they need to thrive even if they don't land a coveted orchestra position, says Woodcock.

For him, the last year has been the fastest of his life, and the leap from Minnesota to Massachusetts and from orchestra administration to higher education has been a thrill. "It's reintroduced me to the high energy of students," he says, "and that feeling with students that everything is possible."

Emma Brown can be reached at e.strickland.brown@gmail.com.