Master joins Jacobs faculty

The Jacobs School of Music faculty has secured more bragging rights for next fall after hiring professor Jorja Fleezanis, one of the first female concertmasters for a major American orchestra.

“It’s been a five-year conversation,” said Alain Barker, Jacobs director of marketing and publicity.

Barker said Fleezanis, a violinist, will work with orchestral students, primarily strings.
Fleezanis will fill a much-needed position within the school, said Lawrence Hurst, chair of the strings department.

“It’s a strategic hiring policy of the University,” he said, adding that her decades of experience in various roles will be a great advantage. “We have heard really good things about her in all respects.”

Fleezanis has spent the last 20 years as concertmaster for the Minnesota Orchestra and has been a guest artist and visiting professor at Jacobs for the past five.

“She’s been here through the years,” Barker said. “She wants to engage more directly as a teacher.”

Fleezanis has also been an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota since 1990 and has taught at The Juilliard School, the New World Symphony and The Boston Conservatory.

“That was kind of a sidecar to my orchestral career,” she said.

A concertmaster fills a leadership role within the orchestra, Hurst said, answering technical questions for other musicians to get more done in a short amount of time.

“It’s not a conductor ... it’s leadership in every sense, but it’s not getting up on the podium,” he said. “Time is very precious in terms of rehearsal for a classical orchestra.”

Jacobs’ dean Gwyn Richards described the concertmaster and the conductor as the primary voices of musical decision.

“They’re equally important in the life of an orchestra,” he said. “She is the principal contact between the orchestra and the conductor.”

Fleezanis wants to change the structure of orchestral professorship, which she said currently consists of only a few full-time professors at American universities.

“There are a lot of adjunct professors who come in and do part-time work with this,” she said of orchestral music. “It’s clearly a different kind of music, and it requires a different set of skills.”

Richards said her appointment will help set Jacobs ahead of the curve compared to other institutions.

“Few have anybody who is there as a full-time member of the faculty,” Richards said.

Fleezanis hopes the added access to her will create a more stable environment for the students.

“It’s having a real staple, someone who they know will be there,” she said. “I think it will start to introduce more enthusiasm and constancy for students.”

Besides teaching students to play orchestral music, Fleezanis also wants to teach her students how to be responsible members of the orchestral community.

“It’s very easy for students ... to feel anonymous and not understand the inter-responsibility they have to each other,” she said. “There has to be a unity within the stand. There has to be a unity within the sections.”

Richards complimented the wealth and breadth of Fleezanis’s experience, her passion and standards, and the role model she’s become, saying the school has witnessed all of these qualities firsthand.

“It’s a spectacular appointment for the Jacobs School,” Barker said. “We’re all thrilled.”