The Scene Room

Send us Fan Mail Cutting music programs doesn’t just remove a fun class, it removes a kind of brain training kids can’t easily replace elsewhere. We sit down with Dr. Marija Pranjić, a neuroscientist, music therapist, and pianist, to unpack what music education actually does for neurodevelopment and why access matters so much for equity, learning, and long-term health. We talk about how the “music center in the brain” idea has fallen apart as brain imaging advanced, and what replaced it: a d...

Send us Fan Mail When an opera singer contemplates turning down a Metropolitan Opera debut (for financial reasons), it raises immediate questions about the realities facing working artists today. In this episode, host Elizabeth Bowman sits down with bass Andrew Potter to unpack his recent retirement from staged opera at 43 (OperaWire). Potter shares his perspective on the industry's economic model, sparking a broader conversation about performance fees, rising overhead, and how shifting regio...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Lizzie Bowman is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning librettist Royce Vavrek (Angel’s Bone with composer Du Yun, Adoration with composer Mary Kouyoumdjian, Lincoln in the Bardo with composer Missy Mazzoli) who grew up on a farm in Alberta, Canada, and is exploding in the international opera scene. We discuss how a childhood of country radio and the rural landscape of Northern Canada shaped his "serpentine" path through film school and eventually into the world o...

Send us Fan Mail This week, we sit down with career and leadership coach Julia Starr to unpack a practical path through professional pivots. Julia isn't just a coach; she is a master of the "bold move." From her time as a Fulbright Fellow in Malaysia and a BCG consultant to her work streamlining a family sawmill business and earning an Ed.M. from Harvard, Julia has navigated the exact inflection points she now helps her clients master. In this episode, Julia explains why the skills of a perfo...

Send us Fan Mail What if the most vulnerable part of U.S. arts isn’t creativity, but structure? Brett Egan, president of the DeVos Institute, joins us to unpack why public funding feels shakier than ever, how AI is making the arts more necessary—not less—and what it would take to build a resilient cultural ecosystem that can weather political swings. We trace the long arc from the NEA’s founding to today’s accelerated attempts to shrink and politicize cultural agencies, with real consequence...