UT looks to promote music throughout campus with Longhorn Live initiative

The University of Texas has announced a number of new projects focused on increasing the profile and impact of music on the school’s campus and further into Austin. The Longhorn Live music initiative looks to highlight existing musicians and programs at the Butler School of Music and beyond, bring more high-profile performers and events to the university and find ways for students and staff to have greater interactions with music-related businesses and nonprofit organizations in the area.

The initiative comes from UT President Jay Hartzell, who began increasing live music performances in 2022 and wanted to make the university more of an incubator of music talent.

The school has hired longtime radio personality and music journalist Andy Langer as its first senior director of live music entertainment. In that role, he will coordinate major and smaller-scale events around the campus, as well as a number of music-related programs, and help dispense money from a new fund created to provide live music at most UT events and social gatherings.

Other components of Longhorn Live include the continuation of the Songwriter in Residence programs, the creation of the Moody Center Concert Club to provide students with more opportunities to see major concerts, and the Longhorn Piano Project, which will see more than a dozen decommissioned concert pianos placed in high-traffic areas around campus to encourage student use.

Langer said a live music task force including representatives from University Unions, KUTX (98.9 FM) and other relevant departments helped to identify ways for the university to begin bringing in more of the music culture that exists in the city but had seen a decreasing presence on campus in recent years.

“We all feel that as the city has gotten substantially bigger, with that growth the university that sits right in the center has begun to feel over the years more and more like Vatican City,” he said. “It is its own little entity within the city of Austin, where unless you’re interacting with our museums, with football, with the Moody Center, there’s perhaps less back-and-forth than there used to be, particularly if you look back to the days where the city was small enough that everything was driven wholly by the university and the Legislature. The goal is to seamlessly connect what happens at the university with what happens within the music community at large, to better connect that connective tissue.”

High-profile happenings like concerts preceding UT football games and the recent visit by rapper-turned-flutist Andre 3000 with flute students at the Butler School will sit alongside more background efforts like helping to increase career opportunities for students with an interest in music.

“One of the benchmarks will be, have we helped elevate the talent we have, providing them with the resources, not just in the community, but within the larger national and international music scene to follow their dreams?” he said, pointing to existing events or future partnerships with concert promoter C3 Presents to hire UT students. “One of the challenges that is particularly present when we’re talking about music on campus is that there’s a lot there already. … There’s the Texas Performing Arts facilities, the Moody Center, the Cactus Cafe, the Butler School of Music, which is turning out musicians as its business. All of that already exists and at a university this size, a lot of that by the consequence of being a university this large gets siloed off.”

Langer said the university’s involvement this week in a handful of events for Health Alliance for Austin Musicians’ (HAAM) largest fundraising day point to what’s possible for other organizations or city programs looking to partner with UT.

“We’ve talked to the SIMS (Foundation) folks. We have heard from a variety of city entities and state entities that are either people we plan to work with down the line or are sending people our way,” he said. “The external partnerships are going to be an important piece of this. It’s identifying where the university can have the most impact in the community and how those partnerships can have the most impact on our students.”

Photo by Guðsþegn, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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