Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to BTOT 2017! This is the 27th year that
we've come together to share our insights, our
questions, and our passion for teaching and learning.
The two days of BTOT are unlike any other event

at any other institution, and | am proud to be part

of a community that sets aside time to have these
important conversations.

This year marks the first BTOT since the official merger
of Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory
at Berklee, and while Berklee and BTOT have always
valued a broad range of artistic and academic
subjects, | am excited to see how our conversations
widen and deepen as we welcome our Conservatory
colleagues. The sociologist Richard Sennett once
observed that intuitive leaps occur when dissimilar
domains are made adjacent, because that friction
forces disciplinary knowledge that is usually unstated
to come forward and inspire surprise. BTOT offers
many opportunities for such artistic and academic
collisions, and | hope we will all welcome whatever
surprises might result.

This year’s conference theme, Remix and Mastery,
invites us to reflect on the challenges and rewards of
developing expertise in an ever-changing world. How
do we draw on our expertise, developed in the past,
as we teach the students we have today? How do we
maintain a balance between a respect for the past
and a vision for the future? How might we encourage
our students’ mastery even as we remix our world, our
institution, and our classrooms?

This year we are delighted to welcome Diane Paulus
as our keynote speaker. She is the ideal person to