Last summer, as the Director of Music Programming for ArtsQuest, Dr. Marissa Guarriello helped organize a new conference for music educators. “Some of the senior leadership at ArtsQuest was interested in starting a conference for educators, potentially similar to SXSW, that ran concurrently with Musikfest, the largest free music festival in the country hosted by ArtsQuest,” she says.
The result was the Musikfest Education and Industry Conference, a two-day event in Pennsylvania that focused on music education, popular music and business leadership. “ArtsQuest did charge a nominal fee for the event, but not enough to cover the costs because we wanted it to remain accessible to anyone who wanted to attend,” Guarriello explains. “They ended up absorbing most of the costs, and we also received sponsorship from Zeswitz Music, a local instrument supplier that supports music education professional development.”
Guarriello was well prepared to help put on the Musikfest Education and Industry Conference because one of her current research projects explores the intersection of the music industry and music education. She is also studying and researching creativity in secondary classrooms and reframing uncertainty/failure in music classrooms.
As a Visiting Assistant Professor of String Music Education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Guarriello integrates creativity in her teaching, and many of her approaches are presented in a book she co-authored, “The Creative String Orchestra. “Start by introducing creativity in fun and accessible ways,” she recommends. “Often, people think of jazz as being the creative/improvisatory music genre, but in reality, creativity is useful in all music contexts. I like to get students to be creative in a classroom without them realizing it, then I’m able to tell them what they just did. It becomes a lot more fun because they’re already successful!”
Activities she suggests include trying to play what a color sounds like or trying to arrange a composition with the entire ensemble in the moment — what she describes as “being messy in the classroom.”
Guarriello has established a growing network of educators and musicians who embrace creative approaches to music and music education. “My time spent with musicians and educators have shown me that people learn and teach music in completely different ways,” she exclaims. “It’s fascinating to work and talk with these people. They have opened up a whole new world of what music education is and could be.”
For the 2025-2026 academic year, Guarriello will be joining the Department of Music and Human Learning at The University of Texas — Austin as an Assistant Professor.
