Dr. Martin Kutnowski wears many hats as the fine arts dean of faculty and a professor at St. Thomas, along with being a musician and composer.
He said he wasn’t always sure that he would be a teacher, but now he can’t imagine identifying as anything else.
“Depending on the day I might define myself as a teacher more than anything else,” he said.
Kutnowski decided after high school that he wanted to make music his career.
He said it wasn’t easy – while his mom was fairly supportive, his dad had always wanted him to follow his own career path as a business administration professor.
His mother was a professor of Spanish literature before becoming a psychologist, and Kutnowski said because of her love of literature she was supportive of his artistic interests.
His father wasn’t easily convinced that a career in music was the right decision.
“It was not easy at that point in my life, in my teenage years. As the years went by it was clear that it was not just a rebellious phase that I was going through and it was actually the best fit for me, [and] he was okay. But it did take a few years.”
Kutnowski said that experience has really helped him as a teacher.
Once or twice a year, he said, he has a student crying in his office because they love music but their parents want them to follow a different career path.
“It’s clear that music is a difficult career but I think most careers are difficult. I think it’s more difficult to do something you don’t like rather than do something you like and have a predisposition for.”
The well-spoken professor said he was strongly against the notion of teaching when he was a teenager, but it didn’t take him long to change his tune.
“All of a sudden I realized, “Wait a minute, I’m making my own money,”” Kutnowski said with a smile.
“And it wasn’t by any means minimum wage – for someone who was only 18 it was pretty good. And then I discovered, “this is actually nice” because you get to interact with people.”
He finished a seven-year piano degree at the conservatory in Buenos Aires, Argentina and then did his master’s and doctorate degrees in New York, where he then taught for several years.
He said it’s the interaction that draws him most to teaching.
“… Music gives us a channel. A channel to connect with everybody. Back at that time and later on too I had the chance to teach all kinds of people – people with who I had no chance to communicate with other than just with music because we didn’t speak the same language, people who had some kind of disabling condition that forced me to invent and design new ways to communicate.”
That channel of connection spans from music lessons to other art forms. One of the courses available at STU is called Music In Film, and Kutnowski explained that the function of music in film is to ease the viewer into the fiction.
“In the end, when we watch a movie we’re looking at light on a fabric screen, and yet we are screaming, we have goosebumps, all kinds of irrational reactions. [Yet] we’re grown-ups, we know that the whole thing is fake, that they’re actors, it’s not real blood – it’s maybe ketchup or something like that – but as soon as we enter that reality there’s a suspension of that belief. And music has the function of easing us into that disbelief.”
Kutnowski said a similar thing happens during a music lesson.
Music is the primary focus, but both the teacher and the student get to know themselves much deeper and grow emotionally through music.
“I think this helps us re-evaluate the function of the fine arts within the overall development of the individual, because it can be really profound if done right.”
After many years of being an educator, Kutnowski said he’s had some wonderful opportunities to work with an array of students and faculty members. One story stuck out in particular.
“Maybe more than 10 years ago I was walking in the park and this guy comes to me and says, “You were my teacher!” And I said, “Okay!” because I couldn’t recognize him. It turns out he had been my student when he was nine. And of course [now] he was 20 years old, I couldn’t have recognized him. And he said, “This was a time in my life when my parents had divorced and I didn’t have a male figure in my life. You were kind of a substitute father for me.” And I really had no idea. I guess he had gone through some important examination of his life and he was able to tell me that and I was blown away.”
He said most faculty members on campus who’ve been teaching for a few years would have similar stories.
“It happens once, maybe a couple of times a year, and it is the shining moment. It’s a fantastic reward that happens in a small proportion of what we do.”
