Between University Training and Professional Practice: My Experience at the Henry Mancini Institute
- Rafael Piccolotto de Lima
- Jul 15
- 16 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
How does a musician turn years of training into real-world professional experience?
Entering the professional world involves a paradox. You need to demonstrate experience to receive important opportunities, but you also need opportunities in order to gain that experience. When an institution, producer, or artist entrusts someone with a large-scale responsibility, they expect the result to match the level of the project. An opportunity for which a musician is not yet prepared can have consequences that extend beyond that single engagement.
For composers, arrangers, and music directors, this transition can be especially difficult. Writing for an orchestra, producing a major recording, or directing a large ensemble requires a combination of experience, trust, resources, infrastructure, and professional relationships that is rarely available at the beginning of a career.
Smaller projects are essential to the development of any musician, but they do not always provide sufficient preparation for the leap to a production involving dozens of instrumentalists, large technical teams, renowned artists, or national and international reach.
Some universities, fellowships, and advanced training programs create an intermediate space between these two conditions. They do not eliminate professional demands, but they allow participants to take on real responsibilities within an educational structure that can provide guidance, infrastructure, and some room to learn throughout the process.
During my master’s and doctoral studies at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, I found this kind of training at the Henry Mancini Institute, where I served as a Composer Fellow from 2011 to 2016. In that environment, I took part in commissions, premieres, professional recordings, television productions, multimedia concerts, and composition and arranging projects, working with musicians, composers, and producers connected to jazz, concert music, and the American music industry.
What made this experience especially valuable was not simply access to artists or major concert halls. The institute created conditions in which musicians pursuing advanced training could assume real responsibilities within professional projects without having to build and finance the entire structure needed to bring those projects to life on their own.
In this article, I will draw on some of these experiences to examine different dimensions of this transition: receiving a commission, working directly with performers, preparing music materials, participating in a television production, developing an original recording project, and closely observing the work of composers and producers. More than ten years later, after creating, producing, and sustaining projects of my own, I can see more clearly what those opportunities represented and the scale of the structure that made them possible.
Between Advanced Training and Professional Life
The fellows at the Henry Mancini Institute were not necessarily musicians at the beginning of their education. Many had already completed undergraduate degrees, had professional experience, and came to the university to pursue a master’s degree, a doctorate, or another stage of specialization.
The challenge was not simply to learn the fundamentals of the profession. It was to expand their range of activity, work in new contexts, and gain experience in projects on a scale they would have been unlikely to produce independently at that point in their careers.
The institute was originally founded in Los Angeles in 1997 in honor of composer Henry Mancini. After a decade of activity in California, it became part of the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, beginning a new chapter in its history.
Its approach differed from training centered on a single musical style. Fellows participated in projects that could involve jazz, concert music, film music, television productions, commercial recordings, and collaborations with guest artists.
The artists did not come merely to give a lecture or masterclass. They rehearsed with the musicians, developed repertoire, recorded, and took part in concerts. The educational experiences occurred within the artistic work itself.
This structure created a bridge between the university and professional practice. Projects were presented before live audiences, recordings circulated beyond the campus, and the scores had to meet the same demands encountered outside the university.
How I Joined the Henry Mancini Institute
When I was accepted into the master’s program at the University of Miami, I participated in the institution’s scholarship application process.
During that period, I began conversations with Gary Lindsay, director of the jazz composition program and my future advisor, and with Shelly Berg, dean of the Frost School of Music. From those conversations, a position connected to the Henry Mancini Institute was created so that I could serve as a Composer Fellow.
It was a fellowship dedicated to the institute’s composition, arranging, and music production activities. During the period in which I held the position, it was the only role within its structure specifically devoted to composition and arranging.
Contrary to what many people imagine when they hear the word scholarship, my role was not simply to study. Depending on the needs of each production, I worked as a composer, arranger, assistant conductor, music preparer, orchestra materials supervisor, rehearsal collaborator, or assistant at different stages of production.
The diversity of these responsibilities reflected the nature of professional life itself. A musical project rarely depends on a single skill, especially when it involves large ensembles, guest artists, recording, video, or broadcasting.
A contemporary record of this period appeared in 2014 in SCORE, the Frost School of Music’s official magazine. The profile, The Art of Composition, presented my career at that point, mentioning the ASCAP Henry Mancini Fellowship, my work as a composer connected to the institute, and projects and honors that were beginning to take shape during my years in Miami.
A Commission in My First Year
One of the first experiences to reveal the scope of that position took place in 2012, during my first year of activities with the institute.
I received a commission for a new work to be performed in a chamber music concert. The proposal was to write a composition that would enter into dialogue with Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, using the same instrumentation.
The commission resulted in Asa, Zóio e Matulão, a work conceived in honor of the centennial of Luiz Gonzaga’s birth. In addition to writing the piece, I took part in its preparation and conducted its world premiere on November 30, 2012, at Gusman Concert Hall in Miami.
The experience brought together several stages that do not always appear side by side in a composer’s education. There was a curatorial premise, a defined instrumentation, an ensemble of musicians, a premiere date, and the responsibility of conducting my own work before an audience.
The recording was later submitted to the DownBeat Student Music Awards. In 2013, the Henry Mancini Institute Chamber Ensemble was named the Graduate College Winner in the Classical Group category.
Asa, Zóio e Matulão remained in my catalog and became one of the first examples of how that fellowship could turn a university activity into an accomplishment with professional relevance, documentation, and continuity.
Projects of Different Scales
Not every experience took place in a major concert hall or involved a television production. An important part of the training occurred in smaller projects, where I could work closely with performers and follow in detail the transformation of a score into music.
The Henry Mancini Institute maintained, for example, a string quartet with which I was able to work directly. I wrote Danças em Cordas for the Henry Mancini Institute String Quartet, and the ensemble later recorded the suite.
The smaller format produced a different kind of collaboration. Instead of following a large orchestral structure, I could listen to details in the writing, observe the solutions found by the four musicians, and develop the work throughout the preparation and recording process.
I also participated in concerts devoted to video game music, working on the orchestration and rewriting of materials for the available instrumentation. On other occasions, I wrote compositions and arrangements for different institute programs.
These activities required different skills. Some began with an original artistic idea. Others required understanding the function of a repertoire within an already conceived production, adapting materials, responding to instrumental limitations, and preparing scores so that rehearsals with many musicians could proceed efficiently.
During that period, I also formed a big band with institute fellows and university students to develop and perform original repertoire. In this case, writing the music was only part of the work. I had to bring the musicians together, organize rehearsals, build a program, and create an opportunity for those compositions to be heard.
It was common for a single week to include classes, composition, music preparation, rehearsals, recordings, production meetings, and public performances. The transition from education to professional life did not happen at one specific moment. It was built through the repetition of these responsibilities in different contexts.
Jazz and the Philharmonic and a Large-Scale Production
Among the many projects in which I participated during that period, Jazz and the Philharmonic was one of the most memorable.
Conceived by producer Larry Rosen, the production brought together artists connected to jazz and concert music, including Chick Corea, Terence Blanchard, Bobby McFerrin, Dave Grusin, Eric Owens, and Mark O’Connor. The concert was presented at the Adrienne Arsht Center. Its recording was later released on CD and DVD and developed into a national PBS special.
I was invited to write Spanish Suite, one of the central arrangements in the program. The work, approximately sixteen minutes long, drew on Chick Corea’s Spain and Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, creating specific spaces for Chick Corea, Terence Blanchard, and Eric Owens.
My work began before the rehearsals. I participated in meetings with Larry Rosen, presented ideas, prepared a digital mockup, and followed the proposal through the approval process with the production team and the artists. Then came the preparation of the music materials, the rehearsals, the concert, the recording, and, over the following months, the album’s post-production.
The experience allowed me to follow a project from the earliest conversations through the listening and mixing sessions. My background as a composer, arranger, and recording engineer enabled me to contribute at different stages while observing how artistic, technical, and institutional decisions needed to remain connected.
Jazz and the Philharmonic deserves an account of its own because its story involves compositional challenges and collaborations that extend beyond the scope of this article.
Here, it helps demonstrate another dimension of the Henry Mancini Institute: its ability to integrate a composer pursuing advanced training into a complete professional workflow involving creation, approval, preparation, performance, recording, television, and post-production.
When Infrastructure Makes Artistic Research Possible
Not every project needed to serve a commercial production or a program conceived by someone else. The infrastructure of the university and the institute could also be used to develop original artistic investigations.
During my doctorate, I wrote and recorded Seven Masks as part of the research that would lead to my dissertation, Blurred Distinctions. The work was conceived for a symphonic jazz ensemble combining orchestra, big band, rhythm section, and soloists.
The project presented considerable technical and logistical challenges. I had to prepare hundreds of pages of music, organize sessions for different instrumental groups, create click tracks, edit recordings, and produce premixes so that each new section could play over the previously recorded material.
Musicians from the Henry Mancini Institute and other university ensembles participated in the sessions. Throughout the process, I worked as composer, orchestrator, conductor, music director, engineer, and producer.
These challenges were similar to those encountered in professional productions. At the same time, the university provided an environment in which I could artistically investigate the relationship among jazz, concert music, improvisation, and orchestral writing without having to justify the project through an immediate commercial purpose.
For an early-career composer, independently assembling an ensemble of that size, booking studios, hiring musicians, and organizing multiple recording sessions would have been extremely difficult. The institutional structure did not write the music or solve the creative problems, but it made it possible to confront them on a scale rarely available at that stage of a career.
Seven Masks made one idea especially clear, an idea that would remain important to me: composition is part of a creative continuum. A work does not end when the final note is written. It moves through project development, the selection of musicians, music preparation, rehearsals, music direction, recording, editing, mixing, and the circulation of the final result.
Learning by Observing the Work of Other Creators
Part of my education also took place when I was not the project’s principal composer.
In 2014, Maria Schneider returned to the University of Miami to present Winter Morning Walks, her collaboration with soprano Dawn Upshaw. On that occasion, the work was performed with the Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra. The album had received three Grammy Awards, including Best Contemporary Classical Composition and Best Classical Vocal Solo.
During her visit, I had the opportunity to interview her, follow her preparation, and assist at different stages of the project. I also observed her work with the university’s big band, an ensemble with which she already had a longstanding artistic and educational relationship.
Watching Maria Schneider work revealed aspects that a score or recording alone could not show. I could observe how she communicated her ideas, listened to the orchestra, adjusted details, and built an interpretation alongside the musicians. Years later, she would become artistic director of the Henry Mancini Institute itself.
Another example occurred at the beginning of James Newton Howard’s tenure as artistic director. In 2016, the institute presented a concert at the Adrienne Arsht Center devoted to his film scores, combining orchestra, choir, and images from movies such as The Hunger Games, Maleficent, and Snow White and the Huntsman.
As a Composer Fellow, I followed the preparation of the scores, the organization of the materials, the rehearsals, and part of the work behind the scenes. I also participated in conversations with Howard and accompanied him during an interview at a Miami radio station.
These experiences allowed me to observe the same creative continuum through the work of other composers. An idea had to be communicated to the musicians, translated into materials, coordinated with the production, and transformed into an experience for the audience. Composition did not exist apart from these stages. It was part of a much broader artistic practice.
The People and Structures Behind the Projects
Behind many of these experiences were producers, artistic directors, educators, and cultural leaders responsible for connecting institutions, artists, and resources.
Larry Rosen was one of the most important figures I met in this context. Our collaboration began during the development of Spanish Suite and continued in the following years through projects connected to the Jazz Roots series.
My direct contact with his work occurred primarily through the artistic dimension of Spanish Suite and, after the concert, through the album’s listening, mixing, and post-production sessions. I did not participate in the financial negotiations, fundraising, contracts, or administration of the Jazz Roots series.
Even so, I could observe the network that sustained those projects. It included producers, administrators, professors, cultural institutions, sponsors, donors, guest artists, technical teams, musicians, students, and fellows. The music presented onstage was only the most visible part of a much larger operation.
Working alongside Larry Rosen and other project leaders expanded my understanding of the institutional and human dimension required to transform an idea into a cultural production. My learning did not come from directly observing financial or commercial management, but from recognizing that good musicians and good ideas alone would not have been enough to produce results on that scale.
At the time, I primarily recognized the artistic value of those opportunities. More than ten years later, after developing and producing my own projects, I can see much more clearly the scale of the structure behind them.
For a composer to work with an orchestra, writing the music is not enough. Musicians must be assembled, materials prepared, venues booked, rehearsals organized, teams hired, resources secured, the concert promoted, and institutions found that are willing to support the project.
The Henry Mancini Institute and the Frost School of Music already brought together concert halls, studios, equipment, musicians, technicians, educators, producers, administrative structures, and institutional relationships. The power of that structure lay not simply in the isolated existence of each resource, but in the ability to coordinate them around a project.
This did not eliminate professional demands. The scores had to work, the materials had to be correct, and the deadlines were real. The difference was that we could face these challenges within a structure that distributed responsibilities and risks, multiplied our individual capabilities, and made possible projects that we would have been unlikely to realize on our own at that stage of our careers.
What Remains After Formal Education
Today I look back on these experiences with gratitude and joy. That feeling comes not only from having worked with artists I admired or participated in major productions. It also comes from realizing that those opportunities produced tangible results.
I did not leave that experience simply knowing more. I left with original works, commissions, premieres, recordings, audio and video documentation, credits, conducting experience, and participation in projects that encompassed creation, preparation, performance, and post-production.
Together, these accomplishments formed a portfolio and helped build professional trust. There is no simple relationship in which one concert directly caused another opportunity. But completed works, documentation, and accumulated experience demonstrated that I had already worked with large ensembles, met deadlines, participated in recordings, and followed complex projects through to their public presentation.
In a profession in which new opportunities often depend on the trust of musicians, producers, and institutions, this evidence helped narrow the distance between my education and the projects I went on to pursue outside the university.
What to Look for in a Professional Training Environment
This experience also changed the way I understand music education.
For a student or musician considering a university, fellowship, residency, or specialized program, the curriculum and professors remain important. But other questions may better reveal the kind of experience being offered.
Do students participate in projects that reach the public? Are they given concrete responsibilities? Are their works rehearsed, recorded, or performed? Is there sustained contact with artists and producers? Does the institution provide the conditions for an idea to travel the path from creation through preparation to realization?
It is also important to consider whether the program offers insight into what happens offstage. Music preparation, production, communication, fundraising, rehearsal organization, and institutional relationships are all part of professional life, even when they do not appear in the formal curriculum of a composer or performer.
No institution can fully reproduce the experience of building a career. Even so, programs that combine artistic responsibility, infrastructure, and public presentation can narrow the distance between learning a profession and beginning to practice it.
Why This Experience Still Matters to Me
Throughout this article, I have tried to show not only the results, but also the structures, responsibilities, and forms of learning behind them.
Before the Henry Mancini Institute, I found at UNICAMP an environment filled with possibilities, where I learned to create ensembles and build paths for my own ideas.
Years later, at the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop and within New York’s community of jazz composers, I encountered other models based on ongoing reading sessions, peer relationships, and initiatives created by the artists themselves. My decision to live in New York was also connected to the understanding that an artist’s location affects their collaborations, references, the circulation of their work, and the scale of what becomes possible to accomplish.
The Henry Mancini Institute occupied a different place in this trajectory. It was there that I was able to assume professional responsibilities within an institution capable of realizing large-scale projects by connecting education, production, recording, and cultural circulation.
This experience also helps explain why I began developing projects in which musical creation and the construction of the conditions needed to realize it go hand in hand. Orquestra Urbana and Forró Sem Palavras did not emerge merely as repertoires or instrumental ensembles. They required bringing musicians together, building partnerships, organizing recordings, developing an audience, and creating continuity for original works.
For more than ten years, I fought to develop these projects with creative autonomy. I learned to value freedom, control over artistic decisions, and the ability to build my own paths. I also learned how much work it takes to create and sustain the conditions for a work to find musicians, spaces, resources, and an audience.
This independent experience did not diminish the value of institutions. On the contrary, it gave me an even deeper understanding of what a well-coordinated collective structure can accomplish. Autonomy offers freedom and the ability to create one’s own paths. Institutions and collectives offer scale, continuity, shared responsibility, and the possibility of multiplying the strengths of their members.
Today, I feel a growing desire to collaborate again with organizations capable of bringing these forces together around larger projects. This does not represent a rejection of the autonomy I have built, but rather a recognition that some ideas take on new dimensions when people, resources, and structures work in coordination.
If there is one conclusion I would leave with the reader, it is that learning to write, perform, or conduct remains fundamental, but it does not complete the transition into professional life. Creating a work and creating the conditions for it to exist are parts of the same undertaking.
I also understand today that these conditions do not always need to be built individually. There are moments when they become much more powerful when sustained by collectives and institutions capable of bringing people, resources, and ideas together around a shared endeavor.
About the Author
Rafael Piccolotto de Lima is a composer, arranger, music director, and educator. A Latin Grammy-nominated composer and recipient of multiple international awards, including 13 DownBeat Awards and honors from ASCAP, he develops artistic projects that connect Brazilian music, jazz, orchestral writing, improvisation, recording production, research, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
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