They have dreams. My job is to help them reach that dream.”
Whether he’s performing with the Wichita Symphony or playing with a pickup bluegrass band in a muddy campsite, you can spot Wichita State music professor Mark Foley by his big, radiant smile.
“That’s totally genuine,” he says. “I’m having so much fun. It’s the same with teaching. I get the same amount of joy from teaching that I get from playing music.” For Foley, there’s always a healthy dose of interplay between playing music and teaching. “A lot of times I can line up playing opportunities for my students, and then we have a more tangible reason to practice, so it’s not just an academic exercise. Or maybe they want to know how they can win an audition.”
That, Foley says, is how Wichita State’s innovation mission plays out at the school of music. “It’s not about ‘How do I get an A in this class?’ It’s about ‘How do I get a gig?’ Our curriculum is based on the real world — it’s not so abstract. We are trying to focus on a more relevant educational experience.”
He adds, “Look, our goal is this: Come to the Wichita State school of music, and we’ll do our best to keep you from being in a cubicle farm in your 40s. We’ll bring out your creative tendencies. We’ll help you find your track. We’ll tie you into a musical history that is 2,000 years old — and yet is more alive than ever. We’ll help you find out who you are, musically.”
“Mark is the bass whisperer,” says Seth Carrithers, WSU graduate student. “He is the one that is standing over there, feeding you kernels of wisdom, planting seeds. And as a student begins to mature musically, you see those seeds starting to grow. Each student has their own journey, and instead of getting cookie-cutter results, you see all these musicians really coming into their own under his tutelage.”
Recently appointed director of jazz studies, Foley is also a full professor of double bass, electric bass and music theory. He is principal double bass for Wichita Symphony, and he spends summers with the orchestra of the Colorado Music Festival in Boulder.
The rest of his music career is a collage of varied interests and experience. He holds degrees in music performance from the University of Minnesota, the Eastman School of Music, and from Indiana University. In high school, his rock band opened for Husker Du.
He plays in Americana projects, bluegrass projects, singer-songwriter projects. He composes and performs electronic music. He writes for a jazz-rock ensemble called Friendly Skeleton, is an award-winning public radio commentator and a first-call bassist for club dates and sessions with national players.
He plays one double bass made in 1810 by Raphael and Antonio Gagliano of Naples, and another double bass that he rebuilt himself in 2012.
Foley also founded and curates the Knob Festival of New Music, an annual series of concerts of wildly divergent new jazz, new classical and new rock compositions that are staged every fall at Fisch Haus Studios in Wichita. “We play it for the type of audience that wants to hear something new,” he says. “They don’t want to hear the same old stuff. I feel like when we do it right, we’re part of a culture.”
A culture that values making things new, making things relevant to 21st century realities. It is a cultural identity Foley shares with the rest of the WSU music faculty.
“We’re all colleagues,” he says. “We’re soldiers in arms. We don’t just talk about it. We actually have to do it. With all of the opportunities here — jazz, classical music theater, composition — we’ll help you find the route that best expresses what you’re trying to find.”
Apart from his frenetic and diverse performance schedule; apart from the realities of paperwork, scholarship administration, high school visits; apart from the genuine thrill he gets from recruiting and teaching students, what does Foley want to accomplish next?
“Bigger venues. Bigger halls. Bigger festivals. I still want to play Glastonbury,” he says. “And I want to be the one guy who played both Carnegie Hall and Austin City Limits.”
